Time keeps on ticking (measuring the years in beds)

One night this week, while I was at a work-thing for a colleague, Lester surprised me by taking the boys' guardrails off their beds.

So in just under 4 years, we've gone from this:

Their cribs before they were even born. This is the room that is now Clair's.

 to this:

We moved the boys' cribs into the guest room when I was pregnant with Clair, to make room for her things in the small room.

to this:

After Dean tried to jump to his death from the crib a couple times -- toddler beds!

We converted their cribs to toddler beds in December 2012.

to now this:

NO GUARDRAILS!

After bath, Dean was having a hard night, and felt the need to take to his bed, like it was a fainting couch.

At some point, these beds are supposed to be able to convert to twin-size (though I'm not sure how) and then to full-sized. So we have a ways to go before we've gotten our money's worth out of them. But I already feel a little bit like, "Whoa! Where did the time go?" How on Earth am I going to feel when they're in FULL beds?

I remember when they both fit in a Pack 'n Play, all teeny and sweet, with fat rolls on their legs.

And now they have no guardrails. They get up in the morning and make their beds. (The night they got their guardrails taken off, Cary woke up at FOUR A.M. to make his bed, he was so excited. Yay for us.) They wake up in the middle of the night and take themselves to the bathroom. They stay up way too late, sitting up in their beds, giggling and singing and talking about things Lester and I have no part of.

How did this happen? Where did the time go?

Kate Middleton is pregnant! (and other random baby bits)

The first thing I did when my co-worker and friend Stacey yelled out in the office, "New York Times reports: The Duchess of Cambridge is knocked up!" was not go to the NYT to read up about it.
No, the first thing I did was go STRAIGHT to Suri's Burn Book to see her reaction.

It was priceless! Hands down the best part of this announcement.

In other baby news, on Day 2 of the Big Boy Beds, it took Cary and Dean 45 minutes to settle down last night while I was giving Clair her end-of-the-night bottle. So after I finally got her down, I went in to tell them to "Go to sleep!" Cary was in Dean's bed. And four of the slats in the blinds near Dean's bed had been pulled out. Great.

The thing that baffles me is that those blinds were always there. Nothing has changed about his proximity to them or his ability to reach them. So who knows why now he decided to destroy them. Toddlers are inexplicable.

The good news is it only took that one time to get them settled and they were conked out after that.

So while Lester was at the Redskins/Giants game having a blast, I got all the kids asleep by 8:30, and the dinner dishes and bathroom cleaned up and their next-day snacks made by 9.  Which meant I got to watch two full episodes of Teen Mom 2, in the bed all to myself, no kids, no remote-control-hogging husband and no noise!! Hooray!

In other baby news, Cary and Dean are smart as whips. We played with Play-Doh together this weekend and I was amazed at their creativity. They're also doing so great recognizing all their letters. Cary can recognize them all, and Dean is not too far behind him. And they're becoming slightly more purposeful about their drawing/coloring adventures, which makes for some interesting "Mommy, look what I made!" mysteries. (Most of the time, I'm like, "Uhhh....ummmm....errrr....a squiggly line?? A big mess? Some sort of Rorschach test that will explain your future life choices?")

But sometimes, they surprise me:

Um, Kate Middleton -- let me see your Royal Baby do that at 2-and-a-half! HOLLA!

Big boy beds! And the aquarium!

The big boy beds are here!

(I know saying this probably means the kiss of death, but...) So far so good!

Yay! I'm a big boy!

I'm free! I'm free!

Lester converted them on Sunday, so we've only had one nap and one overnight to practice, but aside from a little bit of extra time to actually get them in the beds, we have not had any issues. They stayed in their beds for the entire nap and overnight too. Both times one of us had to go in the room once to say, "Hey, knock it off!" for some reason or another. But as is usually the case with them, right after that, they were conked out.

So let's see how this goes from here on out.

Also, we took all the kids to the Baltimore Aquarium for the first time. We met up with our friends David and Stephanie, and their beautiful boys Dylan, 2, and Landon, 2 months.

Here we are at the dolphin show, which was a huge hit!! Landon is wearing the outfit we bought him, which says, "World's cutest little brother!" Awwwww.

This is the classic Dean face.

The boys loved all the fish and the dolphins, but truthfully, I think they liked riding on all the escalators much more. So we'll wait awhile before paying the $30-per-adult (!!!!) ticket price until we think they are really ready.

Afterwards, we went out for lunch at the Inner Harbor and ate seafood -- appropriate, right? :-) 

There's a huge guitar on top of the restaurant. When Cary saw it, this was his reaction. He thought it was the silliest thing he'd ever seen.

  All in all, a  very good weekend!