More Pictures

Someday, there will be a blog post that does not revolve around the twins.

Just as I suppose that someday there will be a time that Jess and I are well rested and able to accomplish more than tending to these girls every beck and call. When that day will be? Anyone’s guess.

For the record, in the past week we’ve been dealing with both teething as well as dueling ear infections. I’m sure you parents out there know the joy of which I speak on both of those subjects… now, just combine the two and multiply that by 2 and you’ve got what we’ve been dealing with. I’d come up with a joke about it, but I’m too damn tired.

So, without further ado, some pictures of what we’ve done lately.

As always, there are more pictures on Flickr, so click on an image or a header to go there and view ’em.

4 Months Old!

4 Months Old

4 Months Old Alex

4 Months Old Meri

4 Months Old

4 Months Old

First Solid Food!

Meri takes the first spoonfull

Hmmm... I might like this, mom.

Alex, patiently waiting her turn

Alex's first spoonfull

Meri aftermath

Alex aftermath

Ride the iron horse?

As you may or may not be aware, Jess has been thinking/planning/wondering if it is possible to pack up the girls and make a trek to Pittsburgh this summer to show off the girls to family and use the U2 concert tickets she bought on a whim last year. I’m of the mind that this would be a huge undertaking and I’m not sure if I’m up for it… and that’s putting it mildly. Despite the fact that I love Pittsburgh and would truly enjoy another trip out there, my fear is the travel itself. The amount of crap we’d have to lug around with us would be immense. I fear the girls, cramped in a metal tube at 36,000 feet with no escape for 6 hours. I don’t want to be “that parent” that everyone else on the plane secretly loathes.

Anyway, just for shits and giggles, I decided to look into taking a train. I’ve never traveled on a train. I know nothing about where they run, or how much they cost. But, perhaps it could work. At least you can move around on a train. You could get a private room. The girls could get out of their seats and we could stretch our legs as we leisurely traveled cross country. Images of the golden era of train travel danced in my head. This could be fun, I thought.

So, I jumped onto amtrak.com and started poking around. This is what I found…

First off, despite the fact that we have a train station in Boise, Amtrak does not stop here anymore. The nearest stations to actually get on a train are in Spokane, Washington and Salt Lake City, Utah. Obviously picking SLC, I just went with everything Amtrak gave me (ie. I know we could drive ourselves to SLC, but that’s not the point of this exercise).

  1. Get on a bus and travel 7 hours 25 minutes to Salt Lake City
  2. Have a layover in SLC from 5:50pm to 3:30am (10 hours)
  3. Board train for Chicago, total duration to get there: 34 hr 20 min. Yes. 34 hours.
  4. Luckily the layover in Chicago is only 3 hours
  5. Take train to Pittsburgh, 9 hr 25 min.

We would leave Boise at 10:25am on Sunday and arrive in Pittsburgh at 4:35am on Wednesday. Total travel time: 64 hours. Oh wait, round trip… The schedule says only 57 total hours to make the return trip… Let me get out my calculator… Just a short 121 hours total for the round trip. Just travel time. For comparison, we could fly round trip, from Boise to Sydney, Australia THREE times in that amount of time.

Ooooookay…

Now, the price. The cost for the privilege to give up more than 5 whole days of our lives? Over 1,300 bucks. Yes, you read that right. And that is just for 2 seats and the girls riding on our laps, apparently. If we were interested in a private room, say for one of those 34 hour legs, the cheapest/smallest one they have (still just 2 seats) would add $600 to the total. If we wanted a private room for both of those 34 hour stretches, that bangs the total price up to just north of $2,500. Not to mention the 15 meals we’d need to buy ourselves along the journey. I’m going to go ahead and assume that food prices on a train are probably a lot like those in a movie theater or sports stadium… you know, super reasonably priced. On the plus side, some trains now have WiFi!… however, not any of the ones we’d be on.

Or, we could fly. Direct from Boise, 1 stop, 7 hours each way, round trip of 14 hours and a total cost of $825.

Needless to say, the train is much less attractive an option than I was prepared for. Maybe to those of you more familiar with train travel this isn’t as shocking to you as it was to me. But I was kinda blown away. So, you’re telling me it takes 8.5 times longer and is more expensive to boot? Gee, where do I sign up?

Anyway, back to square 1. We will continue to weigh the pro’s and con’s and see where we end up.

Pittsburgh family, maybe we’ll see ya in July… or maybe we won’t.

Break on through to the other side

See if you can guess what we’re looking at here:

If you guessed 2 teeth forcing their way into existence in Alex’s mouth, you’re the big winner.

Jess and I were each feeding a respective baby this evening when Jess says to me, “Um… I think Meri is teething.” “Impossible,” I reply, not wanting to believe on top of the non-stop feeding we’ve been doing that it was time for this as well. “Come here and stick your finger in her mouth,” she insisted.

Instead of getting up from my chair with Alex, a bottle, a pillow, the iPhone and TV remote, I figured I’d just do a little test on Alex instead. What I felt filled me with dread.

Teeth. Little, bumpy, nubby teeth. Two of ’em. Son of a…

So, we got that going on now. Time waits for no man, and all that jazz. Maybe it was those teeth that caused me to get a whopping 4 hours of sleep last night. At least 3 of those hours were in a row. In my world, that’s almost a victory.

All in all, this has been a pretty eventful few days. 4-month appointment last Friday where the girls both got excellent bills of health and the go ahead with solid food, rice cereal, from the doc. They’ve taken to it fairly well, but get angry if you don’t shovel it in fast enough. They’re still burning through breastmilk and formula like it’s going out of style. Then the other morning, Alex was laying on the bed next to me as I struggled to get myself up and going for the day, when she decided to do a barrel roll and go from back to front. Great, they’re mobile.

Now this.

Does this mean we can now ply them with shots of whiskey like our parents did?