Eating

This post originally appeared on the Bellani Maternity blog.

I had such big plans. My children were going to eat nothing but healthy, organic, locally-sourced, homemade food. And exciting food, too: they were going to love exotic noodle dishes, cheeses of all sorts, chiles, olives, and all of the things I love that I never ate as a kid. I was going to spend my evenings and weekends happily cooking, filling our freezer and pantry with meals and snacks, and all of our friends would marvel how well it was all going.

Ha.

Ha, ha. Ha.

I am led to understand that there are people out there—food people—people with a love of food, and cooking, and eating, who have children, and manage to stay food people, who have adventurous, agreeable children with big, broad appetites, who make every mealtime a pleasurable and laughter-filled experience for the whole family. We do not have these children. If you do have these children, I am beyond happy for you, but I’m afraid I have to ask you to please, if you wouldn’t mind terribly, shut up about it.

There are days they eat almost nothing. Or days that they’ll only eat pasta. Again. Days when the food they’d happily tucked into only days ago is now emphatically and tearfully rejected. Days when I want to throw my hands up and never set foot in the kitchen again.

At our lowest moments (kids screaming, food everywhere, my head in my arms on the table) my wife reminds me of the advice our pediatrician gave us at their first birthday: “At one year, you can reasonably expect one good meal a day. At two, expect one good meal every other day.” These are, to be sure, low expectations, but they’ve become our mantra. If they don’t eat dinner, we remind ourselves that they ate lunch. Or vice versa. Or that they ate all of their oatmeal at breakfast. And that we’ll try again tomorrow.

There are victories, though. There are only a few parenting moments more proud than sitting across from my wife at dinner and watching both children gleefully shovel mujadarra or chana masala into their faces. Or hearing Julian urgently ask for “more more black beans!” Or having to remind Eloise to chew, chew, chew, and swallow before putting more chicken in her mouth.

Now that they can express their preferences, some meals are a little easier. At breakfast, I can ask, “What do you want for breakfast?” and get answers. Usually the same answers, but answers, nonetheless. (Julian: “Bagel!” Eloise: “Oatmeal!”)

With the understanding that eating is still a work in progress, and that we have a success rate far below 100 percent, here are the guidelines we try to stick to. These are inspired by Ellyn Satter’s Child of Mine, which I have not yet managed to read in its entirety. Still, the capsule version that I liked was this: “Parents decide what, when, and where to eat. Kids decide whether, and how much.”

What’s for dinner is what’s for dinner. I’m going to make one meal for the family each night, not two, not three, not four. The twins are going to eat what we eat… mostly.

There’s at least one thing they reliably like on their plates. Their dinner plates will have our dinner on them, but I try to design each meal so that there’s at least one component they recognize and have eaten before. Sometimes that’s as simple as making sure there’s broccoli or green peas or corn on the cob on the side. If dinner is especially adventurous (say, a delicious potato and fontina cake that Rachel and I really enjoy) I might put out some chicken bites or something. But the key to this rule, for me, is not going back into the kitchen for something new. Ever. Almost ever.

No seconds until you’ve tried everything on your place. The danger of having something they like on their plates is that they can tend to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else. It’s great that you like the pasta, Julian, but if you want more (and I’m happy to bring you more) you have to at least try the meatball. This has led to a lot of comical putting one molecule of food in their mouth and spitting it out ostentatiously. That counts. They might not eat the new food this time, but maybe it will be a little less unfamiliar next time.

Eat as much or as little as you want. My childhood is full of stories of being chased around the house by my father trying to get me to eat just one piece of chicken. I can’t believe that was fun for anyone. If our kids don’t want to eat something, that’s their choice. We try to tell them, “I think you’ll be hungry later,” but if they say they’re all done, and want to go and play, as long as they’ve at least made an effort to put something in their mouths, I don’t want to fight with them.

Keep trying. I’ve heard that to get a child to try, and potentially like, a new food, you have to offer it on at least ten separate occasions, even if they’re going to refuse it nine times. This is exhausting and demoralizing, and it’s the part I have the most trouble with. When they refuse to try (or spit out) the food I’ve lovingly, carefully, painstakingly prepared for them, it’s really hard not to take it personally. But my ever-patient wife reminds me that we’ll try again. And again. And again. And we do.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. As much as I want to give them healthy homemade food all the time, it really won’t kill them to eat something from the (gasp!) grocery store freezer. Chicken nuggets, or little pouches of applesauce, goldfish crackers, or even the occasional cookie aren’t going to harm them, and don’t make me a bad parent.

A toddler isn’t going to starve himself. Everyone eats, eventually. Trying to keep our own anxiety levels down helps make meals more pleasant for everyone. And maybe, if we keep this up, in six to twelve months, they’ll be happily helping me cook, and trying our pad thai, and asking for more samosas. Right?

Right?

Judge Not?

This post originally appeared on the Bellani Maternity blog.

Colleen’s latest post ends up being really timely for me, because it helped to catalyze some sort of vague ideas I had bouncing around in my head. Circumstantial factors helped, too: I happened to see the most recent post pop up on my iPhone while I was sitting in the passenger seat of a DCYF van, riding alongside the Child Protective Services investigator I was shadowing for the day.

We all judge each other, all the time. We rarely say anything about it, of course. If I’m sitting a few tables down from you at a restaurant and see you chewing with your mouth open, I’ll scoff silently. If you see me walking down the street with my shoes untied or my pant cuffs tucked into my socks somehow, you’ll probably experience a little mental snigger. We judge each other’s driving, our choice of romantic partners, our wardrobes, our taste in music, our Facebook posts, our writing, our singing, our posture, and, of course, we judge each other’s parenting.

How often have I caught myself thinking less of someone for making a different parenting choice than I did? More often than I’d like. Cloth diapers vs. disposables. Plastic toys vs. wood. Plastic bottles vs. glass. Sleep training vs. co-sleeping. Strollers vs. baby-wearing. Breast milk vs. formula. Midwives vs. OB-GYNs. Nannies vs. day care. Staying home vs. returning to work. Pacifiers. Junk food. Discipline. Clothing.

(I want to emphasize quickly that although this post has coalesced as something of a response to Colleen’s post (or perhaps it’s simpler to say that it’s inspired by what Colleen wrote) it’s not at all intended as a criticism of anything she said or did. I wholeheartedly agree that, yes, babies belong in car seats, and I applaud her decision to notify the police that this family was being so obviously unsafe. I wish I could say with confidence that I’d have done the same thing. Parenting may be mostly shades of gray, but some things are blank and white, and this is pretty clearly one of them.)

A recent blog post at the New York Times shared the experiences of a lawyer who represents parents accused of abusing or neglecting their children. She describes what happens when the instinct to judge another’s parenting is taken to its logical and legal extreme. To be sure, there are parents out there who should be judged. There are parenting choices that are, simply, objectively, better than others, and some that should never be made at all. Still, that impulse to judge, to disapprove, to intervene can become extremely hard to resist when it’s directed at someone who already has a history of making bad decisions.

I can’t tell you anything about the DCYF case that I witnessed, except to say that it involved a family reacting badly to a crisis that I would expect any family to react badly to. It just happened that this family was already in the system, and so warning signs become red flags, and red flags send white vans driving out from Providence. (I do want to say that the investigator I had the privilege of shadowing handled the entire situation with incredible poise, professionalism, and compassion: I was humbled and impressed.)

I think of myself in my worst parenting moments: when I’m at my wits end and snap at my children, or pull them too roughly out of harm’s way, or say something, exasperated, forgetting that they can understand. I wouldn’t want anyone to witness these moments; I can imagine how they’d look through the eyes of an average, judgmental parent-on-the-street, much less through the eyes of someone bearing the card of the Department of Children, Youth, and Families.

And look at me: even in my worst parenting moments, I’m married to the mother of my children, we both work at good-paying jobs that we enjoy, we have family and friends nearby who are able and willing to help, and we can afford food, shelter, clothing, and quality child care. I have every advantage. When I’m driven to the edge and fail to be the parent I want to be, should I be judged for it? Well, maybe. And so should anyone, perhaps. But parenting is fundamentally about compassion: compassion for our children most of all, but also for ourselves and for each other, each struggling to do the best we can for the ones we love most.

I’ll try to remember that the next time I find myself shaking my head in middle-class disapproval at the parent with the shopping cart full of soda, or the kid I think is over- or under-dressed, or the house that’s full of Fisher-Price instead of Melissa and Doug. And I’ll try especially hard to remember it the next time I have the urge to tell another parent that the way I’m doing it is the right way.

(Still, people: kids go in car seats, infants sleep on their backs, and no honey before age one.)

Friends With Children?

This post originally appeared on the Bellani Maternity blog.

This is a common scene, right? We’re driving home from running some errands and decide as a treat to stop by the playground to kill some time. The four of us roll into Humboldt Park, and the kids proceed to tear it up in the way that kids do.

(As a side note, because we hadn’t exactly planned to go to the playground, and because we sometimes let the kids influence what we dress them in, Eloise was wearing an adorable but completely impractical skirt and brand new white sandals. Just the thing. We must have looked like those parents who dress their daughter in inappropriately dressy girly clothes all the time. We’re not those parents!)

There were a handful of people there, including three mothers, each with a young daughter about the same age, who seemed to be casually acquainted. One of their kids kind of wandered over to where Eloise was playing and so the three of us ended up tossing a ball back and forth. The new kid, Sadie, was adorable, and the small talk with her mother was pleasant, and I thought, “Hey, new friend?”

And then they had to leave and I found myself kind of weakly waving goodbye.

How do new parents connect with one another and schedule these “playdates” that I’ve heard so much about? I’m sure that we’re at something of a disadvantage because both Rachel and I work full time, so we’re not often a part of the weekday kid scene. (Back before I went back to work, I befriended some of the other parents in the delightful classes we took at Bellani, but since I was demoted from “stay-at-home dad” to just “dad” I haven’t had a chance to see any of them.) But even on a weekend, when I do make meaningful eye contact or pleasant chit-chat with another parent hovering by the jungle gym, I have no idea how to seal the deal.

I think it’s so awkward and difficult because it’s essentially like trying to hit on someone you just met; I wasn’t any good at that back when I was single, and I’ve been cozily partnered up for more than a decade. There’s just no way I’m going to be able to successfully pick someone up at a playground.

I often wonder how much of it is gender-related. I see little clutches of moms that seem to gather together as if by some kind of electromagnetic force. Is new parenting secretly a “no boys allowed” club? Or does a guy wandering up to a bunch of women just exacerbate the creepy pick-up vibe? “Hi there. I think our kids are about the same age… laydeez.”

(This reminds me of a YouTube video that’s a couple of years old but is still, I think, funny. There’s probably nothing in it that’s precisely inappropriate for a family-friendly blog like this, but I feel that I should warn you, as Ira Glass occasionally says, that this video does acknowledge the existence of sex.)

I am generally baffled as to how new parents find each other. Most of our pre-kid friends still don’t have kids, and although we’ve met a few new friends with children, our social circle seems pretty narrow. How do you all do it?

No! No Daddy!

This post originally appeared on the Bellani Maternity blog.

Is there anything less dignified, more damaging to the self-esteem, or more pointless than competing for the attention and affections of a 20-month old child? Apart, obviously, from appearing as a contestant on a reality television program? I don’t think there is.

Everyone tells me it’s completely normal for kids to go through phases of preferring one parent over the other, and it’s true; I’ve seen our two do it. Sometimes they’d switch on and off, so one week Julian would insist that only Mama could give him his bottle before bed, and the next week, it had to be Daddy. Still, knowing that it’s happened before, and knowing that it will end, and knowing that it’s so common doesn’t change how infuriating and, yes, heartbreaking it is when you’re the dispreferred parent.

The past few weeks have been the worst in a while. Both kids have been sick, and they seem to have decided that while Mama generates loving waves of peaceful healing, Daddy is covered in acid-tipped spikes. It’s worse than ever before because now they’re talking. It’s one thing for them to cry and fuss and twist around when I pick them up; it’s something entirely different when they cry and slap and shout, “No! No Daddy!”

As a result, I look for ways to maximize their affection. I’ve started angling to do pick up, rather than drop off, at day care, because they are ecstatic to see whoever’s coming to get them at the end of the day. “That’s right, children. Shower me with your love. Not literally, Eloise. Can I have a tissue, please?”

Most of the time, I have the maturity and presence of mind to take it in stride. I know that they’re basically irrational little beasties whose moods and preferences change by the minute. Sometimes, though, it stings. It’s unpleasantly humbling to have your feelings hurt by your child. There have been times when I’ve sullenly parked both wailing, ungrateful snots on their mother’s lap and stormed off to sulk. Way to go, Daddy.

In another example of my exceptional maturity, the times when they do request me over my wife feel like Olympic-level victories. I may be guilty of actually pumping my fist once after Julian said, “No no mommy!” and crawled into my lap. Ha! In your face, HONEY!

The upside, if you can call it that, is tbecause she’s been sick, Eloise has been waking up in the middle of the night. My attempts to console her have been met with apocalyptic shrieking so I’ve had to regretfully concede middle-of-the night duty to my wife. “I’d totally go and get her, honey, but you know she really wants you. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

The whole thing is karmic payback, of course. My dad never tires of telling the story of when I was about two or three years old, and started crying in the middle of the night, and he walked in and leaned over my bed, and I looked up and said, “Not YOU!” He seems to have gotten over it, so I’m sure I will, too.

Stacked

It’s been crazy around here, with the babies taking turns coming down with first some kind of nasty stomach bug and then some kind of 48-hour virus that, while it appears not to have been H1N1, still shot Eloise’s fever up over 103. We’re glad that’s over with.

Apropos of nothing, here are two pictures documenting Julian’s facility with neatly stacking his toys:

It’s worth clarifying that the wooden post on the ring stacker only comes up to about the orange ring. He just grabbed discs from another set and kept on stacking.

Maclaren Mania

I think people are going a little nuts with the Maclaren recall. It’s terrible that twelve children were injured, but I think it’s important to keep in mind how small that number is in comparison to the number of Maclaren strollers on the market.

The coverage has been a bit maddening. The NYT’s Motherlode breathlessly wonders:

Add frustration with the logistics of the recall to fears about finger amputation — not to mention the question of how on earth to get junior to the park or the supermarket if the stroller is now too dangerous to use — and you have some cranky parents.

Except, as I understand it, the strollers aren’t too dangerous to use. They’re just potentially dangerous to fold if your kid is sticking their fingers in there. We never fold up our stroller (it just lives on our porch) so there’s really no reason for us to freak out.

Motherlode also wonders if “too much damage to customer loyalty has already been done” by the fact that Maclaren’s website was overloaded by requests for hinge covers yesterday. Who in their right mind would stop using a stroller they already own and like because a company’s website crashed? I don’t think I understand people. Handling a recall is a very delicate operation, and customers are bound to get nervous and angry, but I don’t understand why the media is calling this a PR disaster just because the recall was successfully publicized.

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.)

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!

The Hardest Button To Button

I often find myself, in my head, mixing up Zutano, a maker of fine baby clothes, with Zumpano. Still, I have to think if Carl Newman started a line of baby clothes, he’d know that they should have snaps, not buttons. Have you ever tried to fasten a button on the neck of a squirming baby?

Parent Cards

Has this ever happened to you? You’re out walking with the babies in the stroller, or hanging out in the park and along comes another parent with a baby or babies about the same age, and you get to chatting, and you think, “Hey, we should hang out some time, and get the kids together, and, man, we need some more friends with kids,” but then you go your way and they go theirs and you never see them again, or you just end up “Hi” friends as you pass each other every once in a while?

It’s a problem, right? So Rachel and I came up with a genius solution: parent cards. You make up some business cards with your names, your kids’ names and ages, and your phone number and email address, and keep a stack of them in your stroller or diaper bag, and when you run into another parent, you exchange them and then later you can call each other and have a playdate.

I’m sure it would be a little weird and awkward the first time you hand one out, but once it catches on, it would just become totally normal. Spread the word! Parent cards.

Of course, Rachel and I came up with this idea months ago, and never actually made parent cards, and then the latest issue of Babytalk showed up at our house, and of course it has this VERY SAME IDEA in it, but they call them “Mommy Cards.” Stupid sexist parenting-industrial complex. It’s still a good idea, though.

Hungry Monkey, Matthew Amster-Burton

A shamefully long time ago—I’m talking months—the marvelous Kelly at Bellani Maternity handed me a book as the kids and I were walking in to Tot Gym class. “Here,” she said, “I think you might like this.”

A book about parenting and feeding written by a stay-at-home foodie dad named Matthew? Why, yes, I might be interested in such a thing. Having read it, I can wholeheartedly recommend Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater if you are interested in at least two of the following three things:

• Parenting
• Food
• How awesome it is to live in Seattle

Parenting books that tell you what you should do kind of get on my nerves, especially when they’re written by non-experts, and especially when the five books on your shelf express five different strongly help opinions about THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO. Hungry Monkey is refreshing, because except for the recipes at the end of each chapter, Amster-Burton doesn’t give instructions or suggestions or even advice. He just tells you what he did, and how well it did or didn’t work. His goal was to raise a foodie like himself, an adventurous and eager eater, and to avoid “baby food” as much as possible. Since I love to cook, and since I badly want to raise children who love to eat and try new things and who will appreciate what I’m slaving over in the kitchen, this was a goal that I shared.

I do think that Iris Amster-Burton, the eponymous hungry monkey, was an unusually adventurous child, culinarily speaking, and mileage will vary widely. Our babies were much slower to take to “grown up” food, and we’ve had to be much more careful about milling or pureeing their food. (Julian, for instance, has a hair-trigger gag reflex, and if he gets too big a piece of food in his mouth, or if even a small piece of food ends up on the back of his tongue where he doesn’t expect it, BLEARGH.) I don’t think you should read the book as a road map and expect that your experience will be the same as the author’s, and it’s occasionally been a struggle for me not to be disappointed when the babies didn’t respond the way the baby in the book did, or when I don’t have time to get an elaborate home-cooked meal for the four of us on the table by 6:00.

Hungry Monkey‘s most important function (apart from being a very funny and enjoyable book with some delicious-looking recipes in it) is as a corrective to all of the other baby-feeding advice out there. I was especially tickled to read his skewering of Ruth “Super Baby Food” Yaron, a best-selling author with no qualifications as a nutritionist or pediatrician whose “bland is best” diet would have parents milling their own goddamn grains. (I mean, is there anything more “Stuff White People Like” than milling their own cereal? For cripes sake.) The feeding philosophy of Hungry Monkey is, basically, “Dude, just feed your baby,” and having Amster-Burton’s sarcastic and carefree voice in the back of my head has been therapeutic.

Despite my plans to feed the babies only homemade, delicious, flavorful food from my own kitchen, we’ve ended up dividing their meals roughly into one-third homemade baby food, one-third grown-up food (either off of our plates or run through the food mill or food processor), and one-third store-bought. We’ve had the best luck with Plum brand baby food, which comes frozen and actually tastes pretty good when heated up. Their favorite flavor is their Vegetable Stew with Beef, but since we want to raise polite and respectful children, we’ve been referring to the beef stew by its full name, Beef Stewart. (Likewise, George Squashington and Yogertrude.)

Despite my initial scoffing (scoffery?), we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Baby Purees. I’ll whip up a batch every week or so and store it in Baby Cubes in our downstairs freezer. I honestly thought I wouldn’t need to look at a recipe to figure out how to steam some vegetables and put them in the food processor, but Karmel’s suggestions for good combinations really are both creative and helpful. My one criticism is that her indications of how many servings a given recipe will produce seem wildly off. A recipe that claims to make 4 servings will generally work out to a tray and half or more of Baby Cubes. (I do play a little fast and loose with the quantities, but not by that much.)

As for “real food,” it’s been really exciting to see what they’ll eat and enjoy. Generally speaking, when we have leftovers nowadays, instead of putting them in the fridge for lunch the next day, I’ll run them through the food mill or the food processor and stick them in the freezer in cubes. Julian and Eloise have gobbled up mushroom risotto, smoked salmon chowder, three-bean chili, chana masala, pasta with tomato sauce, and probably more things that I can’t think of. They’ve happily and eagerly snacked on pieces of quesadillas from Whole Foods. They love pickles and plums (not necessarily together). There aren’t that many foods they don’t seem to like, to be honest. They’re not wild about summer squash or chicken, but I think our sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

As much as we try to broaden their palates and provide them with variety, the twins are babies, and I think they would happily eat Happy Baby Puffs and applesauce for every meal—at various times we’ve had to institute moratoria on both foods to try to convince them to eat ANYTHING ELSE. They have essentially the same breakfast every day (oatmeal and yogurt with some kind of fruit) and don’t seem to mind. But as they get more comfortable with chewing, and get a few more teeth, and as their hand-eye coordination improves, I think mealtimes are going to get more and more fun. I think I’m looking forward to a time when they can express an opinion about what they’d like to eat, even when we enter the inevitable “nothing but macaroni and cheese” phase.

Anyhow, Hungry Monkey is a great book and a quick read, and I’m very grateful to Kelly and Bellani for giving to me. You should all, like, go there and spend a lot of money, or something.

Lactation Cessation

Anyone who has spent even a modest amount of time with me since Julian and Eloise were born knows that producing milk for them utterly consumed my thoughts and actions for the first couple months of their lives, and it largely consumed them for several subsequent months. I agonized over the contents of every bottle, over the maintenance of my supply, over whether the whole thing was worth it, given the sudden surge of “press” suggesting that maybe breast milk and breastfeeding aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be.

And now it’s over. I pumped for the last time on Saturday night, before we left for our vacation in New Hampshire. The babies got their last bottles of breast milk the following day. I imagined that feeding them those bottles would be emotional, and I hoped somewhat sweet. Unfortunately, they only drank half the bottles in their car seats before we hit the road, and they finished them at a pathetic little gas station just north of Concord where we’d pulled over to deal with a truly putrid diaper and inconsolable screaming. Not exactly the most meaningful end to one of the most difficult and amazing things I’ve ever done in my life, but I think that distraction and humor served me better at that point than reverent reflection, which almost certainly would have ended in tears.

A snapshot of the last 10 months:

• 60.23 total gallons pumped (this does not, of course, include whatever milk Eloise drank while nursing)

• 1,384 pumping sessions, totaling an estimated 346 hours (14.5 days) spent pumping

• Just 7 ounces lost in two spills (not counting regular quarter-ounce drips here and there)

• More Than You Wanted to Know Alert: 32 percent more produced by the right than the left side

• Roughly 2,500 fenugreek tablets swallowed

• Approximately 450 cups of Mother’s Milk tea drunk

• Nearly $1,000 spent on the above plus pump rental, lactation consultant, etc. (not including supplemental formula)

And the result of all that? Well, Eloise nursed nearly exclusively from birth to 5.5 months, when I returned to work. Julian, who couldn’t nurse because of his poor squished jaw, received bottles exclusively, and it was for him that I hooked myself up to the hated pump 5, 6, 7, even 8 times per day, waking up in the middle of the night to pump even long after both babies were sleeping through the night. For the first two months, both babies essentially got nothing but milk. From 2 to 8 months, they got between 2/3 and 3/4 milk (and the rest formula). Once Eloise self-weaned (a very difficult and sad turn of events for me) and there was no longer a live nursing baby to persuade my body to keep up milk production, my supply dwindled, but I was able to give them about 50 percent milk until 9 months, and then I ramped down completely over the three weeks after that.

I know that’s a lot of milk, and I know that, given the circumstances (two babies to feed, only one who could nurse), I did the very best that I could. I can’t help dwell a little on how much I would have liked the whole thing to go very differently, though. I liked nursing. I would have liked to do it for several months longer. I would have liked to have spent far less of early motherhood pumping. And while I’m making a wish list, of course I would have liked to have been able to nurse both babies. But of course all that wishing accomplishes nothing. So now I turn complete responsibility for nourishing my babies over to Whole Foods and PBM Products, makers of Target-brand formula, and I try to readjust to a life in which my body isn’t providing sustenance to any other humans. How mundane.

Circa one month old. Amazingly, given its omnipresence, I couldn’t find any pictures with the pump in the background.

White Noise

Since we brought the babies home from the hospital they’ve been sleeping with white noise playing. At first we used a little white noise machine with a menu of different sounds: womb, ocean, wind, etc. Each setting has an additional secondary sound that can be added to the main sound. Ocean, which we used most often, could be augmented with “buoy.” Either the buoy button didn’t work or the buoy sound effect was incredibly subtle—Rachel and I now have a running joke that the sound a buoy makes is the sound of silently swaying from side to side.

Eventually we decided that the little noise machine wasn’t loud enough. When we moved them into the cribs in their own room, we needed something that made enough noise to blanket out the normal noises of the house so we didn’t have to tiptoe around starting at 6:30. Rachel found a CD of white noise at Amazon, so we bought an iPod speaker dock, popped in my ancient 40 GB iPod, and put the white noise on repeat.

Of course, each white noise track was only ten minutes long, and the short pause while the track restarted used to wake them up. Luckily, I was able to stretch out the track in GarageBand, and produced an extended remix version that was three hours long.

So now we had our system: when the babies went down for their naps, we’d turn on the speakers and when they woke up, we’d turn them off. It seemed too much hassle to actually stop the iPod playing; sure it kept looping forever even while the speakers were off, but the power draw seemed minimal.

What may be obvious to you, but was obvious to me only in retrospect, is that endlessly playing the same three-hour track on repeat for four months might not be the best way to prolong the life of your iPod hard drive. So, yeah. That died yesterday. We’re trying this cute sheep out for now, but it seems to only work on a timer, and we kind of want something that will go all night. Anyone want to sell me an old iPod cheap? This time we’ll probably push pause every now and then.

Reading Too Much Into It

“Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?”

“I see a red bird looking at me.”

“Red bird, red bird, what do you see?”

“Obviously, I see the brown bear that I’m looking at.”

“Oh. Hmm. Good point. Short book, huh?”

Father’s Day

I sometimes think about changing the tagline of this blog to “Better Late Than Never.” Father’s Day was a long time ago now, but maybe these thoughts are still relevant.

I’ve written before about my thoughts on “fatherhood” as a distinct category from “parenthood.” For the most part, I think it’s an empty distinction—or at least it should be. (For an interesting take, check out this blog post from the New York Times.) Certainly, when I talk to the babies, I refer to myself, in the third person, as “Daddy” (why do I do that, I wonder?) but I don’t really think of myself as a “dad,” or as a “father.” I think of myself as a “parent.”

Part of the reason, of course, is that when I think of “dad” I think of my dad, and he and I are two very different people, and two very different parents. In many ways, my dad actually has many of archetypal “dad” qualities. For one thing, he’s the strongest man alive. My sister tells the story that when she moved into her apartment in Manhattan, the movers didn’t show up, so my dad ended up carrying the entire moving van up two flights of stairs. One-handed. I am not the strongest man alive. In fact, I have a pile of things that are too heavy for me to lift that will be dealt with when dad comes to visit next week. When Eloise and Julian grow up, I do not expect that I will be able to uncomplainingly carry air conditioners up from their respective basements.

Dad also knows how to do stuff. He’s fielded many a late night phone call from me that went something like, “Hey, dad, how are you? Busy? So… how hard is it to unclog a garbage disposal?” or “Um, I can’t figure out how to take the glass pane out of the storm door,” or “Should we get life insurance?” or whatever. Rachel was recently remarking that my one practical skill—a rather deft hand with phone wiring—is nearly completely obsolete at this point. I mean, sure, I’ll probably be able to teach the twins how to make homemade mayonnaise or strum a G#m, but I’ll be useless when it comes to changing a tire, or jump-starting a dead battery, or caulking a bathtub.

There will be some traditional “dad” tasks I will be able to perform, of course. For instance, I’m sure I’ll embarrass them in front of their friends by telling the same jokes over and over again. I’ll probably sing too enthusiastically when driving the carpool. I’ll definitely think I’m caught up on all the hot new technology when in fact I’m years behind.

(I sometimes think about my dad when I’m changing diapers, and wonder how any parent ever takes anything their children say seriously. Someday, Julian or Eloise will come to me and express their earnest opinion on a matter of great import, and I’ll just picture them gleefully sucking on their toes while I wipe their asses clean.)

So, I don’t know about this whole “father” thing. I don’t want to deny that there are any essential differences in the way that Rachel and I relate to the babies. She, after all, grew them and personally produced the bulk of their nutrition. I didn’t. And I know as Julian and Eloise get older, the way we relate to them will inevitably become more gendered. But for now, I’m really enjoying the uncomplicated joy of parenting, and the extremely complicated pleasures of complaining to other people about what an all-consuming pain in the ass children are.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to be the parent I want to be to them: I wish I could be the calm, cool, competent father I envisioned myself as. The fact is, I’m often frustrated, impatient, and overwhelmed by them. And yet, every lost hour of sleep, every ear-splitting shriek, every failed nap, every shirt spit up on, every new creak in my back—it’s all unquestionably worth it if it’s the price of seeing their faces light up when they see me. Adorable little rat-bastards.

Manhattan Toy Company

Why does the Manhattan Toy Company’s Whoozit line feature a rendering of the constellation Grover?

Plum

Internet, forgive me: I fed my babies store-bought baby food.

At least it was expensive, organic baby food. We’re running low on our own baby food stocks, and I couldn’t figure out how to process what Rachel and I were having tonight (cheese quesadillas), and Julian had frankly already eaten his weight in yogurt today, and, and, and…

Eloise, predictably, loved it. Julian opined that, on the whole, he preferred yogurt.

Orzo Salad with Spinach, Feta, and Tomatoes

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

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

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

Chips Off The Old Block

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

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

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

Not That Original

Looks like the whole daily photograph thing has been done.

Super Powers

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

Mother’s Day

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

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

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

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

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

Poll

“Bitten Nipple” works best as a name for:

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

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

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

No More Sterilizing?

Apparently, you don’t have to sterilize bottles. It makes sense: if you’re not going to sterilize them before every use, why would you bother doing it only sometimes?

Abigail

Today we had to say goodbye to our superstar babysitter/helper/sanity-preserver, Abigail. For the three months or so that she’s been helping us out, Abigail has been absolutely indispensable. Diapers got changed, bottles got washed, and babies got strolled, but most importantly she has been endlessly fun, patient, and sweet with our two occasionally-challenging babies. In addition to being pretty much Julian’s best friend, Abigail is one of only about a half-dozen people that Eloise will consent to be held by. That’s pretty impressive, and it took considerable perseverance. (She’s also managed to put up with spending hours with me, Rachel, and assorted family members, which ought to earn her a medal of some kind.)

Abigail is heading off for her summer break, and we hope that we’ll see more of her in the fall, but for now all of us will definitely miss her. Thank you!

The Cutest

Rachel just called me upstairs, saying, “You have to see Eloise!” I peeked into her bedroom to see her in her crib… curled up lying on her side! It was the cutest thing I have ever seen. I’m still “eeeeeee”ing.

Update

Eloise, our little firecracker, has slept in her crib all night un-swaddled for the past three nights! Yes, she’s still woken up crying several times in the night, but we haven’t had to go in there, and she’s put herself to sleep each time. I can’t tell you how proud we are.

(It’s easy to take for granted our little Julian who continues to sleep blissfully through the night, unperturbed by all of the activity in the crib next to him. We think he’ll actually be more of a challenge to wean from the swaddle, but for now he’s content, and so are we.)

Thanks also for all of the helpful suggestions of rainy-day activities. I’m hoping the weather will just be completely awesome for the rest of the spring and summer so I won’t have to use any of them, but in the unlikely event that it, you know, rains in Providence during April and May, I’ll give them a shot.

Your Help Is Requested

Our daily routine generally includes a 45–60 minute walk in the stroller. The babies seem to really like it: they either doze peacefully or stare in fascination at the sights in the out-of-doors. We live in a really wonderfully walkable neighborhood, so it’s generally a pleasure for whoever’s pushing them along, too.

It doesn’t hurt that it kills an hour during the otherwise grim march from their last nap of the day to bedtime.

The problem is that we’re entirely at the mercy of the weather. When it rains, we don’t go for a walk, and when we don’t go for a walk, we’re all stuck in the house. Getting out and about is good for them, and it’s good for their caretaker. (Me.)

So: suggestions on things to do with the babies when a walk isn’t possible? Preferably that can be accomplished with a baby-to-parent ratio of about 2:1?

It Goes On

Today we continued along the path to solid foods, introducing the more conventional rice cereal. Rice cereal is… weird. It looks like instant mashed potatoes, and when mixed with formula is, if possible, less appetizing. Eloise was not impressed with the special of the day, but Julian contentedly nommed it down. Tomorrow we’re going with applesauce. (And yes, yes, I know you’re “supposed” to wait 3-4 days before introducing each new food, but I just can’t, in good conscience, keep shoveling this bland mush into their mouths. If they like the applesauce, we’ll settle on that for a few days.)

The other thing going on is our continuing struggles with sleep. I meant to write a long, detailed post on our adventures with sleep training (and may yet, if I find the time and you, dear reader, express an interest) but the short version is that we went with Dr. Ferber. Julian has never really been a problem in terms of sleeping through the night, but we needed to get Eloise down to a single wake-up to feed, and we’re still working on getting them to nap reliably during the day.

About a week and a half ago we decided to eliminate Eloise’s final night feeding, and that’s been something of a battle. Even though she should be able to sleep through the night without eating, she emphatically does not want to, and is not shy about expressing her displeasure, loudly, at 4:00 in the morning. The last two nights have seen me spending those gray hours between 4:00 and 7:00 sitting in the glider with her sleeping on my shoulder, since she’s currently refusing to go back down into her crib. The challenge is exacerbated by the presence of her brother, who can sleep blissfully through almost anything, but not his sister wailing at 4:00 in the morning. We’re now planning to whisk him out of the room at the first sign of an Eloisplosion since otherwise they take turns working each other into a frenzy and no one gets any sleep.

As if that weren’t challenge enough, we’re also trying to wean them off sleeping swaddled. Yes, at this point, the babies can only fall asleep if tightly wrapped, which means if, say, they wriggle out of their blanket in the middle of the night, they can’t go back to sleep… ELOISE.

Our plan is to use the spirit of the Ferber method: we’ll put them down unswaddled and each night wait a progressively longer amount of time before picking them up and swaddling them. That sounds like it might work, right?

Right?

Please, God, let us get more sleep tonight.