Our Divided Attention

Here's another good news/bad news aspect of twins:

The good news: Two babies equals twice as many milestones -- We just got two "first smiles", and in the coming weeks and months, we'll get two first crawls, two first steps, two first words, and so on and so forth.

The bad news: Since each parent can really only pay attention to one baby at a time, mommy and daddy each have at least a 50% chance of missing each of these milestones.

Exhibit A. Leah rolled over from her tummy to her back for the first time yesterday. At the time of this momentous occasion, daddy was bottle-feeding Riley and mommy was en route to the bathroom. Luckily, daddy was facing in Leah's direction at the time, so he was able to divert his attention from Riley just in time to watch Leah push off the ground, then sort of fall on her side with enough lopsided momentum to roll her over on to her back (narrowly missing crashing into our coffee table, but that's another story.) And then there she was, lying on her back with a triumphant "look what I did!" grin on her face.

What Kathy saw (rushing into the living room after hearing me scream "WHOOOA!"): Leah lying on her back with a triumphant "look what I did!" grin almost faded from her face.

Sorry, mommy.

But the fact is, we're probably missing at least 50% of what each of our babies do each day, simply because we're paying attention to the other baby at the time. For all I know, what I thought was Leah's "first smile" could have been her third smile, and I just happened to miss the first two. Maybe Riley's been rolling around our living room like a steamroller while I've been occupied cleaning up the vomit that Leah keeps spewing on me. Actually, for all I know, Riley could've been reciting Shakespeare while Leah was rolling over yesterday -- I may not have noticed.

I really need to work on having my eyes move independently, so I can keep one eye on Riley and one eye on Leah. I think that's the only way I can avoid missing things. Except there'd still be the stuff I miss while writing in a certain blog.

And on that note, here are Leah and Riley demonstrating their look of disapproval: