Real Food Rising Summer Program Begins!

Mike's hard work came to fruition on Monday when the first summer program of Real Food Rising kicked off with 10 youth farmers, 2 crew leaders, 1 agriculture intern, and a 1 very tired program director/head farmer/youth coordinator/father of twins. Oh, and it was 98 degrees too. Go Mikey! He's been working on getting this going in some fashion since we arrived in Utah so this is very exciting. The girls are so proud of their daddy.

Some shots of one of RFR's farms a few days before the program started (Mike had already planted most of the crops with the help of volunteers):

Bonus shot of the girls! They're thinking about how awesome their dad is.

Opa and Oma Come to Visit

Opa and Oma came all the way from Braintree, MA to help out around the house and with the girls. Opa was just here a week, but he got a lot of good cuddling in, alongside running a 5K, helping to re-landscape our front yard, drinking local beer, and getting a haircut, among many other projects. The man's a machine!

Luckily Oma's staying on another couple of weeks so we'll get to post lots more pictures of her in the future.

The 5K was to raise money for Burmese refugees. Opa ran and Oma walked.

Nothing Beats a Good Ceiling Fan

Adults like ceiling fans in the summer for the cool breeze. Babies love them for their contrast with the white ceiling and their hypnotic spinning. Hours of entertainment. Zora especially can't get enough; whenever she seems to be gazing wistfully off into space, thinking deep thoughts, she's really just mesmerized by a ceiling fan. If she happens to be "looking at the camera," it's likely we just got in her line of sight to the fan.

Starting to Have Expressions (and Opinions about Sports)

The rivalry heats up. Punches were thrown.

Some pretty great faces.

"I've got my eye on you..."

Love Zora's face: so pensive and wistful.

Daddy Being Daddy

Happy Father's Day to the most wonderful and generous dad of twins out there! He keeps me laughing and feeling loved, even with all the ups and downs of parenthood.

And a great one of Grandpa Bob with the girls.

Noemi and Zora can't wait to meet their Opa Jon in just a few days!

We slept through the night (-ish)!

Big milestone alert! We decided just yesterday to see what would happen if we didn't wake the girls at night to feed (we usually wake them every 4 hours). Frankly, we needed a little bit more sleep and they're big enough now that they can tell us when they're hungry. Well, they slept from after their 11pm feeding all the way until 7am (so about 7 hours) - that counts as sleeping through the night in my book! And they weren't even ridiculously hungry at 7am. In fact, only Noemi woke up so we still had to rouse Zora. Now that I've jinxed it by posting about it, it will never happen again. But oh well, it was fun that one time

Noemi & Zora celebrating their accomplishment

Such big girls!

The Power of Music

The girls love music, whether it's our off-key singing, the tinny lullabies their bouncy chairs play, or something from the ipod (anything from indie rock to world music - they're not picky). Here is a video sequence showing how music can tame the wild beasts.

Before pressing play:

After pressing play:

Chicks All Grown Up

A few weeks ago we lost another of our big chickens, this time to a couple of dogs running loose through our neighborhood. They somehow managed to dig under our back fence into the coop, killed one, and terrified the other two. Luckily the batch of new "chicks" we got back in February were in their own re-inforced pen so didn't get eaten. But they're not chicks anymore - now they're full on chickens! At four months they're not quite ready to lay, but we're going to combine them with our two remaining big chickens very soon and we should have 8 laying hens by August!

Sue/Grandma with the chicken we lost to the dogs

One of the remaining "big" chickens

The other remaining "big" chicken

The 6 new "chicks"

New Things We Can Do

Being just over 10 weeks comes with more awake time (more interaction with Mom and Dad, but also more crying) and some fancy new skills like raising our heads on our own and smiling.

Sister Pics I

Some shots of the girls together from the early days to the present:

3 days old

1 week

3 weeks

4 weeks

4 1/2 weeks

5 weeks

5 1/2 weeks

6 1/2 weeks (rockin' their Converse socks from Aunt Alyson)

7 1/2 weeks (compare to 4 1/2 wks above)

Noemi lamenting the fact that they don't quite fit together in the Boppy anymore

9 1/2 weeks (today!)

And a video of the girls at 8 1/2 weeks:

(not viewable in the email - go to the blog itself to watch)