The audio in the background is provided by Macy, who is gnawing on a vinyl carrying case for her blocks.
In other news, Camy has become deceptively mobile (no visible crawling, but she just ends up in places you wouldn't expect). If you like to read on the floor, don't leave you reading material there, or she will find it:
She loves paper. So much so that it has lead to one of our first family rules: no eating checks greater than $5.
Trying out the new shoes that Edna made for the girls, they play typical rolls in this video: Macy screams, Camy plays around with Macy.
In this video both girls try screaming.
Of the two Macy is the more developed screamer. Fortunately she has not found that full throttle scream yet, but you can hear her searching for it. It will come.
When not screaming, Macy trains as a cage fighter. Here she is practicing on her doll/punching bag, Emily. The real-time video looks about as erratic as the time-lapse video.
Camy recently discovered her shadow - curious things they are.
Here is another time-lapse Macy video playing in the toy Mona & Bryant sent us.
The girls turned 5 months old this weekend. As part of that milestone, I wanted to answer a question that some of my friends ask me: are the babies on budget?
Of course they are – 53% below budget in fact. Well… kind of. The only explicit forecasted budget we had was for diapers. We came across this site: http://tinyurl.com/5bbxrg, which seemed to have reasonable numbers. Edna has whittled down purchases by buying in bulk (we are talking months at a time), and the girls have taken to frugality in diapers like ducks to water. So both price and volume are doing better than expected.
But diapers are only 20% of our total cost since inception. Equipment was 40%, clothes 20%, Food 10% and the lots of other things for the last 10% (see Exhibit 1). The trick to budgets here is economies of scale (i.e., does it cost 2x as much to have two, or just a little more). We didn’t set a specific budget for these categories, but looking around the USDA, and MSN, here is a guess on where they stand.
On equipment the girls are 10% below budget for one child, or 55% below budget if you assume two kids takes twice the stuff. One great perk of living out East is that moms have their kids later in life. After having twins, they don't plan on a another set and are happy to sell you top-of-the line stuff, two at a time, at bargain-basement prices. So being connected with the Mothers of Multiples here has helped quite a bit.
These fiscally fit girls took it even one step further: they have also been self-financing so far. If you take the budget surpluses from the recreation and dining out categories (because its a lot harder to get out with the girls), we have broken even across those categories and the baby expenses. Who said children were expensive? Go team.
The girls are also 17% below budget on clothes, and 83% below budget on food (which probably assumes formula where we did not have that cost). The clothes are a little embarrassing because the other reason he girls are so fiscally mature for their age is you. The many, many gifts we received were not included in the numbers. Thanks again, I still have many of you on my thank-you list, which is getting older every month that passes by.
