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.”
Filed under Monthly Updates | Tags: eloise, food, julian, milestones, monthly, Parenting, sleep, smiling, toys, trixie tracker | Comments (10)Solo
Yesterday was Rachel’s first day back at work since the twins were born. I’m sure she’ll have a lot to say about that on her own, but it also means a bit of a change for me. We’re incredibly lucky that the twins’ wonderful grandmother is going to be on the scene Tuesdays and Wednesdays for a while, so that means that I had a considerable amount of help yesterday.
Today, it’s just me (at least until 1:00 when the indispensable Abigail, our babysitter/helper, arrives). Wish me luck!
(Tomorrow I’ve got them on my own from 8-5… I’m thinking the only possible thing I can do, in this day and age, is to live-blog it.)
UPDATE
The day was a smashing success! Julian was a little more difficult than usual, but Eloise had, no question, the best day of her young life. (One day, she’ll graduate from college, and I’ll say, “Well, young lady, this is certainly exciting, but it’s no Day 166.”) She was smiley and playful and happy, and she let Abigail feed, hold, and play with her, and she didn’t really even fuss once. It was kind of eerie. Of course, now I’m exhausted. Here’s hoping tomorrow goes as well.
Filed under Parenting | Tags: abigail, eloise, Parenting | Comments (5)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!
Filed under Monthly Updates | Tags: food, monthly, Parenting, play, pumping, sleep, smiling | Comments (9)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.
Filed under Monthly Updates | Tags: eloise, julian, language, monthly, Parenting, scheduling, sleep | Comments (10)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!
Gender
Let’s talk about sex, babies.
Rachel and I have decided not to find out in advance what the sexes of the twins are. Partly, this is because we like the idea of being surprised, but mostly (for me at least) I don’t want anyone to know in advance whether we’re having boys or girls because I do not want to be inundated with pretty pink princess crap, or sports and cowboys crap. DO NOT WANT.
It’s odd to me how common it is to find out the sex of your unborn baby. In our twins class, we’re the only couple out of 9 who didn’t already know what they were having. When we went to Babies “R” Us to start our registry, the woman at the checkout was apalled that we weren’t finding out. “But,” she pleaded, “how will you buy bedding?”
I get it that, traditionally, pink clothes and sheets with flowers and such are for girls, while blue stuff with balls and trucks and cars are for boys, but I can’t shake my bafflement that anyone thinks a one-month old cares what’s printed on his or her crib sheet. Even burpcloths are gendered. Burpcloths! Because, God knows, if a boy throws up onto a towel with flowers on it, it will turn him gay.
I swear, if we have a girl, I’m totally dressing her in this “chick magnet” onesie. Because this makes me kind of queasy.
Filed under Pregnancy | Tags: gender, Parenting, sex, sexism | Comments (3)