Day 225

Orzo Salad with Spinach, Feta, and Tomatoes

One of our go-to summertime meals is a “Greek” “salad” with orzo, spinach, feta, grape tomatoes, lemon juice, and olive oil. It’s delicious, light, and summery, and is good warm or cold. Turns out, the babies like it as much as we do (at least, once we run it through our food mill—thanks, Julia and Jeff!) and have gobbled it down enthusiastically two nights in a row.

This marks, I suppose, the real beginning of the “real food” phase for the babies. I very much want to start the habit of sitting down to dinner with the babies and feeding them whatever we’re having, and I’m totally jazzed that the kiddos seem to like eating. Some of the time, anyway.

(I was going to start trying to take a picture of each meal to post on the blog but, (a) I post enough pictures on the damn blog, and (b) once it goes through the food mill, it doesn’t look quite as appetizing.)

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Chips Off The Old Block

(I’m trying hard to remember to do more than just post pictures on this blog. After all, things happen, and what’s a blog for if not to tell the world about them?)

Tonight, we served Julian and Eloise their first food that wasn’t a single ingredient: pasta with Newman’s Own tomato sauce. (This is not entirely true. I guess I should say it was their first food that wasn’t explicitly “baby food.”) I’m pleased to say that they liked it, although this isn’t really a surprise. If allowed, Rachel would eat pasta with tomato sauce for dinner every night of her life, so the babies are just taking after their mama. (True, Rachel doesn’t generally run hers through a food mill.)

I’m excited, because hopefully this will be the beginning of real food for the babies. Maybe next time it won’t be sauce from a jar!

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Not That Original

Looks like the whole daily photograph thing has been done.

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From the Archives

My dad’s moving, which entails a lot of digging old stuff out of the basement. Today he sent along these pictures of me at seven months old.

Matt, 7 Months

Rachel’s comment: “You look like Eloise, with Julian’s cheeks.”

Day 213

Taking a Stand

When Eloise learned to sit up on her own, she became a much more content baby…for a while. Now nothing except standing will do. Of course, holding a baby in a standing position all day sort of interferes with any other activity I might feel would be worthwhile (attending to the baby’s brother, or using the restroom, or other similar frivolities), so I decided to see how long she could stand at this kitchen stool. A long time, it turns out. Go Eloise!

Unrelated: When we get behind on pictures, we back-date them when we finally post them, which means they get buried under any non-picture posts we might have written in the interim. So if you want to be sure not to miss a single priceless image, be sure to scroll down a bit. Recent shots include Eloise modeling a little cotton dress that I knit when I was pregnant (and when I was sure I was having two boys, incidentally — don’t ask me to explain that one).

Seven Months

Hello, seven months! I didn’t hear you come in. I have to admit that I was so focused on making it to six months that it sort of didn’t occur to me that we’d keep going after we passed that milestone.

I’ve slowly established a convention with my monthly posts of including photos of the two babies together. Matt posts a daily photo of each baby individually, but lately some of the very cutest pictures have been of both of them. Now that they’re sitting and interacting so much more, there is an embarrassment of riches to choose from. I think we’re at a bit of a sweet spot right now in that they interact well, but aren’t yet able to hit, push, pinch, and steal toys — well, at least not with any intentionality. I’m sure they’ll reach a point where I long for the days when they just lay, bloblike and unaware, side by side. (Actually, that’s not true. I’m pretty darn sure I’ll never long for a return to the bloblike days.)

Indeed, things have continued to get more fun with the babies all the time. Now that they’re a bit easier to entertain and the weather’s getting better, we’ve started to take them more places: the Providence Children’s Museum, Tot Gym class, playdates, or simply the front yard. Our most ambitious trip was to a bat mitzvah service and celebratory lunch a couple weeks ago. We were out of the house for about five hours, and, remarkably, the babies held up pretty well! We would have stayed longer except we ran out of diapers and bottles. Julian even allowed himself to be put down for a nap on the hosts’ bed, although it was quickly interrupted by a pack of children who barged in playing some variation of Hide and Seek. Matt discovered the disturbance shortly after it happened, and, in a demonstration of how patient and gentle he has become with children since becoming a parent himself, hissed, “If you woke up the baby, I swear I will kill each one of you.” (The baby had indeed been awoken, but boy those little kids can run fast.) That bit aside, I think all four of us were proud of how things went. I hope this bodes well for some overnight travel to New Hampshire we have planned for this summer.

Julian and Eloise continue to show ever-increasing zest for life. They are positively exuberant when playing with toys, although their different personalities are evident in their playing styles. Eloise tends to study most toys with a furrowed brow, turning them around slowly, giving them measured shakes. Julian tends to lunge for each toy you present (no matter how many times he’s seen it before) as though he’s been in sensory deprivation for a week. This is a bit of a problem when you want to offer a toy to Eloise. Even if you allow Julian to snatch the toy you’d originally intended for Eloise, when you reach for the toy that Julian had been playing with previously, thinking that he will surely be tired of it and therefore it will be a safe bet for offering to his sister, he drops whatever you’d just given him and heaves himself at the toy he had been playing with for 10 minutes. (I get the sense this is pretty common at this age. My twin mom friend Julia describes how her son will grab eagerly for the mesh feeder she is handing to his sister, even when he is at that very moment chewing on an identical mesh feeder.)

They do get tired of their toys sometimes (leading me to have a complete breakdown of will power and buy them ever more toys), but I love how they get reset overnight: you get them up in the morning and their body language clearly communicates, “Hey! It’s my toys! I haven’t seen you guys since yesterday!”

Physical milestones are coming along, with completely reliable sitting, plenty of wriggly rolling, and a near-constant desire to stand with support. They have also become quite adept at grabbing and pinching our faces, which, as you might imagine, is quite painful. It’s very silly to explain to a totally non-verbal child that “we don’t pinch,” but we’re not sure what else to do at this stage. (Pinching back doesn’t seem quite right.)

The biggest challenge at this point (well, aside from the twins’ propensity for waking up at 4:45 a.m. for the day) is the eternal shortage of time. I recently described it to someone as the temporal equivalent of living paycheck to paycheck: we have just enough time in the day to get all the basics done (bottles, laundry, meals, and a minimal level of tidying), but trying to find time for things on top of that is a challenge (paying bills, mowing the lawn, making baby food, writing monthly blog posts), and if anything unexpected comes along, or there’s a major task that doesn’t fit into the regular routine (finding a nanny, installing the window air conditioners, taking the pukey cat to the vet for an abdominal ultrasound), I start to feel a bit panicky about how we’ll ever find time to get to it. And dammit, sometimes when we do find ourselves with a few extra minutes, we would like to sit slack-jawed and watch Lost rather than seizing the opportunity to scrub the grout in the kitchen floor. This is probably something that’s largely attributable to having children in general, rather than having twins specifically, but I’m still adjusting to it.

But without question, the trend toward an improved ratio of good stuff to hard stuff continues. So much so that lately I’ve actually started to feel a strange and unfamiliar feeling that I finally identified as nostalgia. I was at the midwife’s office for a non-pregnancy-related reason last week, and walking past the ultrasound room I suddenly felt a sense of melancholy that I had no little pre-babies to check up on in there. Then some friends of ours had twins last week (congratulations, Christina and Kelly!), and looking at the pictures on their blog and reading about their first few days as parents has made me all misty. I even got a little wistful when I found a few packets of castille soap under the sink that the nurses had given us in the hospital for washing pump parts. (I challenge all of you to find something under the kitchen sink that makes you feel sentimental.) Of course, I’m not so far removed that I don’t then instantly remember that I spent most of the first four months traumatized, but I like seeing signs of the fact that as more and more time passes, the happy memories will take increasing precedence over the difficult ones. I have no problem with my brain conducting a little revisionist history; I’m perfectly content to remember the early months wildly inaccurately.

Because of the aforementioned shortage of time, it took me nearly two weeks to crank out this post. And now I can’t think of any thoughtful way to end it, but if I don’t go ahead and hit “publish” now, it’ll be time to write the eight-month post. So please distract yourself from my abrupt and artless conclusion with this adorable photo:

Month 7

Super Powers

One fun thing about playing with babies is that I’m pretty sure they can’t track objects as fast as I can move them, so when I toss a ball quickly up in the air and then catch it, from their point of view I’ve made it disappear and then reappear. That’s right: daddy is magic.

Day 212

Mother’s Day

Many of you know that I struggled a bit with depression in the first few months following the twins’ birth. I remember having a realization during one of my low moments that while I loved my children very much, I certainly was not loving being a mother. This worried me more than a little, seeing as I had recently entered into a fairly non-renegotiable lifetime contract.

But last weekend I celebrated my first Mother’s Day from the perspective of the…errr…celebratee? — and I was so very happy to realize that over the last three months, I have grown to embrace and relish and feel pride in my role as Julian’s and Eloise’s mother. It took me a little while to integrate my new identity as Mama with my old identity as Person with Diverse Interests and Hobbies, but I’m finally getting there.

Mother’s Day was an incredibly beautiful day in Providence, so we thought a picnic in the park might be a nice idea. We packed up an unseemly amount of stuff (we had a full double diaper bag, a cooler with food for all four of us, and a tote bag full of toys, plus the baskets under the double stroller were stuffed full. One more piece of luggage and we would have needed a pack mule. All this for a 45-minute picnic one block from our house.

We had a wonderful time sitting on the grass in the shade, feeding the babies pears and peas, watching the babies spit up the pears and peas, debating whether we should stop Eloise from eating the paper our sandwiches came wrapped in, swinging the babies around in the sunshine, and eyeing the frozen lemonade truck on the edge of the park. It was an eminently enjoyable hour.

Before Matt and I started trying to have a baby, I — like many people, I expect — had rosy and airbrushed visions of what it what it would be like to have a family. Perhaps not surprisingly, countless times over the last two years I have thought to myself, “this is not what I pictured.” From giving myself injections to getting pregnant in a tiny exam room (with the participation of a businesslike nurse) to discovering I was having TWO babies to having a c-section to pumping milk 8 times per day, so much of this has differed sharply from what I imagined. Yet last Sunday, out in the dappled sunshine, with our two beautiful babies perched on a muslin blanket on an expanse of green grass, happily playing with toys and grinning at us, I had a rare and wonderful realization: this, at last, is motherhood exactly as I’d pictured it.

Poll

“Bitten Nipple” works best as a name for:

a) a rock band (”One night only: indy rock sensation Bitten Nipple!”)
b) a British pub (”I’ll meet you for a pint down at the Bitten Nipple.”)
c) a strong cocktail (”Bartender, pour me another Bitten Nipple.”)

Bonus question: Can you guess why Matt and I might have been talking about this? Here is a hint.

(You are disqualified from this contest if your name is Eloise.)

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