The Wave

Over the past week or so, we've had a couple of bad days with the girls where they haven't been their usual chipper selves for some reason. Leah's had a bit of a cold lately and has occasionally been waking up from naps crying as if someone were trying to kill her. Which of course freaks Riley out just a bit and so we end up with a not-so-great start to the afternoon. This is what happened to us yesterday afternoon as I was at home with the girls covering for our nanny who had the day off. After this inauspicious start, the girls just generally didn't feel like cooperating with daddy, so everything that afternoon -- bottle-feeding, food-feeding, getting them into the stroller, whatever -- was just a little more difficult than it usually is. And so as the afternoon dragged on and I waited desperately for Kathy to get home, I was feeling more and more frustrated and defeated.

I think the girls can somehow sense when daddy's almost at the end of his rope, because at times like these, one of the girls will usually throw daddy a bone. I had Riley on the floor on her tummy and was holding her favorite plastic fish in front of her trying to get her to reach for it. I do this occasionally to try to encourage her to crawl, but neither of our girls has shown much interest in learning how to crawl yet. But in this instance, for some reason, Riley desperately wanted to grab this fish, and she started trying everything she could think of to try to get closer to that fish. First she started doing this weird breaststroke-like swimming motion. When that didn't work, she lifted her butt up and pulled herself into this crouching-tiger position. Then with a mighty "gggggggga" sound, she lunged after the fish, but she got the motion wrong so she ended up propelling herself backward, and face-planting into the ground.

It was pretty much the cutest thing you ever saw in your life. It's one of those moments where the cuteness totally bowls you over and knocks you down, like a wave at the beach that comes out of nowhere. This was a cuteness tsunami, basically.

Raising twins is frequently exhausting, but one of the best things about it is that we get twice as many moments like this as we would with one baby. We get a whole bunch of these moments, although most of them would sound mundane or stupid if I tried to describe them in this blog, but trust me, they're fricking cute. But dammit, we NEED twice the number of these moments, because these moments are what sustain us. They're like food to our famished souls, or like water to our parched souls, or like -- um, something else to our something souls. Ran out of analogies there, but you get the idea. We need 'em.

Here's to getting knocked over again...