Ah, The Dreaded Double Meltdown...

Over the past week or two, Kathy and I have been visited quite frequently by the scenario we like to call the Double Meltdown. I'm guessing you could probably figure this out by its name, but a Double Meltdown is what we call it when both Riley and Leah start crying/screaming at the top of their lungs at the same time. It is, uh, most unpleasant.

For the first three weeks or so, Leah and Riley each seemed to be able to sleep through the other one's screams, meaning that Riley could be yelling her head off and Leah could be right next to her blissfully sleeping away. Unfortunately for us, over the past week or so, that's changed, so if Riley screams loud enough, Leah will now wake up and join in the screaming fun. And thus, another Double Meltdown is born.

Most of the time, the Double Meltdown is a little stressful but not much of a problem. We've got two babies and two parents -- so each parent picks up a baby and changes and/or burps and/or comforts her. Presto -- problem solved.

Occasionally, though, one of the parents will be unavailable for some reason -- taking a shower, taking a nap, buying groceries, picking up dinner, taking a walk because his or her head is exploding -- and the remaining parent gets to try to deal with the Double Meltdown on his or her own. When this first happened to me, my first instinct (after the panic instinct) was to try to comfort both at the same time. I think this involved some sort of gymnastics of holding and rocking Riley back and forth while awkwardly patting down on Leah's belly while she lay in the crib. That didn't work out so well. Riley, sensing that my attention was not 100% on her, protested by screaming even louder and turning an alarming shade of reddish-purple. And Leah, showing disdain for my half-assed attempt to comfort her, unleashed her own hearty yowl of protest.

So, our new response to the Double Meltdown is to respond first to the "Squeakiest Wheel", which is the polite way of saying we try to first comfort whichever baby's cries are the screachiest and most annoying. (I guess we should call it the "Screachiest Wheel".) Because Riley is so good at screaching, Riley ends up being the Screachiest Wheel about 99.9 percent of the time, meaning that Riley is almost always the one who gets comforted first.

I'm hoping that Leah doesn't view this as personal challenge to work on her crying technique to make it more screachy. If that happens, we'll have to come up with a new way to decide. Maybe a spirited game of Rock-Scissors-Paper or something.

A couple photos of the babies during happier times: