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.

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!

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