...You Can Only Hope to Contain Them

As far as Kathy and I can tell, neither of the twins is all that close to crawling, but both Leah and Riley have recently been working on alternative methods of transportation. We started noticing something was up a few weeks ago. When we went to get the babies from their cribs every morning, we would find Leah had scooted herself down so that her feet were against the "foot" of the crib, and that Riley had scooted herself up so that her head was against the "head" of the crib. And then we would notice that when we left them on the floor and took our eyes off them for a minute, we would then find them in a slightly different spot or oriented at a 45 degree angle from where we had left them. Until about a week ago, we had never really witnessed how they were pulling off this little magic trick.

We've discovered now that they actually use completely opposite methods. Leah swings her legs up suddenly and then lets the momentum rotate her around, like break-dancers do when they do that cool spinning-on-their-back move. Except that instead of making ten or twelve rotations like the break-dancers do, Leah does like one-tenth of a rotation or something. She does this four or five times in a row, and suddenly she's moved over a foot or so and is lying at a 90 degree angle from where you left her, lying there with a big grin on her face that says "look what I did!"

Riley's method is kinda hard to explain, but Kathy and I call it the "crab walk". Basically she arches her back off the ground so that she's basically supported by her head and her feet, sort of an "upward-facing dog" kinda yoga position. Then she pushes off with her feet so that she basically ends up scooting about one inch up toward her heard. It's kind of like how an inchworm would move, if the inchworm were upside down or dyslexic or something.

So in other words, Leah scoots herself by making herself into a letter "U", and Riley scoots herself by making herself into an upside-down letter "U". Or a lower case "n", I guess. The twins are apparently trying so hard to have their own identities that they are twisting themselves into opposite letters of the alphabet.

Anyway, watching these little maneuvers, you can't help wondering whether it's actually worth all that trouble for poor Leah and Riley just to move six inches in one direction. It all seems like a lot of work for not much gain. The view from six inches away can't be that different, can it? I mean, really, why bother? Is lying at the center of the crib really all that distasteful?

My second reaction to watching the babies scooting is, basically, "oh crap." One of our only saving graces as parents of twins has been that we can put one of the babies somewhere and they'll basically stay there in that spot while we tend to the other baby. If you take that away from us, things could get really difficult real fast. We think taking care of two babies is tough now - just wait until we have one parent trying to keep an eye on two babies as they scoot away in two different directions. Life will become a hopeless game of whack-a-mole, except they're, um, babies instead of moles, and um, we won't actually be hitting our babies with a large rubber mallet. But you get the idea. I think. Okay, bad metaphor.

How to Clear Out a Restaurant

This weekend, Kathy and I took the babies out to brunch with some friends of ours that also have twin babies. Kathy and I used to love eating out in San Francisco and we went out to restaurants all the time before we had kids, but we really haven't eaten out with Leah and Riley much since about three months ago when they stopped sleeping through everything. I was a little apprehensive but sort of curious about how it would go.

It went....poorly.

We went to the worst brunch restaurant in our neighborhood. I'm not saying that out of bitterness because we had a bad meal there this weekend. I mean to say that we consciously decided to go to the worst brunch restaurant in our neighborhood because we knew that there wouldn't be very many people there, meaning that (a) we would definitely be able to get a table for "eight", and (b) there would be fewer people giving us dirty looks when the babies inevitably started crying.

It's a little weird going out with lots of babies, because you can't just ask for a table for four -- you have to be ultra-specific: we are four adults, plus we have two babies who need high chairs, plus we have two babies who are going to sit in their stroller so we need to have space next to the table. Usually when we walk into a restaurant with the twins, there's some initial cooing over the babies by the hostess or the waitress or something, but the restaurant people were clearly having a bad day, because they were having none of that. Perhaps sensing the hostile atmosphere, Leah started whining almost immediately, pretty much right as we got handed the menus.

It was pretty much downhill from there. Leah started crying. Riley started crying. We tried to feed them. We tried to soothe them, we passed them back and forth, we held them, we bounced them on our knee, we lifted them over our head, we did whatever the heck we could think of to calm them down. Each thing we tried would work for about 45 seconds, after which they would start crying again. So that meant that each conversation topic would get cut off after 45 seconds, which led to a whole lot of incomplete conversations. Plus, I discovered that it's hard for my brain to keep a conversation going while I'm simultaneously lifting a baby over my head and making googly-eyed faces.

About two-thirds through the meal, I looked around, and the restaurant that had been about half full when we entered was, and I'm not exaggerating here, completely empty except for us. I mean, everyone was gone. On the one hand, I felt embarrassed that our babies had apparently been so obnoxious that they had driven all the customers away. On the other hand, I felt an undeniable sense of relief that we didn't have to worry about disturbing anybody anymore.

A few minutes later, I found out that the reason why the restaurant was empty is that they had closed the kitchen due to some sort of odd kitchen mishap where the cook cut his finger off or something. I am, of course, glad that our babies had not actually driven away the customers with their screaming, but I'm hoping that the cook's injury didn't have anything to do with Leah's high-pitched screech as the cook was slicing my chicken apple sausage.

So, to summarize. Terrible meal, horrible service, 45-second conversations with crying spells in between, and as a bonus we may have caused a cook to lose a finger and a restaurant to lose a day's worth of business. All in a day's work. Ta-da!

Split Personalities

As parents of twins, life isn't always easy, but we do get one major advantage over single-baby parents in that we get to watch the progression of two little personalities as they simultaneously develop. People we talk to usually want us to compare their personalities, talking about how they're the same and how they're different.

I always have trouble answering that one. I mean, what does "personality" mean for a baby, anyway? Especially in the first three months or so, people would ask me that, and I would struggle to make up an interesting answer. Um, well, Leah likes to eat and um, Riley drools a lot. Are "hungry" and "drool-y" personality traits? And um, what about "poopy"? 'Cause those babies sure can poop with the best of 'em.

Even now, the babies each have individual traits, but I sometimes wonder if we sometimes just project personalities on them that aren't really there. Like, Leah has this high-pitched squeal that sounds like an 11-year old girl on a roller-coaster or at a Jonas Brothers concert or something. People hear this sound and say - aw, that Leah is absolutely adorable. They think, that Leah sure is a fun-loving, excitable, free-spirited personality. Except Kathy and I know from experience that Leah makes this squeal not only when she's happy but also when she's super-exhausted or extremely grumpy. When she's tired, she'll squeal over and over in earsplitting fashion, and the squeal turns darker and more sinister, until it finally starts to sound like something out of horror movie. And suddenly, Leah doesn't seem quite so fun-loving and free-sprited anymore.

Longtime readers of the blog know that Riley has always been the more "challenging" of the two babies. I've talked at great lengths about how Riley freaks out easily and how she goes from happy to frantic without warning and how she's impossible to calm down. Kathy and I had gotten so used to thinking that Riley was the more difficult baby that it took us a month or so to realize that it's not really true anymore. For weeks and weeks now, Riley has been a happy, calm little angel, and Leah has actually become the more difficult baby to put to bed, the more difficult baby to calm down, and recently even the more difficult baby to feed. But because we had this image of Leah being such a carefree soul, we didn't really notice that the babies have now switched places and that Leah is now the "challenging" one.

So now part of that whole vision I had in my mind of my daughters personalities is shot to hell. Next, you'll be telling me that Riley's not actually drool-y.

Nah. There are some things in life that just don't change.

Stupid Consonants

Lately, Kathy and I have developed a somewhat unhealthy obsession with baby milestones. I think it started at the babies' six-month checkup, when they gave us a long checklist of things that a six-month-old should be able to do. The first twenty or so things on the list were things Leah and Riley have been doing for awhile, so we were feeling pretty good. But then we hit Number 21.

21. Can baby pass items from one hand to the other?

Huh? Passing things from one hand to the other is a milestone? If I had known that I probably would've been paying closer attention. I dunno - do they pass things from one hand to the other? They're babies. Why would they want to pass something from one hand to the other? Do they need to pay for something at a drive-thru window or something? What about if they have something in both hands and they take away one of their hands -- does that count? Actually, pretty much everything that Leah and Riley pick up these days goes from their hand directly to their mouth. Does it count if they something goes from their hand to their mouth and then to their other hand? Because I'm pretty sure that happens all the time.

And then we got to Number 24:

24. Can baby say consonant-vowel combinations like "ba-ba" or "ga-ga"?

Leah and Riley have made all kinds of consonant sounds, but it usually only happens when they're trying to make a vowel sound but they have their hand or something in their mouth so it comes out like a consonant. Do hand-assisted consonant sounds qualify? Does a raspberry sound count as a consonant? How about a tongue-clicking sound -- I'm pretty sure that's considered a consonant sound in some African cultures. How about barfing? I think Leah makes an "bleeeh" sound when she spits up -- that's two consonants right there.

So anyway, Kathy and I have now become obsessed with getting Leah and Riley to check these two milestones off their list, lest they fall woefully behind their peers. Watching more closely, we saw that they actually pass things from hand to hand all the time. Who knew? Item 21 - check.

So that leaves the "ba-ba" item. For the past couple weeks, I've been repeating "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba" over and over and over again in the hope that they'll get the hint. They don't say "ba-ba" back, but they do think Daddy saying it is fricking hilarious. Nowadays, the quickest way to get the twins to smile is for Daddy to say "Bah!" over and over like an idiot. So we may be no closer now to checking that milestone off our list, but at least we now have a handy way to make Leah or Riley smile. But I'm okay with that for now -- I've learned you've gotta take your victories where you can get 'em.

Twin Sync

Like most sleep-deprived parents of newborns, Kathy and I bought all those books about how to train your baby to sleep longer at night. Of course, we immediately turned to the chapter about the first three months, because that's all we cared about at the time. Imagine our disappointment when we found that the advice in all the books basically amounted to: "put your babies to sleep when they're tired, and feed them when they cry -- there's nothing you can do to make them sleep longer because they're too young". Yeah, thanks a lot, we could've figured that out without forking over thirty bucks to Amazon.com.

Then after three months, the gods smiled upon us, and the twins suddenly transformed into darn good nighttime sleepers. After four months, they were pretty much sleeping 11 or 12 hours through the night without much intervention from mommy and daddy. The books sat mostly unread on our coffee table. Amazon, you're welcome.

One other obvious thing I remember seeing in the books somewhere was the old adage "never wake a sleeping baby". I always thought that seemed like pretty obvious and easy-to-follow advice, but that was before I had twins. During the early months, we were constantly waking up our sleeping babies. Basically, whenever one baby woke up from a nap, we would wake the other one up so that Leah and Riley would stay on the same schedule. Otherwise, they would be on alternating schedules, meaning that at least one of them would always be awake, meaning that the parents would get no rest. Because it's generally considered bad form for parents to go to sleep and let the wakeful baby fend for herself. Alas.

Nowadays, we don't usually wake the babies because they do the job for us. Or Riley does the job for us. After every nap, Riley wakes up and starts babbling in an elevated voice that she knows is just loud enough to wake her sister from her slumber. So Leah wakes up, and just like that, Leah and Riley start babbling in unison in a song that says "Come and pay attention to us, mommy and daddy, or we'll start screaming, and you'll be sorry". Or at least that's what I think they're saying. Gotta check my Baby-to-English dictionary.

So generally, Leah and Riley are pretty much on the same schedule. Except for this past weekend, when Leah was a little out of sorts and somehow ended up an hour off-schedule from Riley. For the rest of the day, Leah and Riley were on alternating schedules. It was sort of like having only one baby, except it was one crazy insomniac baby who never sleeps. I had been kind of curious how it would be, having only one child up at a time, and I have to say, I did not like it one bit. It was actually kinda creepy to have only one baby there when you're used to having two. I spent the afternoon with the nagging feeling that somebody was missing. Part of my brain was in a constant state of thinking "oh my God, where's the other baby, we've lost the other baby!"

Part of my brain is sorta stupid.

Plus it was totally exhausting to not have a break all afternoon, to constantly have to be "on" for hours upon hours. Oh well, at least now I sorta know what it would be like to have only one baby - if that baby was some sort of cyborg, non-sleeping, Energizer-bunny baby.

And now, a picture of Leah and Riley in a circle of 6-month olds at the neighborhood easter egg hunt. Please note how nobody else in the circle has cheeks that can hold a candle to Leah and Riley's. All hail the cheeks!

Married... with Twins

One of the things that all the twin parenting books warn you about is that having twins supposedly causes some major strain on your marriage. I read somewhere that the divorce rate among parents of twins is twice as high as the divorce rate among other couples with children. There are actually entire books written about the subject, including this one. I love some of the chapter titles:

• My Husband Says He Feels Like He's in Prison!
• My Son Likes to Play Dress-Up as a Girl and My Husband is Freaking Out About It!
• I Kicked Out My Angry Husband!
• Cell Mates or Soul Mates? Five Steps to Get the Love Back

You gotta love chapter titles that have exclamation points. Makes you feel like you're watching Jerry Springer.

Considering we're exhausted all the time, Kathy and I aren't doing too bad so far, or at least I think we're still soul mates and not cell mates. But we do have the occasional fights, most of which fall into one of two categories:

Fight #1 -- Dave doesn't know how to put the babies' clothes on: About 50% of our fights will start when Kathy discovers that I've committed some kind of twin clothing infraction, such as (a) putting a baby's clothing on backwards or inside out, or (b) putting one of the twins to bed with her bib still on, or (c) [and I have to preface this by saying this ONLY happened ONCE] putting on a baby's pajamas but forgetting to put on her diaper underneath the pajamas. In Kathy's world, the clothing infraction falls into the category of crimes against humanity. All evil that later befalls the twins throughout the day is a direct result of the clothing infraction. Is Leah acting fussy? Clearly it's because her daddy put on her socks too loosely. Riley crying in her stroller? Obviously, she's upset because daddy put her hat on sideways.

I have to admit that I am severely clothing-putting-on impaired. It takes me forever to put the babies outfits on in the morning, and no matter how hard I try, I usually manage to do at least one thing wrong. But in fairness, I do the same thing with my own clothing. I head out the door all the time with my shirt untucked or sweater on inside-out or backwards. The part of my brain that notices clothing is just plain missing. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what outfits our babies wore today, but that doesn't mean I don't care about my daughters. Without looking, I can't even tell you what I'm wearing right now. Hey, what do you know, sweatpants!

Fight #2 -- Dave didn't hear what Kathy said the first time: Kathy's a New Yorker and by nature talks pretty fast. And of course, having twins makes every spare moment of the day all the more precious, so nowadays, Kathy talks even more super-rapid-fire than usual, like one of the Gilmore Girls. So, my poor laid-back California ears miss stuff. Unfortunately, when mommy's panicked because the babies are waking up and she needs daddy to help her by doing something QUICKLY, asking her to repeat something once or twice doesn't go over too well. Here's how the exchange usually goes:

Kathy (from across the house): Dave, can you [wah-WAAH-wah-WAH-WAH-WAAAH]

Dave (shifting brain out of internet-surfing haze): What?

K: I need you to [wah-WAH-wah-WAH]

D: (pausing as his brain furiously tries to catch up to Kathy's brain)

D: (pausing further as his brain tries to go through the various possibilities of what Kathy MIGHT have just asked for)

D: (pausing further as he realizes it's a lost cause)

D (nervously): Ummmmm. What?

K: (defeated sigh) Never mind, I'll do it myself.

I guess these fights aren't too bad, all things considered. In the end, all the strain really ends up being outweighed by that weird bonding that comes from the shared exhaustion mixed with satisfaction we feel at the end of each day. And anyway, any prison that features these three women can't be all that bad.

Who's the Favorite?

As the father of two daughters, I constantly find myself trying to avoid favoring one over the other, but it's so dang hard not to have a favorite, when the babies themselves show such obvious favoritism. Leah is a mommy's girl all the way, and has been since birth (I think that for Leah, the whole mommy-equals-food association was pretty much the game-clincher). But right now, Riley only has eyes for daddy.

Somehow, whatever I do right now, Riley seems to think it's pretty freaking hilarious. I say the word "Ba!" -- Riley giggles. I say the word "Mmmm-Ba!" - Riley laughs heartily. I say the word "Mmmm-Ba!" while simultaneously scrunching my eyes up and shaking my head from side to side -- Riley laughs uncontrollably, gasping for breath. What a great audience! Thanks, Riley, and don't forget to tip your wait-staff on the way out.

Riley is also a humungoid Peek-a-Boo fan. I should track down the person who invented Peek-a-Boo and send him or her a fruitcake or a bottle of wine or something, because that game truly has some sort of voodoo power over Riley. Even if she was just crying her eyes out three minutes ago, I can start playing Peek-a-Boo with her and she'll suddenly get all glowy-eyed and giggly. She actually vibrates (literally vibrates!) with anticipation when she senses a Peek-a-Boo game coming on. It's like Riley's version of crack. And since Kathy doesn't have the patience to play Peek-a-Boo for the twenty minutes straight that it takes to satisfy Riley, that means that I am the official designated Peek-a-Booer, and that in itself is enough to make Riley the head of the daddy fan-club.

Leah, I can tell, doesn't quite see what all the fuss is about. She likes daddy and Peek-a-Boo well enough and all, but the thing that makes her eyes glowy is when mommy walks into the room. So unfair. I've got to play Peek-a-Boo and make faces and hop around the room like an idiot all day for Riley's affection, but Kathy gets Leah's undying adulation by just walking into the room. Oh, I guess she did do that nine months of carrying them around thing. And that whole labor thing. And that breastfeeding thing. And...

Okay, Kathy wins. I can't compete with that.