Thirteen Months

After the fanfare of the 12-month mark, this subsequent monthly update is bound to feel rather lackluster and anti-climactic. But in fact, the month was not at all lackluster: it was busy and fun and challenging.

The excitement of the first birthday festivities was quickly followed by the excitement of Halloween. It didn’t start out well: the babies were none too thrilled to be woken up from naps, stuffed into hot, cheap, polyester fleece costumes, and carted into my office to be shown off at the annual “Goosebumps” party to which the children of all employees are invited. Let’s just say that when the head of HR distributed the photos of adorable be-costumed children frolicking merrily at the party, Julian and Eloise were notably absent.

Things improved on Halloween itself, however. Our good friends Ilissa and Dave came to visit with their darling three-month-old son, Ethan, and we dressed all the babies up and took them on a late-afternoon stroll around the neighborhood. We returned home to greet the torrents of trick-or-treaters, and a torrent it was – the street was packed with children and parents. It was a very warm night, so we brought the babies outside to witness the action, and Eloise seemed to be electrified by all the activity. She ran laps up and down the street for as long as we would let her, trying to climb the stairs on the neighbors’ front stoops, weaving in and out of the throng of trick-or-treaters.

Month thirteen was a challenge because both babies were sick nearly the entire time. While neither had H1N1, their illnesses seemed to add up to a sort of deconstructed swine flu: first they each had a cold with some respiratory symptoms, then they moved on to a nasty gastro-intestinal virus, and finally they rounded things out with a 48-hour flirtation with high fever. They took turns — always Julian first — and while I think it was probably easier that they never were both very sick at the same time, it certainly was a long few weeks. Matt and I managed to stay healthy, mercifully, but this glimpse of the non-stop illness that comes with having young kids in winter has left us a bit apprehensive about what’s ahead.

Developmentally, the babies seem to be gaining receptive language at a rapid clip. This feels like a momentous change: now, whatever I say to them, there’s at least some slight chance that they’re going to derive some glimmer of understanding from it! I know that doesn’t sound like much, but after a year in which their knowledge of English words was inferior to that of the cats, it’s a huge improvement.

What they aren’t doing much of is talking. Both babies can say “Dada” pretty reliably, but that’s it. Eloise says “hi,” her catch-all syllable for “this object is interesting to me,” nearly incessantly, and won’t say anything at all if you prompt her with something like, “Can you say ‘kitty’?” Julian, on the other hand, responds to that prompt with a pause and then a jubilant “Dada!” It’s kind of adorable. “Julian, can you say ‘kitty’?” Pause. “Dada!” “Julian, can you say ‘Mama’?” Pause. “Dada!” We aren’t worried about their lack of verbal giftedness, because they seem so engaged and communicative now even without words (and they continue to love books, racing over and sitting down attentively when they hear the word “read”), so we know that language will come with time.

One area that has seen some advancement at last is Eloise’s hair growth. She has progressed from complete baldie, to John Stamos on Full House (weird on top, long in back), to David Bowie in Labyrinth (really weird on top, really long in back). Okay, those are exaggerations, but that’s the impression that she gives me. Things seem to be picking up in that area, and it’s sort of nice to imagine how she’ll look in a few months with a regular head of hair. (Julian, on the other hand, is starting to look scruffy, and our first baby haircut is on the horizon, though Matt is in denial about this.)

There’s no question that the 13-month milestone feels different to me than the others. Each previous one felt momentous for one reason or another, especially since they seemed to be counting down to the one-year mark. And now the first birthday has come and gone, and the monthly milestones feel less like hurdles cleared, less like goals attained, and more like small signposts marking off the passage of everyday life. That said, the babies are still changing all the time, and the changes now are even more interesting to me than the changes in the first year (I remember that the changes from month one to month two were mostly things like a reduction in the amount of grunting they did in their sleep). So it’s nice to pause and regularly reflect on how fast and how far they come each month. (In a nutshell: Fast. And far.)

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!

Eleven Months

Eleven months! I’ve decided that observing the eleven-month mark is a bit like celebrating your 45th reunion. It’s a nice milestone and all, but everyone knows in the back of their minds that the 50th is right around the corner, so they’re kind of holding their enthusiasm in reserve until then.

Actually, that’s just kind of the lame excuse I’m giving for the disjointed brevity of this post. This month I totally failed to be disciplined about jotting down some notes about the events and activities that characterized it, which means I can’t actually remember anything that occurred prior to roughly the last two days of Month Eleven, and even those are getting mixed up in my head with the first couple days of Month Twelve.

I do recall that the biggie this month was that Eloise started walking. One day she started taking a few intentional steps between objects, and two days later she could walk across the room. It’s crazy! She walks with her hands way up in the air, and it’s so cute I hope she never stops. She might look funny walking up to get her diploma at graduation, but I don’t care.

Julian is not walking yet, but we can tell that seeing Eloise walk is giving him ideas. In fact, we’ve noticed that they’re both getting much better at observing what the other one is doing and then following suit. For example, Julian loves to stand at the wooden cradle in the living room and rock it back and forth with ever greater vigor and enthusiasm. When Eloise sees him do this, she invariably walks or crawls over and joins him in the same activity. (This is kind of a problem when the toy in question is not quite so large and shareable as the cradle — we have lots of toy-stealing issues these days, and so often they both seem to want to occupy the exact same point in space.) In the tub, if one splashes, the other splashes (incidentally, two splashing babies is not an insignificant amount of splashing). When one claps, the other claps. If I put an object on one baby’s head, the other baby immediately tries to put a nearby object onto his or her own head. To my dismay, Julian seems to be modifying his laugh to sound more like Eloise’s: now, instead of delighting us with his delicious belly laugh, he, too, sounds like a hyperventilating donkey.

That said, of course their distinct personalities continue to emerge. Eloise is sharp and intense and Julian is sweet and goofy. The other day while playing with them I had a couple of moments that I thought illustrated their differences. First, Eloise was playing her favorite new game: I would hold out my hand and say, “Can you give the ball to Mama?” She would almost put the ball in my hand but then whisk it away, looking mischievous and pleased with herself. My daughter the trickster. She can’t wave or point, but she can deceive.

A moment later, I was attempting to play catch with Julian, rolling a ball back and forth. After rolling it over to him, I held out my hands and said, “Can you throw the ball back to Mama?” And Julian, without hesitating, crawled all the way across the room to me, placed the ball gently in my hands, and sat back and looked at me with his big sweet eyes. (I then gave him a high five. Julian is great at high fives.)

One other new skill that the babies have developed is, erm, the ability to sit still and watch television for a few minutes. Yes, I admit it: we let the children watch roughly 20 minutes of TV per day (usually not all in a row), and it is the greatest. The luxury of knowing we will be able to make their breakfast or dinner without them standing at the gate to the kitchen and wailing is a wonderful new development. We TiVo Blue’s Clues and pop on an episode for a few minutes every now and then. Sometimes it backfires, because Matt and I are so mesmerized by the dorkiness of the host(s) that we will sit right next to the babies, slack-jawed, completely forgetting about whatever it was we’d planned to do while the babies were occupied by the TV. I know, the American Academy of Pediatrics says no “screen media” until age 2, but until the AAP is offering its members up for free babysitting, I am going to violate their strict standard a few minutes a day, and I’m not afraid to admit it. (I will disclaim that I hope never to get to the point where I’m allowing my kids to watch lots and lots of TV.)

Right at the end of the eleventh month we endured a family rite of passage: we all got sick within a few days of each other. Luckily it seemed to be only a mild cold, and we can’t really complain because we have been incredibly fortunate to have suffered relatively little sickness in the Sparvey household in the last year. We’re all very glad to be on the mend, if slightly apprehensive about the repeat performances that are likely in the coming months. As a side note, we did discover that blowing one’s nose in Julian’s presence makes him go into full, instant meltdown. A long, slow, intake of breath followed by a long, slow, wide-mouthed wail with giant tears rolling down his cheeks. It’s bizarre and, I will admit in bad-mother fashion, kind of hilarious.

So that’s a sliver of life at eleven months. Back in my eight-month post, I talked about my friend Melissa coming by with her 11.5-month-old daughter, and how I couldn’t believe how much more advanced Abi was than Julian and Eloise. Now here we are at that point (almost), and quite honestly it’s hard to remember a time when they weren’t pulling up and cruising and putting plastic bowls on their heads. I know they are changing fast, but when I try to think back on what they were like just three months ago — what made them so different then that I couldn’t believe how old Abi seemed in comparison — I can’t remember them doing less. Then, of course, I’ll watch a video from a few months back, and I’ll be stunned by how different they were. (I recently remarked with some alarm to Matt, when we watched a video from month 2 or so, “What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they doing anything?”) I know that three months from now I’ll feel the same way — I’ll look back on this time and I won’t be able to believe how far they’ve come since, without my even noticing it. And then three months after that. And then three months after that.

But that’s getting ahead of myself. Onward to the one-year mark, after which I have been assured that life will become easy and carefree. Whee!

Ten Months

I’ve had a hard time getting started on this monthly post, because I always feel as though these updates should have some broad themes rather than being a laundry list of what new things Julian and Eloise are doing. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to come up with any theme other than something along the lines of “More of the Same, But a Bit Better.”

I know that the babies are changing quickly — getting more mobile, more interactive, more vocal, etc. — but that has been the trajectory for months now. Lately it feels as though the most fun things are not the big developmental milestones, but the little transient skills and quirks that the babies surprise us with. For example, lately Eloise has been finding it hilarious when she sneezes. She’ll sneeze once or twice, then grin hugely and look around for us to confirm, “hey, that was hysterical, right?” Julian has been cracking us up for a while with his habit of wagging his hand back and forth over his mouth while making a sustained vocalization to hear the yodeling effect. (For a long time if we wagged his hand for him, he’d automatically make the noise, but now he’s totally self-sufficient.) I’m not sure whether most babies do this, because we’ve noticed that Eloise has just started doing the same thing. Finally, a favorite new development is the way they practically leap onto us when we pick them up, often screeching with delight, grabbing on with all limbs like little spider monkeys. I could never get tired of that.

One big milestone that I do think maybe we should be trumpeting here is that we think Eloise is saying her first words. I always thought that it would be clear when either baby went from meaningless babbling to saying an actual word — I’m not sure why, but I thought I’d just know. Turns out it’s not that obvious. But Eloise has been saying a very distinct “hi” for a couple of weeks now, and she will reliably do it when she sees a person, a cat, or a ceiling fan. (It’s the ceiling fan bit that throws me — is she really saying hi?) She also says “hi kee” or “hi kee-hee,” often indiscriminately, but almost always when she sees one of the cats. I don’t really dare wonder whether she’s saying “hi kitty”…well, okay, I do dare wonder. Matt thinks no, I think maybe, and Jen, our nanny, thinks yes. Finally, she has been saying “uh oh” whenever she throws or drops something — or when she’s about to. If I’m looking away from her when she’s in her high chair, and I hear her say “uh oh,” I can pretty much guarantee that when I turn around, she’ll be holding her sippy cup off the side of her tray, getting ready to drop it. It is incredibly cute and makes it very difficult to discourage that particular behavior.

As we learn more about their personalities each month, it is hard not to wonder when (and to what extent) we will see gender differences emerge. There are probably some stereotypical things you could point to that would suggest they’ve already started to appear — for example, Julian will watch passing trucks for much longer than Eloise will when we sit outside, and when they play with blocks, Eloise really seems to be trying to stack them, while Julian is Entropy Boy and only wants to knock everything over. On the other hand, there are ways in which the two of them diverge from standard boy/girl expectations. Eloise has a serious arm and will throw everything — rattles, wooden balls, blocks, books, and, once, the large Magic Mozart Cube. She’s pretty indiscriminate not only about what she throws, but what she’s throwing at. Poor Julian has been clocked in the head with a Fisher Price Roll-A-Round more than once. She’s great and playing “catch,” throwing a ball to one of us after we roll it to her, while Julian prefers to stuff the ball into his mouth. He is also generally more content to play quietly on his own, while Eloise wants to run around the house for as long as a poor, suffering adult can be persuaded to lend two fingers and keep up with her. Really it’s probably too early to see any real gender differences. (This in spite of the fact that often, when I describe the twins’ personalities, whoever I’m talking to will immediately attribute their personality characteristics to their sexes. “That’s a girl/boy for you!” I’m told. I am nearly positive that if I were to completely reverse my description of their personalities, I’d be told the exact same thing.) Still, it’s an interesting thing to be thinking about. I’m open to the possibility/reality of gender differences, though I do want to try to avoid creating them myself.

Some other highlights of this month include visits to some (relatively) unfamiliar places for the babies, including friends’ houses and Lake Winnipesaukee. In just about every case the babies did better than we expected. They continue to enjoy experiencing new sensations and had a great time up at the lake, showing real excitement every time we carried them down to the water’s edge to dip their toes in. One of the nicest developments this month is that Eloise has apparently decided that she does not wish death upon all humans outside her immediate family and has even become more outgoing and sociable than Julian, who is going through a bit of a shy phase.

As the babies start to show evidence of a transition to toddlerhood (Julian is a super-cruiser and Eloise seems determined to walk as soon as possible), we find ourselves encountering minor “Sunrise, Sunset” moments at every turn. Last week we said good-bye to the baby bucket seats and upgraded to fancy Britax convertible car seats. Bouncy seats are gone, safety gates are up. Boppy pillows and Bumbos are out, push toys are in. Matt organized the giant pile of baby crap in the basement, and it was odd to discover that there are more clothes and gear that they’ve outgrown than there is stuff we’re waiting for them to grow into. A year ago the possibility of such a scenario would never have occurred to me.

One thing that did occur to me, but which I often doubted I would survive to see, is that sometimes having twins is fun — and by that I mean even better than having a singleton. Later this week Matt is going to post a video of Julian pushing Eloise on their Little Tikes Push and Ride Racer, and upon viewing it you will all — male or female, young or old — run out and take potent fertility drugs so that you, too, can birth twins and replicate such astronomical levels of cuteness in your own homes. The Adirondack chair photos in this post and here are another example — one baby in one Adirondack chair would be unremarkable at best, lonely and sad at worst. Sure, Julian brazenly steals whatever toy Eloise is playing with, no matter how many appealing alternatives he has in front of him, and if she’s in his path when he’s cruising around the furniture, he has no problem attempting to cruise right through her, totally oblivious to her very loud protests. (In fact, she has developed a distinct noise — it sounds like an angry Donald Duck — that she uses exclusively when Julian is bothering her. Our first sibling squabbles!) I know that will only become more challenging in the coming months, but as long as we get those uber-cute twin moments to balance them out, I think it’ll be worth it.

So that’s ten months! We made it to double digits. The fact that I can’t believe it shouldn’t suggest that it went fast — in fact, it seems impossible it was only a year ago that I was writing the thank-you notes from our baby shower. But as I said to my dear twin-mom friend Julia the other day (a kindred spirit whose twins are a week older than Julian and Eloise — truly she is the lifeline that the universe threw me after misjudging that what I wanted more than anything in the world was twins), I’m sure that when we’re celebrating their 10th birthdays we’ll think all of this went by in the blink of an eye. Probably because we’ll be mostly senile by then.

Nine Months

Nine months old! For most people, nine months of age roughly represents the point at which their babies have been on the outside for as long as they were on the inside — their “Inside-Out Day,” as it was observed around here. Of course, I delivered my babies a bit early, so Julian’s and Eloise’s Inside-Out Day was July 4 — 36 weeks and 6 days after they were born. Needless to say, they’ve changed so much in the last nine months! (Though to be perfectly honest, they probably changed more during their in utero months, but I wasn’t able to observe that as closely.)

This month the babies’ engagement with the world has kicked up a notch. Their play is more complex: rather than simply shaking a rattle and passing it back and forth between their hands, they’re banging the rattle against other things, trying to pick up something else with the same hand currently holding the rattle, intentionally dropping the rattle and picking it back up, putting the rattle in an empty bucket and taking it back out, inspecting the details of the rattle with the newly isolated index finger, and handing the rattle to Mama when asked. This is not to say that there isn’t still plenty of sampling the exotic and delicate flavor of the rattle, but you can definitely see that their play has become more deliberately exploratory.

(Of course, their favorite toys are so often non-toys – something that I’m sure is familiar to many parents. The translucent tops to the Born Free bottles have long been a favorite item, along with tissue boxes, an unopened bag of tortilla chips, the mail, a Dunkin Donuts cup, a ginger ale bottle, one or more wooden spoons, a plastic tub that once held 340 pieces of Double Bubble gum, breast pump parts, an empty wipes container, and – most prized of all – Matt’s nametag from a recent Brown event, complete with lanyard.)

In addition to their increasingly skilled manipulation of objects, their sphere of attention and interest seems to have expanded. In the past, they’d play with toys we put in front of them, and they’d pay attention to big stimuli like a car driving past the house when we’re sitting on the front lawn, but they didn’t really seem capable of perceiving and observing ambient activity. Now, though, I notice that they are fascinated by people doing things around them — people throwing a frisbee at the park or kids playing on the swings, for example. Julian in particular seems to love watching toddlers and preschoolers run around, flapping his arms in delight when someone comes near us or looks at him. They just seem better able to make some sense of what they’re seeing. It makes life so much easier when we take them places — the environment entertains them so we don’t have to! (And that’s part of why it was particularly brutal to suffer through the least sunny June on record. A friend quipped that if Nature were really a Mother she would have recognized that children just can’t stay inside for that many miserable days on end.)

Of course, along with this increased attention to their surroundings comes an increased desire to get around. Neither baby is quite crawling yet, although both keep teasing us with promising lunges and determined grunts. Eloise can often stagger forward on all fours a bit, but Julian usually pitches forward onto his head and rolls onto his back before he can make any progress toward his goal. I think he may be able to do a somersault before he can crawl. (Fortunately he is a good-natured little fellow and, after a few squawks of frustration, will subsequently content himself with whatever is within reach.) Both prefer standing and cruising to anything else, and they will drum on the ottoman and make circuits of the family room furniture with great enthusiasm for long periods. This has created a bit of a traffic management problem, as they will often cruise right into each other’s personal space and knock each other over without a backward glance.

On the verbal development side, Julian went through an adorable phase of saying “blah blah blah” recently, and he often busts out with all kinds of fun consonants when he has cheerios in his mouth (I think they make him more aware of his tongue). Eloise went through a short phase where she would alternate “heh”s with me – she’d make one, I’d make one back, and then she’d look at me very intently while we took turns sounding like we were practicing our courtesy laughs. Also, sometimes the two of them will talk to each other, as long as you don’t mind defining “talking” as “alternating ear-splitting screams of delight.” In general, neither baby seems ready to wow us with a first word. Unless you count blah as a word.

It really does feel, however, as though we’ve entered the stage where they seem to do something new every day. You can practically see the little wheels turning in their heads as they start to realize that they have some control over their own environment and that, with a little determination, they can often make cool things happen. (Cool things like rolling themselves under the crib or pulling the old rainforest bouncy seat down on themselves, for example.) Of course, this also means that they are so excited about life that they often want to stay up much later than their usual bedtime, and a few times they’ve woken up in the middle of the night and played happily for hours while their parents cry with exhaustion. These days they really seem to love the world they live in, and they don’t want to waste any time sleeping that could be spent clapping or drumming or creating din at the Leapfrog musical activity table.

Month nine also brought some travel, most notably to Lake Winnipesaukee for a family reunion, where they got to meet their 47 closest Spaulding relatives, including their cousin Kasey, just 6 weeks older than they are. Between all the commotion, the disrupted sleep (all four of us shared a room), and a bug they both picked up somewhere (the sickness kind, not a literal bug that they picked up, though I could pretty easily imagine that happening too), I think they were a little overwhelmed by the whole experience. We’re heading back up in August, when there will be far fewer people, and I am hoping that they manage a bit better on that occasion. When I was pregnant I always used to imagine bringing them up to the lake, so even with all the fussing and hassle and disruption of routine, it’s pretty great to be taking them to a place I love so much.

So the trend toward easier and more fun continues, no question. We do still have challenges, though. The babies are pretty willful and aren’t slow to resort to screaming when something horrible is happening to them, such as being seated in high chairs without any Cheerios on the trays. It has forced us to think a little bit about our discipline philosophy, early though it may seem. We’re not wild about the idea of giving the babies whatever it is they want in response to their screaming, but on the other hand, we don’t want to be hardasses and not respond to their screams when maybe it isn’t the end of the world if all they ever eat is Cheerios instead of Matt’s delectable lemon pea risotto. Most of the discipline books out there seem to be meant for toddlers and up, so right now we’re kind of just inconsistently winging it and probably permanently scarring the children.

I was remarking to Matt last night that this post seems to be just a laundry list of what Julian and Eloise are up to these days, and it’s lacking the introspection that characterized some of my earlier monthly posts. I think that’s because I’m simply less tormented by the babies and my transition to motherhood than I was for a long time, and I’m really having fun with them right now, so a reflection on my internal state reveals far less turbulence than it once did. And while I hope we can agree that this is a good thing, it does kind of leave me solidly in the realm of the plain old “hey, look how cute my kids are” mommyblogger. Well, so be it. Look how cute my kids are!

Eight Months

My babies are two-thirds of a year old! This is the first time I’ve measured their age in years, and while I admit it’s a little contrived to do so, it reflects the fact that I am slowly starting to think about time in larger segments. For the first eight weeks or so of the twins’ lives, I counted every single day — and each one felt endless. Then the weeks starting coming at a good clip, and sometime around 20 weeks I realized that I’d actually missed a Sunday of marking their age in weeks in my head. Once I returned to work, the months started to zip by. It’ll be a good while before I really shift from thinking about their age in months to thinking about their age in years, but suddenly the one-year mark doesn’t seem like a theoretical fairytale era that the world will only reach long after I am dead.

Maybe time is moving more quickly because the babies are moving quickly in their development. It’s amazing to me how well they rise to the challenge of just about every opportunity we give them to try something new. Want to stand up against this play table? Yes, all the time please! Can you sit here and listen attentively while we read you books? I can, and I’m adorable while I do it! Would you like to try to feed yourself Cheerios? More than anything in the world! Want to try drinking water from a cup? DEAR LORD YES THIS IS THE GREATEST THING I’VE EVER EXPERIENCED!

Eating solid foods is becoming a bigger part of every day, now that meals often include elements that cross over into play: drinking from sippy cups, sucking on fruit in mesh feeder bags, and eating finger foods. About a month ago we significantly relaxed our rules about waiting 2-3 days between the introduction of each new food, and now we just give them all kinds of elaborate combinations and tastes of what we’re eating. Sometimes we just take our own dinner and put it through a food mill and feed them that (orzo salad with feta, spinach, and tomato was a big hit). As for non solid foods, Julian is showing some skill at feeding himself a bottle, which is very cool and promises to be advantageous when he finally masters it. Less wonderful is that Eloise completely and suddenly self-weaned about 10 days ago. She acted like she’d never nursed in her life and wondered what the heck I was suggesting that she do with that thing, exactly? This has been very difficult and intensely emotional for me, for lots of reasons. I thought about writing a post about it, but in the end, I don’t think everything was meant to go on the blog. Suffice it to say, I’m still dealing with it (it happened so fast and I wasn’t ready to be done with nursing), and now we’re washing more bottles than ever.

On a happier note, the twins just get cuter and funnier all the time. Julian is going through a phase of really loving to play with giant “toys” — I can stand him at the tower fan and he’s content for a good five minutes — longer if I turn the fan on and off a few times (don’t worry, I have the oscillation turned off). He loves the big yoga ball we used to bounce them on for a good 37 hours of each day. An empty laundry basket is another good one. Perhaps he feels comfortable around very large objects because of all the time he spends with his own cheeks.

Both kids continue to be obsessively into standing up, and if they’re lying on their backs or sitting, and you hold your two hands out to them and say “Give Mama/Daddy your hands,” they’ll put their two little hands in yours and pull themselves right up. (Actually, I think we could probably hold out our hands and say “Republicans are slimy and they’re trying to sabotage meaningful health care reform” and they’d do the same thing — I don’t think their verbal comprehension skills are really what’s at play here.) They aren’t clapping, waving, or giving high-fives yet, though that’s next on my list of things to teach them. Julian is pretty motivated to pull himself up on stationary objects, and Eloise will stagger in an approximate walking motion if you stand over her holding your hands in hers — it continues to seem likely that she will walk early. Neither one seems particularly close to crawling, and it’s entirely possible they’ll skip it altogether. It’s hard to learn to crawl when all you ever do is stand (or shriek to be put into a standing position).

Lots of people will say that having twins is interesting because you see so very clearly how different children are right from the start. And anyone who has spent any significant amount of time with our kids knows this is true. However, I’ve noticed that sometimes I tend to associate a certain characteristic or interest or skill with one baby, and not recognize the possibility that the other baby might actually have the same one. For example, for a long time we marveled over Eloise’s interest in standing up, so we were constantly propping her up on a stool or a small table or something. When it finally occurred to me to see whether Julian might be able to do the same thing, not only did he catch on very quickly, but now he is even more aggressive than Eloise in his attempts to pull up on anything within reach. So I’m trying to be cautious about making assumptions about either baby in relation to the other. This will get easier to avoid, as Julian and Eloise are starting to show an ability to perceive what the other is doing and insist on doing it as well. This often manifests itself as jealousy when the other baby is being held, but it also applies to bottles, toys, and, of course, standing. (God forbid that one should get to stand up in the crib while the other poor, tortured, unloved, deprived baby gets its diaper changed.) As difficult as that can sometimes be, when both babies are gracelessly lunging at me at the same time in an effort to pull my hair and pinch my face to demonstrate that they missed me while I was at work, I actually think it’s pretty cool that in eight months, they’ve gone from a near total lack of perception of their surroundings to possessing the ability to identify that their sibling is doing something and by god they want to do it to. (The grammar in that sentence was quite flawed, but I’m not quite up for fixing it.)

I think we’re all starting to enjoy each other as a family more and more. Matt and I always loved the babies, without question, but recently I think that feeling has really deepened for both of us, from a sort of instinctive, protective love into a much more complex love that comes when you all start to, you know, like each other. The words “smitten” and “besotted” have often been crossing my mind when I think about how I feel about these two little delicious, soft, funny, snuggly, smart, amazing, wiggly, constantly changing little people. It is a truly fantastic feeling.

This month we’re looking forward to our first overnight trip since St. Louis in January — we’re taking the babies to Lake Winnipesaukee! Even before I had kids, and certainly when I was pregnant, one of my favorite things to imagine was taking my children to a place that I love so much and that looms so large in my own childhood memories. I’m hoping the trip goes better than we expect — we are a wee bit concerned about napping and nighttime sleep — because I’d love to feel a little more flexible about taking the babies places in the future. (Julia, I’ve got my eye on you and Portland! Rachel and Liz, get ready to show the babies the Big Apple!)

Speaking of looking ahead, this week my friend Melissa was in town and stopped by with her adorable 11.5-month-old daughter, Abi. Watching Abi next to Julian and Eloise was like watching two different species. Abi was crawling everywhere, pulling up, maneuvering objects with lots of dexterity, babbling like crazy, and just generally being a toddler next to our babies. It is impossible to imagine that that’s what’s in store for us in just a few short months. Impossible and awesome.

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:

Six Months

Four days old and six months old. Needless to say, the cradle doesn’t get a lot of use anymore by our big hulking babies!

Well holy cabooses, it’s been six months. It feels like just yesterday that it the babies were…oh, about 5.9 months old. (It feels like roughly 10 years since they were born. No indeed, time has not exactly flown by.)

This has been a big month, and a good month overall — our best yet, I’d say. There have been visits by all the aunts and all the grandparents, plus the babies’ first Passover seder. (Julian was a model child, and Eloise…umm, let’s assume she was just trying to do her youngest-child duty and sing the Four Questions, loudly and incessantly, for the entire meal.) Many of the other major milestones have already been documented here: we night- and swaddle-weaned Eloise; I went back to work; we started them on solid foods. Things continue to go well on all three of those fronts, though we are a little disappointed that Julian and Eloise do not seem to have very adventurous palettes yet: rice cereal and applesauce yes, sweet potatoes and carrots a resounding no. (I, however, have discovered that fresh, pureed, unadorned vegetables are quite delicious!)

This month has had more than its fair share of miserably rainy days, which are brutal because they rule out the sanity-saving afternoon stroller excursions that we rely on so heavily. But there have also been some gorgeous spring days, and it has been wonderful to see the babies discover that outdoors does not necessarily equal freezing temperatures and bitter winds. Being outside really seems to interest them and calm them, so in addition to walks in the stroller, we’ve been taking them to the playground, letting them lie on the grass, and setting their Bumbo seats in the sun. Quite frankly it’s been pretty refreshing for us, too, after a long winter of looking at the same few rooms in our house for most of every day. We bought some cute sun hats and some baby sunblock in anticipation of lots of outdoor time as the weather keeps improving.

It’s a lot of the little things that are making the babies so fun and funny these days. Julian has an amusing habit of clasping his hands together up above his body and thumping them down on his chest repeatedly, as though he’s having a little trouble with the ol’ ticker. He also still grins like a goon when you sing any song and replace all the lyrics with “Julian.” Eloise will kick her legs up and jump if you hold her by her armpits and bounce her up and down — it’s so cute. She continues to have independent control of her eyebrows and can easily raise one or the other, allowing her to express her skepticism about all our efforts to impress or entertain her. On the other hand, she hands out face-splitting smiles like they’re going out of style. Even better, she has expanded the circle of people reliably permitted to hold her from two to four (my mom and Abigail have finally survived her hazing rituals and earned her trust).

Speaking of smiling, one thing we’ve noticed recently is that the twins have started smiling when they’re enjoying themselves, as opposed to strictly in response to someone smiling at them. Before it was purely social and seemed largely reflexive (see a smile, make a smile), but now some of their smiles seem to indicate that they are entertained by their activities or our antics. (The big smiles in the official six-month photo are in response to my kicking around the living room chanting “Mama does the can-can! Mama does the can-can!” No sacrifice of dignity is too large for my children.)

Each month brings more and more interest in toys (and, hence, more and more toys into our home). Blocks, rattles, and stuffed animals are great, but so is a giant unopened bag of tortilla chips. They are loving the jumperoo and often enjoying the exersaucer. The cats would probably be the number one plaything if they were stupid enough to get anywhere near the babies; as it is, both kids practically hyperventilate with excitement if a cat looks their way.

The big developmental milestone that seems to have sped in out of nowhere is their ability to sit unsupported. Two weeks ago they could probably balance for 5 seconds before toppling over; these days I bring them downstairs in the morning, sit them on the floor, arrange some toys in front of them, and go back to bed. Okay, I don’t go back to bed, but I do go into the kitchen and make breakfast and do other morning tasks. I can’t believe how quickly this happened. I had been looking forward to it for a long time, suspecting that it might make both babies (particularly Eloise) happier and our lives a bit easier, and so far I seem to have been right on both counts.

There are still times when it’s really hard, of course. Matt is on his own with them a lot more often now, and when I check Trixie Tracker during the day and see that they each have napped for a total of 23 non-simultaneous minutes, I just cringe for him. But the trend definitely continues to be toward easier, and I can honestly say that I am finally enjoying being a parent much of the time. I am not sure that I would repeat the first four months for any amount of money, but it’s a great feeling to have the fog lifting, those brutal days behind us, and all the best stuff ahead. Time is speeding back up, and I know that they’ll be a year old before I know it. To quote from the Joni Mitchell song my parents used to sing me to sleep as a kid: “Take your time, it won’t be long now/’Til you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”

Five Months

Oh hallelujah! It’s time for a monthly post and I am not currently contemplating leaving the babies on a neighbor’s doorstep with a note promising daily deliveries of pumped breast milk.

Indeed, things are much improved since my last monthly post. Experienced parents will not be surprised to know that my satisfaction with my children is directly tied to how much time they spend asleep. I love parenthood when I’m not actually doing any parenting. While they’re still not sleeping on quite the schedule we’d like (this despite the very clear agenda we lay out for them every morning), they are generally taking a longish morning nap and several spotty afternoon naps. So while it used to be “I hope the baby falls asleep soon” when we were at our wits’ end, now it’s “Let’s try to put the baby down for a nap.” And sometimes it works! We dream of a day when they each take a long morning nap and a long afternoon nap. We are not so bold as to dream that they might take them at the same time. We are also trying not to think about the fact that one day we’re going to have to teach them to sleep unswaddled — something they are incapable of doing at the moment.

In a more wakeful vein, this month featured an explosion of interest in toys. We received a few toys at our baby showers and shortly after the twins were born, and I remember reacting (internally) along the lines of, “We’re never going to have any use for these.” I mean, the babies’ most advanced skill at that point was occasionally uncrossing their eyes. It seemed like we’d never make it to a time when they might want to play. But here we are, and each new colorful object we parade before them triggers a frenzy of enthusiastic grabbing, followed by a frenzy of saturating said colorful object with drool.

This engagement with toys (and books, too — they even try pretty consistently to turn the pages themselves, which is so cute) means that the babies can usually be happily occupied for significant parts of the day. It is tremendously gratifying to see your children happy. For the first three months, the best possible option seemed to be “not unhappy” (a state that was all too rare for Eloise), but recently they’ve developed the capacity to have fun. Julian loves to hear us say or sing his name, and he gets a big, slow, dopey smile on his face when we do. And Eloise, our colicky baby who drove me to Zoloft and Matt to very bad words, now smiles hugely, repeatedly, and gleefully at everyone who smiles at her. Like most parents, we never tire of our babies’ smiles, but the memory of weeks and weeks of colic make them that much sweeter.

One highlight of the month, in my opinion, was taking the babies to the current session of the Marvelous Multiples class at the hospital that we took when I was pregnant — we were the featured current parents. It was so great — we felt like twin parenting experts! I think it’s easy to be so focused on the challenges of the moment that you don’t realize how far you’ve come. It was really great to be able to offer advice and remember all the things that we’d figured out and survived. It forces me to grudgingly acknowledge that we will probably also survive the issues that are currently kicking our asses. (There was one person in the class expecting triplets. I could barely bring myself to make eye contact with her. Triplets, holy crap.)

The next month is going to bring some big changes. Most notably, I’m going back to work on April 1. It is going to be such a drastic change that I can’t even really imagine it. I think it will be great for me in some ways, but in other ways I’m going to miss Matt and the babies so much. (Matt, as a part-time graduate student, will be the primary caregiver through December, with a little help from my mom and Abigail, our wonderful Brown student babysitter.) I’m dealing with the transition by not thinking about it at all right now, so more on this subject next month.

Another big milestone that’s fast approaching is the babies’ introduction to solid foods. While it some ways it will complicate our already complicated lives even more, I expect it will be fun to see them try new flavors and textures. We actually had something of a preview of this recently, because after Julian’s digestive system developed a bit of a problem with its back-end functionality, he was prescribed two bottles of prune juice a day. While at first I think he was completely stunned to taste something so wildly different from what usually comes out of his bottle, he quickly warmed up to it and now gulps it down enthusiastically each and every time. (Incidentally, putting the dark prune juice in the bottles where there’s only ever been pure white liquid makes it look to me like we’re feeding him some sort of toxic sludge.) So we’ve started talking about what new foods we want to introduce to them and when. Matt has big plans for homemade baby food, and I am looking forward to slowly ramping down my role as chief baby-food producer.

Speaking of which, this past week I returned my hospital-grade breast pump, which I rented the day we came home from the hospital. I had major separation anxiety, since it has been such a huge part of my life, and I wasn’t sure I could trust my plain old consumer-grade Pump in Style to do the trick, but so far it’s working fine and I guess I’m happy to save the $50 a month.

Many twin parents have told me that you really just have to grit your teeth and plow through the first year in survival mode. I truly can’t believe we’re fast approaching the halfway point of that marathon. And honestly, while it’s still incredibly challenging, I’m not having to grit my teeth quite so hard these days. Again I say: hallelujah!

Four Months

Oh boy. The babies are demonstrating an unfortunate habit of being brutally difficult on their monthly birthdays. Either that or I have a habit of being particularly emotionally vulnerable on those days. Perhaps I build up so much expectation around those milestones that when they don’t wake up on those days making me breakfast in bed, I’m bitterly disappointed and handle the whole day poorly.

Anyway, yesterday was a rough day. It happened to be my birthday, and I would say it was marginally worse than last year’s birthday, which was spent at a funeral in New Jersey followed by an early dinner at an Applebee’s off I-95 in Connecticut. This year was about as much fun as the funeral, but there were no cheeseburger sliders afterward.

I thought about waiting a few days until I was in a slightly more peppy place before writing the four-month post, but I’ve done that every month, and this time I just want to get it out there and not have it hanging over me (the post). Besides, while I know that our visitors come here for the cute pictures and the happy stuff, I figure you can all handle a little bit of the reality that more often than not, those little cherubs are kicking my ass. I know that I’m dealing with some mild postpartum depression, and I am doing everything I can to keep my lowest moments at bay; in my heart, though, I know that the only thing that’s really going to help is time. So now I’ll just start focusing on the slow march to the five-month mark, when things are sure to get better, right?

Eesh, now that I’ve started with a total downer, the positive stuff I’m about to put up here is going to sound disingenuous. And it really shouldn’t, because the good stuff really is good. But I was chatting with another twin mom recently about how hard it can be as a parent to go to other people’s blogs and see all this sunshine and adorability and to feel as though you must be the only person who sometimes (or regularly) feels less than rosy about the whole experience. So just read the above as an attempt at making this blog fair and balanced. Consider it the token Democrat on Fox News. Now on to the happy! (Hmm, this analogy makes it sound as though I’m equating “happy” and “Republican.” Purely an accident.)

The first half of this month was actually really good. The babies became far more interactive and really interested in the world. They also seemed to fall into a bit of a routine during the day, eating at 3-hour intervals and napping somewhat regularly. It was a huge relief to have some structure and predictability in our days. Unfortunately, the second half of the month saw all that go right out the window, and it now seems that the babies are so fascinated by the world that they have very little interest in sleeping, lest they miss anything good. Eloise has been refusing to nap, ever, and while Julian is still a fairly good sleeper, oftentimes I hear him at night through the baby monitor grunting for an hour straight, and when I go in he’s repeatedly kicking his legs up and to the side in his swaddling blanket, mimicking the motions he made when he rolled over (!) from back to front last week (a feat he repeated three times that night but not since). These grunts wake Eloise, of course, and the less said about that the better. Their lack of sleep not only means we get less sleep at night and fewer breaks during the day, but it also makes them exhausted crankypants. Which makes us exhausted crankypants.

Still, their interest in the world is welcome and lots of fun. There are now lots of big “hey, I know you!” smiles when we come into their field of view, which can go a long way toward mitigating the challenges of the day. They are starting to reach and grab, which means they often have fistfuls of my hair, delightfully. Julian lies on the playmat and flings both his arms out at once, trying to hit as many hanging toys at a time as possible, and Eloise is adoring the tags on her Taggie blanket. They are also vocalizing a lot more. Julian does lots of classic coos alternated with a noise that sounds just like radio static, so when he’s “talking” to us it sounds like we’re getting bad reception on the baby talk station. Eloise, who has always been less chatty than Julian, now makes a lot more noise, but she pretty much only says “Aah, ahh” (the A sound in “cat,” as opposed to “car”). It’s pretty cute.

My favorite development this month by far was that they started noticing each other. It happened quickly. For a while one or the other would occasionally gaze with studied interest at his or her twin, but they did that with the cats, too, so it wasn’t particularly meaningful. But then all of a sudden both of them at the same time seemed to realize that the other existed. Matt and I were sitting next to each other on the couch about two weeks ago, each holding one, and before we knew it they had locked eyes and were smiling and cooing at each other. This lasted several minutes, and since then we have been able to reproduce this just by pointing them at each other. (And we do that a lot, it’s so cute.) Sometimes they’ll even catch eyes and start smiling at each other without prompting from us, which is a treat. This gives me hope that very soon they’ll be great playmates and let me return to my life of heavy drinking and trashy magazines. In seriousness, I’m looking forward to being able to sit them both in Bumbo seats, facing toward each other, and letting them entertain each other for, oh, minutes on end.

I’ll end with a quick nod to another recent anniversary: they day before their four-month birthday (February 18) was their “conceptoversary” — one year after they were conceived. (We know this for sure because we conceived with the help of fertility science, so those of you who would prefer to believe that Matt’s and my love is a chaste love may go on doing so.) It is odd to think about this period last year. I wanted so badly to be pregnant, and I was but didn’t know it yet. I look at pictures from my last birthday and can’t believe that I was already hosting the two little balls of cells that would become Julian and Eloise. I could probably say something insightful and profound about that if I weren’t so sleep deprived. I’ll just stick with the uninsightful and obvious: What a year it has been.

Three Months

I had big plans to write my three month post on the actual day they hit the three month mark — what an impressive accomplishment that would have been! But then they were grumpy little trolls all day and I thought maybe I’d regret it if the post just said “Two babies for sale, cheap. Make an offer. Will be sold separately or as a set.”

Celebrating the twins’ three-month birthday after they’d finally gone to bed. That’s not water in Matt’s glass.

I think that was the right call, because really, month three was a considerable improvement on month two. While it was still exhausting, frustrating, and oftentimes boring as all get-out, there was less crying and more smiling by all members of the family than there was a month earlier. There was also a lot more sleeping by every member of the household, thanks to Julian’s regular 10-12 hour stints (yes, that’s with no wake ups) and Eloise’s own occasional flirtations with sleeping through the night.

During their awake time, it became markedly easier (though far from foolproof) to make and keep the babies happy, most reliably by taking their clothes off and letting them roll around naked in the crib or on the floor (a huge hit with both of them). Actually, I wonder whether there’s anything iffy about so often dealing with a fussy baby by stripping off its clothes. Are they going to learn that nudity is an appropriate way to cope with any unpleasantness? Will they be disrobing during math tests in school? After their Little League team loses? When someone turns them down for a date? Eesh. I’ll worry about that later. Right now, Naked Time buys us a few minutes to take showers or eat lunch, so it is a good thing.

They also can now be entertained by certain interactions with us, such as our squeezing their cheeks while sing-songing “cheeks!” or making very mature fart noises at them. When they’re in good moods, we can generally count on being rewarded with a smile. This early play is actually pretty fun and, I like to think, a great preview of things to come.

Month three featured some big firsts, including a first Chanukah, a first Christmas, a first (and second) trip to visit grandparents, a first (and second) overnight away from home (except for the hospital), and a first plane ride. In general, both twins exceeded our expectations for how they’d handle these experiences (granted, our expectations were rather ludicrously low), suggesting that they are starting to take interest in new places and faces (as long as no one except one of their parents dares to hold them). In fact, we are starting to see dramatic increases in their abilities to engage with us and the world.

Since I am actually writing this well into month four, I can report that this theme of interactivity will loom large in the next monthly recap. I’m going to try to write next month’s post on time, though, because the babies are getting better so quickly that it’s hard to write with enthusiasm about a previous phase when you know how much more fun they’ve become since.

Two Months

It is tempting, when considering the content of a post about our second month as parents, to write “Ellie cried” and leave it at that. Because honestly, that was by far the most prominent aspect of month two.

I know that other things happened in there, though. For example, we moved the twins out of their co-sleeper in our room and into their crib in their room. This seems like a big transition to me, but for whatever reason, unlike practically every other parenting move we’ve made, we barely discussed it — we just did it. It was time, though: their combined weight was creating a depression in the co-sleeper mattress, and it didn’t take long each night for them to roll into each other and wiggle around like two little jumping beans. Which, while adorable (”They’re snuggling!” Matt says), is not conducive to long stretches of sleep. They sleep better in their cribs, and we sleep better with them there.

In fact, as difficult as the second month was (I’d venture that it was even harder than the first month), I do realize that some things have actually gotten easier. Part of it is just that we’ve figured some stuff out: bouncy seats are magical, Ellie and the pump should each have a designated boob each day so they don’t have to compete for resources, muffins and other one-handed foods make eating breakfast more likely, and a tiny bit of formula supplementation keeps Mama sane. The other part is that there are a (precious) few ways in which the babies themselves have gotten easier. Julian, for example, sleeps long stretches almost every night (anywhere from 5 to 8.5 hours). They poop less often, and usually not at all at night, so we do fewer diaper changes and none at night, which helps them go back to sleep more quickly after wakeups. And toward the end of the month, every so often, they started rewarding us with quick little (real) smiles and even the occasional big gummy grin. That makes everything feel worth it for about 30 seconds until the screaming starts back up.

Seeing their likes and dislikes emerge has also been fun. Eloise loves to have the hair dryer blown on her during diaper changes. (In fact, everything about the hair dryer makes her content. That, in combination with the fact that sticking her in a Tiffany’s box made her the happiest she’d been in days, makes me a little concerned that we have a real girly-girl on our hands.) She also loves looking at the pictures that we taped to the underside of the shelf above the changing table. She gives those things much more consistent smiles than she gives her parents. Basically if she could spend all day on the changing table, there would be no colic.

Julian likes…well, Julian seems to like just about everything just fine as long as he isn’t separated from his pacifier. Basically he’s as easygoing as Eloise is not. He particularly seems to like sleeping on our shoulders and cooing at the multi-colored giraffe on his activity mat. Oh, and eating. He doubled his birthweight in 2 months and went from less than one chin to three chins in the same amount of time.

So while there’s no question that our babies are still grubs, they are becoming grubs with more distinct personalities. Here’s hoping for tons more of that in Month Three.

One Month

Wow is there not a lot of time to write anything for the blog! Quite frankly, there isn’t a lot of time to take pictures and post them to the blog, either, but Matt has been unbelievably disciplined about doing so. So I figure I can manage to throw a few words up here between feedings and pumpings and feedings and laundry and feedings. First-draft quality, sure, but words nonetheless.

The other day I commented to Matt about how during pregnancy I often heard from parents that once we had kids, we wouldn’t even remember what our life was like without them. Before I could make my follow up comment, Matt made it for me with a longing look in his eyes: “Believe me, I remember that life.” We agreed that just because we clearly remembered our life before kids doesn’t mean that we want to return to it, but it might be nice to take a vacation there. Say, for eight hours. Per day.

Here at one month out we’re still really in the thick of things in terms of constant feedings, innumerable diapers, and unspeakable sleep deprivation. And I’m not going to sugar coat things and pretend that that doesn’t suck a lot of the time. It’s kind of like the worst of finals period in college, but every day you wake up and it’s the beginning of finals period again, and although the material on the exams is exactly the same, the answers are quite possibly completely different.

That said, these are great babies. Their cuteness has been well documented here, but they also boast sweet (if endlessly hungry) temperaments and winning personalities. While it is still a bit early for them to be smiling socially, they are both pretty smiley and happy-looking babies, which is a welcome reward for our oftentimes wearying efforts. (And we also think they’re starting to show inklings of socials smiles, which will be great.) It has been amazing watching them grow over the last month, and it has happened faster than we ever could have anticipated. Julian in particular has really blossomed — if one is allowed to use that term for anyone other than a teenage girl; I’m not sure — and as exhausting as it is to provide round-the-clock sustenance for these ravenous little critters, it is quite rewarding to see them plumping up and becoming more and more alert and lively.

Today is actually the day after their one-month birthday. Yesterday happened to be a pretty rough day for me. Some days just are. I feel a lot better today, partly because the lowest moments just don’t last indefinitely (hear that, parents-to-be?), and partly because I received some great encouragement and support from friends and family when I really needed it. It’s hard in some ways to hear that things are will get a lot easier at six months, or a year, or two years, or four years, because that feels like it will never, ever be us. But of course it will, and we’re in this parenthood thing for the long haul, so it’s helpful to remember that oh yes, one day we will indeed have kids, not just babies. I remember when it felt like I would never get pregnant, and now here I am a mother; right now I feel that things will never get easier with the babies, but time has a way of marching forward whether you’re enjoying it or not, so I know that one day I’ll turn around and find I have older children, probably sooner than I realize.

And of course, there’s a big part of me that doesn’t want to rush through this phase, since there are many wonderful things about it, and I’ll never be able to return to it (should I be crazy enough to want to). To paraphrase a comment from friend of mine (made regarding her new baby), I can’t wait for them to grow up…but they’re growing up too fast!