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)Countdown
In the first of what I’m sure will be a lifetime of instances of these children disappointing their parents, our twins have decided that they will not be turning around, thank you very much, and so both remain in the breech position. This is a problem for two reasons:
First, Rachel is walking around with two human skulls under her ribs. I’m given to understand that’s as uncomfortable as it sounds. Secondly, it means that the twins are no longer eligible for a conventional vaginal delivery. (I know that some of my friends have expressed discomfort about using a simple medical term like “vaginal” to describe childbirth, and so to them I say: get over it. Vagina vagina vagina.) Most doctors give up on attempting a vaginal delivery if even one twin is breech; ours, because he rocks, was willing to attempt a vaginal birth if Twin A was in the vertex (or “head down”) position. But at this point, the game’s up, and we’re (mostly Rachel) having a Cesarean section.
This has its upsides, though! For one thing, scheduling a C-section means that we can be sure the birth will be attended by our doctor and our midwife, both of whom we’ve really come to like and rely on. Secondly, it means we know the date our babies will be born, which makes planning a lot easier.
So, the countdown to October 26 has begun.
Having a date makes this thing super real. Now, of course, these little guys could always decide to come early, resulting in a scramble to get to the hospital, a delivery by whichever doctor is on call, and, quite possibly, a short stay in the NICU. (If that happens, they are so grounded.) But we know the latest possible date they’ll arrive. It feels like that’s both no time at all and also ages away.
And as weird as becoming a parent is in general, a Cesarean delivery is particularly surreal. They estimate about fifteen minutes, tops, between the time they get Rachel on the operating table and the moment we’re holding babies. That’s a pretty sharp transition from not parents to parents. I suppose, though, that whether the transition is accompanied by twenty hours of screaming labor or twenty minutes of antiseptic surgery, it’s something you can’t quite imagine until it happens. Not for lack of trying: we spend a lot of time talking about how excited we are and what we’ll do when they arrive, and I spent at least a few minutes every night before we go to sleep trying to picture what our babies will be like when they arrive, how I’ll feel about them, and how our lives will change. How can I imagine what it will feel like to wake up at 3:00 A.M. to change a diaper, or see an infant seat in the rear view mirror, or to hold a tiny, helpless baby and know that it’s my responsibility? I can’t imagine, yet; it’s a hopeless task.
And a pointless one! Since they’ll be here in 18 days! To help us count down until the arrival, Rachel regressed to childhood undertook a craft project. We’ll remove one link each day until we’re left with a sad little paper bracelet that, on Sunday morning a few short weeks from now, just before we get in the car at 6:00 A.M. to go to the hospital and meet our babies, we’ll toss reverently into the recycling.
