Yippee!! I made it to the end of NaBloPoMo!!!

I’m going to go enjoy some time with my husband now. Evenings, after Cupcake bedtime, are usually when we get to exchange a few coherent sentences not interrupted by ‘Yes, I hear you. You played with Maddy today?’ or ‘You need to worry about your own dinner.’ or ‘We don’t do that in our family.’ For the past month poor DH has heard a lot of ‘in a minute - I have to post’ from me. I’ve got some time to make up for.

I’ll be back in a day or two.

The Best of It

I can’t count the number of times I’ve looked at the Cupcukes and thought ‘OMG, there are TWO of you.’ Over the past two years the shock of having two (two!!!) babies has slowly faded away and been replaced by wonder and amazement at how much freakin’ fun they can be. They are no longer twice as much work as one, at least most of the time. Now they’re twice as much fun.

I love how they play together; much of the time they don’t need to discuss what they’re going to do, they just know. One game moves into the next without a word of either encouragement or complaint. And I love how they can crack themselves up over something that is lost to rest of us who live outside their twinny world. I also love how kind they usually are to on another. They are quick to hug their sister if she cries or to run to bring her an ice pack to soothe her boo-boo, real or imagined. They rarely fight, and when they do it resolves quickly with a little grown-up intervention.

And they have each other’s back. Woe betide the foolish toddler who tries to bite one of the Cupcakes! There was a biter for a while at their daycare. He bit most of the other kids, but S2 and H2 always came home unscathed. When DH finally asked their teacher about their lack of battle scars she told him that Biter had indeed tried to bite the girls, but whenever he would try to chomp on one of them the other twin would rush in and beat Biter over the head until he left her sister alone.

Jenny mentioned how terrific it is to watch them learn from each other. I agree. By now the Cupcakes will sometimes actively try to teach each other how to do something. It doesn’t always work, but it’s really, really cool to watch. They are really sweet about encouraging each other (Don’t give up, H2!). And when they want to work together to get something done - watch out! They have figured out how to drag the 5′ by 3′ coffee table around the living room to, um, increase their access to things that are too high for them to reach without a stepladder. I can assure you that they had no adult help in coming up with that idea.

But my personal favorite has to be when I see them again after being gone for a few hours and they both come running toward me as fast as they can yelling ‘Yay!!! Mama!!!!!! Yay!!!!’. Both of them talking as fast as they can, trying to tell me what they’ve done while I was away while simultaneously trying to climb up into my arms, together. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

I’m suffering from poor time management tonight. I went to a workshop this evening, Adoption: Risk and Resilience, and it ran quite a bit longer than I’d expected. So, I’m going to postpone my promised post about the best things about having twins and try to buy you all off with pictures of the Cupcakes.

The pictures are from this morning. The girls dressed themselves, including H2’s polka-dotted socks over tights. They also chose their own accessories. Don’t they look great?

The Worst of It

Jenny asked me what I think is the worst part about having twins. My answer to that question has definitely changed quite a bit over the past two years. If someone had asked me that question two years ago my answer would have been immediate: the lack of sleep, followed immediately by the how overwhelming it is to try to meet the needs of two infants at the same time. The day that the Cupcakes learned to hold their bottles by themselves was a marvelous day for me. I was even happier when they learned to walk; no more running up the stairs carrying one baby while the other one sat on the floor, screaming, depositing the (temporarily) happy baby in the crib and having her scream while I ran back down the stairs to pick up the still-screaming downstairs baby and running upstairs with her. Don’t even get me started about trying to drop them off or pick them up from daycare by myself…

One year ago I most likely would still have said that the worst part about having twins was the lack of sleep. But trying to keep up with two very mobile, high-energy toddlers would have come in a close second. Of course, the lower back pain deserves special mention as well, because you can’t pick up just one two-year-old. You have to pick up both of them at the same time. And they get heavy. And oh, my God, did they need a lot of stuff. When we traveled we looked like a gypsy caravan. We had a double stroller, two car seats, two Pack-n-Plays, an enormous diaper bag, two toddler party packs, ack!!!

Now, I would say that the hardest part about having twins is feeling like I never have enough time to spend with each of them alone, and feeling like I often don’t get a chance to really enjoy being with them as people. I worry that I miss things about them, things that they do, that they learn or that they like because I’m so often dealing with them as a team.

But the lower back pain (they still want to be carried around, and now they weigh about 32 lbs / 14.5 kg each) and the explosions of chaos that follow them though the house do deserve special mention.

Stay tuned for ‘The Best of It’ coming tomorrow…

I think that I may be almost over this ^&%^*(& cold. Please, oh please!!!

On to the (very much appreciated) question of the day… Jenny and M3 asked if S2 and H2 are able to recognize themselves in pictures and M3 wondered if they understand that they’re twins.

They do know that they are sisters, but I don’t think that they realize that they are twins. Sometimes they seem to understand what ‘twins’ are, perhaps because DH and I tend to point out other sets of twins. They are beginning to realize that other people, like, oh, me, can’t always tell them apart, though.

And, unfortunately, they can’t accurately identify themselves in pictures. They do especially poorly on baby pictures; they each always think the photo is of themselves. (It’s actually kind of sweet.) I was really hoping that they’d be able to help me sort out some pictures we took before DH started religiously marking every set of pictures with their names. No luck. H2 informed me that all of the pictures were of here, ditto for S2. I spent a very long time after that looking for hints of their bracelets in those pictures.

More questions…?