Week 53

Photos taken between October 19 and October 25, 2009. (Click on any picture for a larger version.)

Nerds

The twins had their twelve-month doctor’s appointment today. It involved 5 shots each plus a blood draw, which was no fun for anyone, let me tell you. There was one light moment, though, that I think speaks volumes about Rachel and me.

Dr. Griffith, our fantastic pediatrician, was being shadowed by a medical student. We were talking about feeding, and he mentioned that he recommended we continue feeding them baby cereal for a bit longer rather than switch to regular oatmeal or some other cereal. He then turned to the med student and asked, “Why do you think I recommend the baby cereal?”

“Um,” she said, “Fiber?”

“Yes, fiber is important,” Dr. Griffith said, “but the other very important thing is…” He paused for maybe half a second. At this point, had you been looking at Rachel and me, you would have seen us literally sitting on the edge our chairs and bouncing up and down. We very nearly both had our hands in the air, waving, “Ooh! Ooh! Call on me!”

We couldn’t restrain ourselves. We blurted out, “Iron!” a split-second before Dr. Griffith said, “Iron.”

So, yeah. Big nerds. (I’m pretty sure that med student hates us now.)

Twelve Months

I am not going to pretend I haven’t been dreading writing this post. One year — such a momentous milestone! How could I ever hope to write an appropriately momentous blog post? How could I hope to neatly capture the tumult and misery and euphoria of the past year? Frankly, I can’t. This felt like the longest and messiest year of my life, and I simply can’t sum it up (aside from maybe a long and messy blog post saying it was tumultuous, miserable, and euphoric). Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin.

While I think about it, I’ll recount the twins’ birthday festivities. Two days before their birthday, most members of our immediate families came for a fairly low-key celebration featuring cupcakes, wonderful gifts, and a 35-minute slide show of the year of daily pictures (yes, that’s 724 photos at 3 seconds apiece). The babies were relatively well behaved, if somewhat overwhelmed by all the gifts and the people who wanted to snuggle them. Interestingly, they were not particularly wild about their cupcakes. I assume this means they just naturally prefer vegetables and that we will never have to worry about them badgering us for non-nutritious snacks.

Then this past weekend we hosted a 60-person birthday bash. A party of that size wasn’t exactly the plan, but a year of social deprivation can make you lose your head when you are listing all the people you’d really like to see. Then they all said yes, and before we knew it we were preparing for the largest party we’ve ever hosted. The babies were absolute rock stars, with Eloise comfortably walking around amidst all the guests and Julian playing happily in the family room, a.k.a. Baby Fun Land Happy Times Village. We are now all pretty thoroughly partied out.

Photo by Ken Zawsum.

Julian and Eloise also received more than 30 birthday emails from family, friends, and fans. I know that one day they will enjoy them every bit as much as Matt and I did (yes, we are reading their email — it’s our parental responsibility to ensure that no cyber-predators are trying to wish them happy birthday). Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to write to them!

Since there’s no point in taking a year-long look at how Julian and Eloise have changed (they were born scrawny and toothless and couldn’t do anything; now they’re plump and toothy and can get into all sorts of mischief!), I’ll simply continue my standard account of how they changed in the past month.

As predicted in my eleven month post, Julian is walking! It’s amazing how differently he and Eloise learned; she was zipping around confidently within a couple days of her first steps, while he has been slowly improving over the several weeks since he made his own first staggering attempts. Eloise was clearly physically ready for walking, but it just hadn’t occurred to her yet. Julian probably wasn’t really ready until much more recently, but seeing Eloise walk motivated him to try sooner than I think he might have if he were the only baby.

I love that they get ideas from things they see now. They pick up on concepts so much more quickly. At the playground recently, Eloise was pushing a large truck toy around, and an older boy ran over and started to scoop handfuls of sand into it. He quickly tired of it and ran off, but Eloise immediately starting scooping sand into it herself. Sometimes I think I underestimate how readily they will understand things. The other week I was brushing Julian’s hair after the bath, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should let him hold the brush while I demonstrated how he should use it. I expected him to require multiple weeks of repetition before he caught on, but he immediately starting moving the brush in the general direction of his hair in a brushing motion. (Not perfect, but he clearly understood what I was showing him.) When did my kids get all smart like that?

Relatedly, we are really starting to tune into their receptive language skills. We love testing out what they know — we’ll use words without any gestures or other helpful cues to see whether “Where’s the window?” gets them to look at the window, or whether “splash,” “clap,” or “bounce” elicits the proper action (they all do). And if I point to Matt and say “Who’s that?” Julian will smile and say “Dada!” Our children are not verbal prodigies, but they know a lot more language than I realized before I really started focusing on it.

Their love of books seems to go hand in hand with this. They display visible excitement when I pull out books (or even if I say, “Who wants to read a book?” — yay again for receptive language!), and they can sit still and listen to them for a good long time. Eloise will often pull a book off the shelf and sit and flip through the pages herself for several minutes, or bring it to one of us with an expectant “hi!” (her word for hello, look at that, read me this, and give me that.) We are also experiencing the parenthood rite of passage known as reading the same damn book two hundred damn times in a row. I’ll finish, for example, Knitty Kitty, and Eloise will promptly take it out of my hands, hold it up, and say “hi!” And so I turn back to page one. (By the way, Matt and I find that we almost always begin a book by formally announcing the title, the author, and the illustrator. I think I do this because I grew up on Reading Rainbow, may it rest in peace. Do others do this?)

They can just do so much now! They will put spoons into bowls of oatmeal and bring them to their mouths about 50 percent of the time. Julian can suddenly stack all the wooden rings on our ring stacker. Eloise gives hugs both spontaneously and upon request. They both drink from Camelbak water bottles. They simply aren’t babies anymore — they are little people. Very distinct little people, at that. Before they were born, when I tried to imagine them, I kind of thought they’d basically be little versions of me or Matt, or a straightforward composite of the two of us. (Because, you know, clearly I am nothing more than the genetic average of my parents.) Well, obviously that’s not true — they are ever-more independent individuals who are wholly their own people. Frankly, it is amazing to me that they are “derived” from us at all! I will admit that when I muse on that, it’s one of the few ways in which I feel sad about not having more kids — who else could our genes produce? It’s so tempting to roll the dice again and see what utterly unique result we’d get next time.

But that’s just idle rumination — these two fun and funny kids are plenty, and we’re deliriously happy to be past the newborn stage. The day before their birthday, as we were getting ready for bed, Matt warned me that he would not appreciate it if I were to wake him up at 2 a.m. to mark the one-year anniversary of my water breaking. I joked that maybe I’d wake up and my water would actually be breaking, and I’d still be pregnant, and this whole past year would have just been a dream, and we’d be just about to start from scratch. We laughed for about a half a second before we comprehended the horror of such a scenario.

Instead, we can look back on the past year fondly, with the luxury of knowing that it’s solidly in the past. There’s something so very satisfying in ticking off the challenges and annoyances that have come and gone. Remember when we had to give Julian two bottles of prune juice a day? Remember when we had to set a timer so that we could hit the restart button on the white noise on the swing that inexplicably timed out after 10.5 minutes, invariably waking its sleeping occupant? Remember when we thought we’d never get them to sleep unswaddled, or in the cribs, or on any sort of predictable schedule? Remember when Eloise went through a (blessedly brief, thanks to Dr. Ferber) phase of needing to have her pacifier manually held in her mouth all night? Remember when we’d eat dinner with them in the Ergo carriers and spill food all over their heads? And let’s do what we can to avoid remembering the endless weeks when all Eloise did was cry (although to be honest, I remember them nearly every single day and feel so grateful for how happy and outgoing and pleasant she is now). Remember how sweet and sleepy and wee they were, and how frazzled and elated we were, the day they were born? Okay, I can barely remember that through the fog — thank goodness for all the pictures.

So that was the first year. It was incredibly hard. But — and I can’t tell you how great it is to be able to say this — it was worth it, because it rewarded us with these two amazing children. Julian and Eloise, we can’t wait to see what you have in store for us in Year Two. (Or in Month Thirteen, for that matter!)

One month:

One year!

Three Hundred and Sixty Five Days Later…

Whew! I did it. I took and posted one picture for (almost) every day of the twins’ first year. (I didn’t take every single picture—Rachel took probably about a third of the daily photos. And we’re missing Day Four, sadly: it was our second-to-last day in the hospital, and the night before had been pretty rough, and I only ended up taking a total of two blurry pictures that day.)

Two obvious questions came up time and again about the daily photo project. First, why would I do such a thing? Rachel and I always wanted to have two children, although we didn’t plan to be quite so efficient about it. Knowing that this was our only trip through baby-ville, I wanted to make sure it was well-documented. Having these pictures is going to be wonderful. I threw them together into a slideshow for their birthday party, and it was really great to watch all 728 of them go by.

The second question was, how long would I keep up the daily pictures? My stock answer was, “Until they stop me.” I was planning on taking a photo a day of each child indefinitely. One year in, I’m not so sure. The project has been great: I love having the pictures, and I think I’ve acquired a somewhat better photographic eye over the year, and it’s been frankly fun to have a daily reason to put something up on this blog. At the same time, taking, post-processing, and posting a photo a day is grueling. There were definitely times when it was a chore, rather than a fun project. The days when I said, “Oh, crap, I have to do the pictures,” definitely outnumbered the days when I said, “Ooh, let’s do the pictures!”

I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll continue. I plan to keep taking pictures this week, and if I’m enjoying it, I’ll post them. I think it’s most likely I’ll start posting pictures weekly, throwing up a post each weekend with a sampling of good photos from the week. Thank you so much to all of you who’ve followed along, and I hope you’ll enjoy whatever I manage to pull together in year two.

Month 12

Day 365

Day 364

Reminder

Hey, friends, family, and occasional visitors: just a reminder that you can help me out with a little project for the twins’ birthday, if you like.

Day 363

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Day 360

Happy Birthday to Our Other Favorite Twins

I post with some regularity on a small general-interest internet forum. One section is devoted to pregnancy and parenting, and, as on many sites, those boards are broken down by trimester/child age range. To give you a sense of the small size of the forum, in any three-month age range there are maybe 25-30 people posting. So, small. Nothing like thebump.com or babycenter.com or any of those other hugely trafficked sites.

So it was a rather unlikely coincidence that there would be another poster on the site who was due with twins on the exact same day that I was. Unlikely and incredibly fortuitous, because once Julia and I started emailing each other off the board, we discovered that not only did we have many other things in common (including that we both graduated from Brown, a year apart), we also just plain really liked each other (I’ve used the phrase kindred spirits before and I’m not afraid to do it again), well beyond the shared experience of twin pregnancy (and, later, twin parenthood). We certainly had a lot to say about that topic above all else, though, and found ourselves emailing and Google chatting with great frequency about heartburn, hugeness, our fears about preterm labor and life with twins, and every other topic we could cram into our lengthy exchanges.

Well, a year ago today Julia and her husband Jeff took the plunge into twin parenthood and gave birth to their beautiful Ben and Elly Bea. I remember so clearly sitting on the couch, enormous, reading her announcement email, and feeling a little left behind — my friend was in the thick of it, loving and caring for two babies, and I was 36 miserable weeks pregnant and giving Matt instructions about what to do if my stomach were to rip away from my body when I rolled over that night (he was to root through my internal organs and save the babies).

Of course, a week later Matt and I jumped off that cliff ourselves, and Julia proved to be even more of a lifeline for me as I attempted to survive those harrowing early months. We both devoted our scant free time to furiously cranking out long emails in which we gave and sought advice, expressed and accepted encouragement, and marveled about how hard and amazing the whole thing was. (Mostly the former for a while. Lately a lot more of the latter.) At one point Julia aptly described it as writing to a diary that writes back (but not in the creepy Tom Riddle way). Through those emails (and some phone calls and, eventually, whole-family Skyping), Matt and I got to know Ben and Elly pretty well: we always had a pretty good sense of how they were sleeping, what they were eating, and even their, erm, digestive habits. We know their personality quirks and their most endearing habits. We’re pretty attached to them.

Unfortunately, they live 3,000 miles away from us, in Portland, Oregon, so in spite of the fact that we know Ben and Elly probably better than any other kids in the world aside from our own, we have never met them in person. And so today we had to celebrate their birthday from afar, with Julian trying to eat the party hat and Eloise for some reason wearing her crankiest pants. But Julia and I have big plans, beginning this summer when we all meet when they come to this coast to visit her family and continuing with our biannual trips to visit them Portland, then taking the kids to Prince Edward Island after they read Anne of Green Gables, and ultimately renting a series of houses in marvelous locations around the world. The adults will sip the local beverage of choice and the kids will play quietly and delightfully (all best friends, of course).

But for now, we have to be content with wishing Ben and Elly happy birthday via blog post, and congratulating Julia and Jeff on surviving the first year. It looks as though Matt and I are going to, too, and it’s in no small part thanks to their fabulous support and sanity-saving humor. I am sure we will all manage to stay in touch even after everything becomes easy-peasy in Year Two.

Day 359

Good Things Happening

This Sunday, on a complete whim, we walked up the street with the babies and had brunch out at Oak. The twins were an absolute delight—Eloise ate a few bites of Rachel’s pancakes, and Julian ate rather more than his share of my home fries. I almost think eating out as a family might someday be a regular possibility.

That same night, the babies ate the chicken enchiladas I’d made for Rachel and me. Ever since I read Crouching Tiger, Hungry Monkey, I’ve somehow elevated enchiladas as the food that would, once the twins ate it, prove that we had gustatorially adventurous children. Well, mission freaking accomplished.

Audience Participation

Believe it or not, Julian and Eloise are turning one in a week.

Whoa.

Yeah, that’s kind of hard to believe.

When my family sold our old house in St. Louis, I dug up an envelope full of cards that my parents received when I was born and on my first birthday. I thought it was a neat memento. Rachel and I started talking about what we’d like for our kids to have in this newfangled Internet age. Someday, Julian and Eloise will be old enough to check the email addresses I set up for them when they were born. Wouldn’t it be neat if their inboxes were full of birthday greetings (in addition to the inevitable penis-enlargement spam)?

If you have the inclination, we’d love it if you’d write a quick email to Julian and/or to Eloise wishing them a happy first birthday, maybe telling them who you are and how you know us, and sharing any memories you have of their first year. In four or five years (or however long) the kids will get a real kick out of it. It’s like a time capsule, only way less effort.

Each baby’s email address is his or her first name @ sparveys.com.

Thanks so much!

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