First time

Today we fed Elin and Filip with food (not milk) for the first time ever! Oat porridge with some fruit puree wasn't all that bad, they seemed to think.

Not that often

It's not that often it happens, but when it does the world seems to stop turning for a while - when all three babies scream their lungs out at the same time...

Yesterday afternoon EOF was sleeping in the pram after having been with me for a quick visit downtown. Anna and the older kids came home from having been elsewhere. I started to prep dinner and was just about to throw in chicken in the oven.

Then Oscar woke up. I picked him up and soon came to the conclusion that he needed a meal. I handed him over to Anna and headed for the kitchen to heat a bottle. On the way there Elin woke up too. She and Oscar started whining and I realized getting the milk ready was needed urgently. Both then changed whining for screaming.
Then Filip woke up and soon joined in. And still the milk bottles had not found their way to the microwave...

Fixing milk is something you may do with one kid on the left arm, but it slows you down. Two kids prevents you from doing anything. So I just had to put down two kids on their mattress (that we have in the living room) and rush to the kitchen. Anna soon had a bottle for Oscar and got him to eat. But when the second and third bottle was ready Elin and Filip had screamed themselves blue.

It took another ten minutes to calm everything down again.

I guess the world stopped turning during that quarter of an hour. What ever that could have happened at that time wouldn't have been noticed anyway...

Not every night

It's not every day that five kids are fast asleep for the night at 10.55 PM. But tonight they are. Too bad everything else isn't ready in the house, so I guess we'll be up a bit longer anyway.

Progress

Elin has been searching for her thumb (to suck on) for three months. Tonight she found it!!

And just a few moments later Filip proved that he is now capable of turning over to his belly.

What to do with a screaming baby?

I'm convinced babies don't know their own good. At least not Elin.

She's extremely demanding or picky when it comes to the timing of her food. When she starts to make small grumpy sounds we know that she is hungry. With some luck we then have one minute to get to the fridge, get a pre-filled bottle, run it in the microwave for 30 seconds and get it in her mouth - or else she'll be screaming. If she screams for more than a minute the noise develops to the sound of an inferno.

Not only does she damage the hearing of the rest of us. When she is screaming like that it is impossible to stop her. She can scream for ten minutes with the milk bottle literally in her mouth. I guess she doesn't notice the food has arrived.

In the beginning we did what we could to comfort her to make her stop and start to eat. But quite often that didn't help very much, but the boys just got hungrier in the meantime and perhaps joined the screaming. So now we sometimes just have to leave her doing her thing and feed the other two while it lasts. It's better to have one screaming baby than three!

I also believe Oscar and Filip is getting used to this behavior. Oscar is now quite often just smiling and looking at his sister, perhaps thinking "you're stupid - don't you realize what you are missing?". Filip may look surprised and wondering - but at least it is not that often that he joins the screaming.

I wonder what Elin is winning through this behavior?