How is it already May, almost a whole month after my last post? And what happened to my “gonna post more”? I suck. Okay, I’m over it.

My mom is going home for a two weeks. While I know I’m gonna miss her, it’ll be a chance for me to see how it’ll be without her. Never mind that I will have my mother-in-law with me. So the tentative plan is that my mom will move back home in the summer time which leaves me and Dan in need of child care. I am a little nervous about all of this and am dreading to have to go through the nanny searching process so I’ve been kind of avoiding it but I know I have to do it sooner or later.

I bought a treadmill. I have been walking on it a few times a week and hopefully I can ramp it up and walk on it most days of the week (and maybe perhaps even run!). I need to get back into some kind of shape.

The babies are growing fast. They crawl very well and now are cruising. That also means the child proofing has begun in earnest and the babies fall several times a day. Nothing too bad though. The worst thing so far is Isaac falling off the cuddle lounger (a whole foot off the ground) and JJ falling and hitting her lip against a table so she’s got a bruise and abrasion on her upper lip. But so far, no major causalities.

It seems like Jadis, over the last week or so, has decided that she doesn’t want to be left behind. All of a sudden, she’s doing things, all at once. For example, Isaac has, for the last two months or so, been able to put the pacifier in his mouth by himself and over the last few weeks or so, has learned to find the pacifier in his crib during the night. Jadis, up until about several days ago, never showed any interest in learning how to put the pacifier in her mouth correctly. Then one day, about two days ago, while I was waiting for her to settle down for her nap, she started whining so I got up and reached in to the crib to get her pacifier when lo and behold! She grabbed it and put it in herself! I was so stunned and so happy!

She also finally learned to roll over from her tummy to her back. She learned to roll from her back to her stomach very quickly but it took her another month to figure it out the other way. She continued to not like being on her tummy as much but would tolerate it better now that she could always just roll over if she wanted. She started to inch backwards as she started to learn that she could move while on her tummy and for several days, that’s all she did. Then, over the two days, all of a sudden, she’s learned how to get in a sitting position from laying on her stomach and she’s started getting on her knees and crawling. I saw her crawl on her knees towards me for the first time today. She also now pulls up to stand and will pivot around. And today, she stood ON HER OWN for a few seconds!

Also, over the last two weeks or so, she’s started to get much more verbal, making a lot of sounds, like Isaac. While the variety of sounds she makes isn’t as large as Isaac, it still seems impressive because she basically went from a very quiet baby (the only sound she would make is a whine if she wasn’t getting what she wanted, an occasional laugh, and crying) to babbling up a storm.

Isaac has been doing all of this with him reaching his milestones at a more regular pace. Jadis just seemed to lag behind until now and now she can do pretty much anything he does.

It’s cliched but I have to say it, how fast kids grow!!

Gretchen Rubin is an author of “The Happiness Project”. She also maintains a blog with the same name. Her deal was to spend a year trying become a happier person and document the process. In honor of that, here’s is an update of my “Happiness Project.”

On March 12th, I wrote about some things that I could that would free up some time I waste and using it towards more happy things. One of my goals was to decrease the amount of time I waste on Facebook. My goal was to check Facebook twice a day, once in the morning and once at night. Well, it hasn’t gone quite that smoothly. I find that while I don’t check it quite as often as before, I still do check more than twice a day and oftentimes, check updates on my Droid. The idea of actually just deactivating my Facebook account has occurred to me but I am reluctant to do it. I think Facebook has made my life happier in a lot of ways. I’ve connected with people that I have not seen or talked to in many years. I’ve gotten to know a lot of my colleagues a lot better. And I stay in touch with some people a lot better through Facebook. But having said all that, I think I can still cut down on my Facebook time but still have all the benefits of staying in touch. So, in the spirit of that, I will do a few things.

1) I will continue to check Facebook twice a day, once in the morning when I get up and once in the evening before I go to bed.
2) I will try not to check Facebook during the day. I will however, answer messages that are sent to me through Facebook.
3) I will try not to check Facebook on my Droid.

Other goals I am trying to work on involve watching less TV, reading more books, exercising. I will write about these later.

“Tea Time For the Traditionally Built” by Alexander McCall Smith.

“Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters” by Ben H. Winters

“Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” by Seth Grahame-Smith.

“Blood of the Fold” by Terry Goodkind.

“Temple of the Wind” by Terry Goodkind.

“A Reliable Wife” by Robert Goolrick.

Today, the twins are nine months old! And that means only three more months until…. well, until we’ve made it through the first year! I don’t know that being parents to twins gets easier after the first year but for some reason or another, it’s seems to be a big deal so yeah us! 3/4 down, only 1/4 more to go!

So more about our Disney trip. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very relaxing vacation because we were so obsessed with pins that we ended up spending every free minute hunting for more pins. That meant we went to different Disney hotels to look at their pin books. We made multiple trips to Downtown Disney to go through the crop of employees and standing in line for the large pin board. We started each day by eating breakfast and stopping by the small store in our hotel to look at the pin board. We ended each day by stopping by the same store to look at the pin board again. Every where we went, we scanned each Disney employee to see if they had pins. At one point, one of the Disney employees who worked to try to rope people into the Disney Vacation club, gave us a hard time about only looking at his pins and not at his face. We all tried to make a bigger effort to look the Disney employee in the face and say thank you after that.

We all had various sets we were looking to complete. I had the “Family with Mouse Ears” collection, the Fast Pass collection, Princess Quotes, and Princess Hearts with Butterflies collection. Dan had his fruit and vegetable Mickey ears collection, the Bagged Fish collection, the hitchhiking ghosts collection, as well as his Vinylmation set. Sara had the Silloulette collection, the round hidden Mickey 2010 pins, and the Princess Eyes collection. Kevin had his squished characters set, the collection of bowling pin villains and a set of pins that were “completer pins”. Okay so if you don’t understand pin trading, none of that will have made sense but since the two people who read my blog are familiar with pin trading, I won’t worry too much about explaining it. If you want a more detailed explanation, I’d be happy to provide it later.

We managed to squeeze in riding all the cool rides which was only possible because of the special Fast Pass.

Okay, tired now so will stop now.

Isaac has been sprouting a single tooth (lower right central incisor) for the last two weeks. So far so good. He hasn’t been particularly fussy although today, he seemed to always want to be around me. But anyways, I haven’t noticed too much discomfort on his part which is good because you always hear how teething is very uncomfortable for babies.

While you can’t really see anything with Jadis, you can definitely feel something sharp coming up along her right lower middle gum line as well. I’m happy that both babies are starting to produce teeth and even more happy that both seem to be he handling it pretty well.

Isaac has started to crawl these last week or so. While he hasn’t really figured it out yet, he is using his arms to basically pull himself along. He does a good enough job of it and generally get to where he wants to go within a few feet. I have no doubt he’ll figure it out soon enough. Jadis today also showed some signs of wanting to crawl. In general, she gets very unhappy within a few minutes of being on her belly. But today, after she got over the initial whininess, she proceeded to move around by pushing herself backwards. She seems to have the mechanics of crawling better because when she pushes back, she lifts up her butt and can almost get into a true crawling position although not for any length of time.

Our trip to Walt Disney World was a lot of fun but unfortunately, not very relaxing. I think one of these days, we need to plan a relaxing vacation where we don’t have an agenda or place to be. Anyways, we stayed at the All Stars Movies which is the lower end budget Disney hotel. There definitely are some advantages of staying at a Disney hotel, one being the ease at which you could go back and forth between the parks and your hotel.

I was planning on writing more but right now, I can’t keep my eyes open. We’ll try again later.

I am trying out a new app on my Droid. We are in Orlando, Florida, finishing a week long trip to Walt Disney World. It was a really fun trip that we were fortunate enough to share with Kevin and Sara.

Some highlights since it’s hard to type long posts on this tiny keyboard.

Pin trading. OMG. Pretty much consumed every minute that wasn’t spent on eating, sleeping or riding a ride. An expensive activity but totally addicting.

Special FASTPASS. Made waiting to go on rides much more reasonable with wait times between five to twenty minutes. Otherwise, with it being spring break and pretty crowded, normal wait times were sixty minutes and more for the big rides. It made it possible for us to ride pretty much everything to out satisfaction.

Food. The Disney dining plan worked out just fine but I don’t see that it’s a must-have for future. Most of the times, I do not need or want dessert.

Babies. I miss them very much!

So not that I’m going through a mid-life crisis or anything but I’ve been thinking more and more about what things I can do to make myself a happier person.

The birth of twins have really changed a lot of things but I think having my mom here has sort of blunted some of huge changes that probably would have much more drastic had she not been here. The biggest thing is I continue to work just about as much as I did before I had the twins. And while I think that I would need to work in order to maintain some sanity, I often wonder if I ought to decrease my hours so I can spend more time with the kids.

But then it occurred to me that there are small things I can do that would free up more time for me to spend with the kids that don’t require me cutting my work hours. I do spend a lot of time doing random crap that probably is a waste of my energy and time. So, as a brainstorming exercise, I thought of writing down a list of things that I spend more time doing that I want. These are things that I will either cut out or limit to a certain times during the day. Which then got me thinking…. with this extra time, what do I want to be doing with it? Kids, of course, but not every waking minute. So here, another brainstorming exercise.

List of Things I Want To Do
1) Play and read more to the kids.
2) Talk to my husband more (not just routine daily things).
3) Talk to my mom more.
4) Talk to my friends more over the phone (Anh, BK, Alicia, Rhonda).
5) Blog more.
6) Exercise regularly.
7) Spend time each day/week/month for CME.
8) Spend more time with local friends (Henrik/Andrea, Dan Lew, Belinda, Amy, Barbara).
9) Declutter and simplify my house and routines.
10) Read for pleasure.
11) Become a FACEP.

Notice that I didn’t have one for talk to my sister more. That’s because out of everyone (except for Dan), I actually do talk to her on a regular basis….

List of Things I Can Do To Make More Time For Myself
1) Check Facebook twice a day, once in the morning when I first get up and once before going to bed at night instead of every hour like I am doing now.
2) Check Google Reader once a day, in the morning instead of hourly like I do now.
3) Instead of having those sites open all the time on my desktop, I will close those websites down unless I am actively reading them.
4) Avoid buying things that I don’t need that will likely end up as stuff that I can’t wait to get rid of.
5) Spend a small amount of time a day, anywhere between ten minutes to an hour to go through stuff and try to donate/trash most of it.
6) Watch less TV. Delete the following shows on the TIVO: Burn Notice, Hoarders, Monk. See if Dan is okay with deleting: Cake Boss, Ace of Cakes. Shows that I want to keep are Challenge and Leverage.

Okay, so there is probably more stuff I can do but this is a good starting point.

I think the twins are developing a little bit of stranger anxiety. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t like people in their face, cooing and making funny faces at them. I took Isaac to the Roseville ED today to run a few errands and when the secretary got down and cooed at him, he cried and cried and cried. It’s not consistent though. He had no problem with another friend of mine holding him and playing with him last week. Jadis is the same way as well, crying when some people get in her face but okay with others.

We’ve introduced a few foods into their diet. They seem to like the egg yolk and tofu (flavored with a little watered down soy sauce). They seem to eat the mango okay. Jadis is definitely the pickier eater while Isaac is more easy going. He eats just about anything but he has a pretty sensitive gag reflex and will vomit. He’s done it a lot the past week and it’s pretty frustrating to be almost done feeding him and then he starts to york. Gotta figure out what exactly trips him up and avoid it because it’s kind of gross. Doesn’t seem to bother him too much though, he just kind of continues doing the same thing after he finishes puking.