The Golden Age

Leah and Riley are now eight months old, and the general consensus among parents that we talk to is that this is supposedly one of the easiest and most fun ages for children. Eight months is old enough for the kids to play and laugh and smile and to generally be adorably cute, but it's still too young for them to be able to get into much trouble or injure themselves or others too badly.

So far I've got to agree with the parent consensus. Kathy and I have been realizing lately that this past week that we're kinda living in the Leah-and-Riley Golden Age right now. The girls are generally sleeping 11 hours through the night, they're eagerly eating the food we're feeding them, they're taking two solid long naps most days, and the inexplicable periods of fussiness are fewer and farther between.

And when I've had to take care of the girls by myself recently, of course it's still tiring, but it's no longer the life-draining, painstaking ordeal that it used to be. It no longer leaves me a sad, lifeless, defeated lump at the end of the night. I'm not quite sure if that it means that I'm getting better at this twin parent thing or if they're getting easier. My money says they're getting easier.

But there are definitely a few lessons I've learned in the past few months about how to take care of twins when you're by yourself:

1. When bottle-feeding both babies at the same time, you need to switch your focus back and forth between babies every few seconds. Otherwise, the baby you're not watching will move her head and the bottle nipple will go astray, and you'll eventually find out that you've been holding the bottle over the bridge of Riley's nose for the past 45 seconds and there's a big pool of milk on her forehead. Not that that's ever happened to me. No.
   
2. Any activity that can simultaneously entertain both babies is a winner. Even if it makes daddy look like an idiot. Because the only people who know that daddy's making an ass of himself again are eight months old, and they have no social standards yet. (I mean, they still grunt loudly when they're taking a poop in public -- daddy stopped doing that decades ago.)
3. Conserve energy. I used to jump, hop, and leap around the room to try to keep the girls smiling and entertained. That usually worked for about five minutes, after which the girls would get totally bored with daddy's antics, and daddy himself would be totally wiped out and in need of oxygen - with no energy and still another long hour to go before the babies' next nap. I've realized that in the long run it's much smarter to just say - hey Leah, you chew on this burp-cloth for five minutes while daddy eats this granola bar. Leah finds it just as entertaining and daddy gets an energy-boosting snack!
   
4. When all else fails, just kill time by putting the girls in a stroller and going for a walk.

The bad thing about living in the Golden Age is that you realize that it can't last forever. Pretty soon, Leah and Riley will be crawling in different directions and I'll be frantically running after them to keep them from causing property damage or personal injury. And I will think back to when they were eight months old, and I'll think -- ah, those were the days.