...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.