Splish Splash, Version 2.0

This past weekend, we went on our first official trip away from home with the girls -- to a little cabin in Pioneer, California. Which is a town that you haven't heard of unless maybe you accidentally drove through it at some point when you were lost, but it's kind of in the Sierra Foothills, in Gold Country. In this case, the exact destination wasn't particularly important -- the important thing was that we were going to stay in a place that wasn't our house, which is something we had yet to do during Leah and Riley's lifetime. And something that we were pretty much scared to death about.

In the end, the trip went okay. Let's give it a solid B-plus. We have to subtract some points because Riley got carsick and puked mightily all over herself, the backseat, her carseat, and poor defenseless Jacque the Peacock as we drove to the lake for an afternoon swim. A nice little pungent bright-red tomato and carrot puke, causing mommy and daddy to have to try to frantically change and wipe their daughter clean while she lay screaming on a mat on the shoulder of Highway 88 in 98-degree heat with Leah simultaneously crying in her carseat just to register her own indignation that nobody was paying attention to her.

I'm sure if you're a parent you already know this, but wow, going on vacation with babies sure isn't the same as going on vacation with just your significant other. There should be a different word for it, other than "vacation", because that doesn't really seem like the appropriate word. Um, bacation?

It's not that I didn't enjoy our bacation, because I definitely did. But I didn't exactly come back from bacation refreshed and rejuvenated, like I would after a typical vacation. After this trip, I was pretty much a worn-out, sleepy, sore, exhausted mess. I needed a vacation to recover from my bacation.

But it was worth it, because somehow all that seemed to really matter is whether the babies were having a good time, and they most definitely were, at least most of the time. It was damn hot in Gold Country and our cabin wasn't air conditioned, but that just gave us an excuse to sit with the girls in the outdoor jacuzzi for hours, as they joyfully splashed and splashed and splashed away until bedtime. (You know it's hot out when a jacuzzi feels refreshingly cool.) Plus there was an undeniable sense of accomplishment at the end of our bacation, like we had finally faced up to this thing that had once seemed so scary and found that it wasn't quite as scary as we had thought it would be. Exhausting and barfy, maybe, but not all that worthy of fear.

And for the record, good times were had at the lake once we finally wiped off all that tomatoey barf.

Splish Splash

Leah and Riley are starting to get a little too big for their infant bathtub, so Kathy has recently been pushing for us to start giving them baths in our bathtub. She got the bright idea that we should put them both in the bathtub at the same time so that they could play together while we give them a bath. This didn’t seem like a very good plan to me. I mean, giving one baby a bath is fairly challenging, because they squirm and splash and slip around. The thought of giving two squirmy, splashy, and slippery babies a bath at the same time in a big ol’ bathtub scared the bejeebers out of me. I had this nightmare scenario in my head where both babies simultaneously slip and they bonk their heads together and then fall face down in the water and I’ve got to reach down and grab these slippery babies out of the water before they both drown. I mean, I have a hard enough time keeping hold of the soap during my morning shower – I certainly can’t be expected to snatch a 20-pound awkwardly-shaped bar of soap with each hand on a moment’s notice, can I?

But Kathy is impressively stubborn about certain things, so in the end she won out. She convinced me it would be fine if we were both there, each washing and keeping an eye on a single baby. So despite being filled with dread, I reluctantly agreed to try this double-bath idea on a trial basis, and this Saturday night was our first trial. It was quite the experience.

Immediately after they touched down in the water for the first time, Leah and Riley started giggling and splashing. And when I say they were giggling, I mean they were giggling non-stop. And when I say giggling non-stop, I mean that they were giggling continuously without even pausing to breathe, except for the occasional mid-laugh croak-y gasping-for-air thing. And when I say they were splashing, I mean they were basically twin Energizer Bunnies, except instead of beating that drum over and over, they were joyfully flapping their arms up and down, triumphantly slapping the water over and over and over and over. The giggling and splashing was occasionally punctuated by these high-pitched, piercing squeals of delight – the kind that sounds like a pack of ten-year-old girls riding a roller coaster while simultaneously watching a Hannah Montana concert.

A couple times, the girls did actually slide and fall awkwardly into the water. We snatched them up quickly and waited expectantly for them to start crying, but in both cases, they just resumed giggling and splashing right where they left off. The giggling and splashing didn’t let up for a good ten minutes. During that time, mommy and daddy intermittently tried to actually wash their babies, with very little success.

So, in the end, the bath was a complete and utter failure under the "getting babies clean" criterion, but a resounding success under the "soaking parents clothes", "splitting parents eardrums" and "making our babies blissfully happy" criteria. And of course, you can probably guess which criterion wins out in that little competition.

Slow Blog Day

My sister’s always trying to get me post more home movies on this blog, but I’ve generally been resisting it. I think the main reason is because I think that most home movies are boring as all hell. Not just everybody else's home movies, but my home movies too. Since the girls were born, I’ve taken hours and hours of footage, most of which I can't even get myself to sit down and watch. When I do end up watching it, I find it usually consists of one or both of the girls staring at the camera with a kinda puzzled look on their face that says “Why is daddy holding that thing with the blinky red light in front of his face?"

It's as if the video camera seems to have some sort of magical power over the babies that suddenly makes them boring. It doesn't matter if the girls are singing showtunes and doing backflips -- as soon as I take out the video camera and point it at them, they suddenly go silent and motionless, as if the camera were some sort of weirdly-shaped baby-paralyzer gun. Basically, my girls are that frog on the WB cartoons.

So if I'm the girls' father and I can't stand to sit through the videos for more than a couple minutes, I can’t in good conscience subject anybody else to it. That would just be cruel and unusual punishment.

But I'm gonna do it anyway. My apologies.

In my defense: (1) these two videos are really short, (2) they're really the cream of the crop -- I hereby certify that these are the least boring videos in our collection, and (3) I'm coming up dry today on blog topics. The first video is from a couple weeks ago and shows Leah and Riley cracking each other up from across the room, and the second video is from this weekend and shows Riley discovering that she can scoot herself backwards.

Enjoy. Or, more appropriately, I'm sorry.

Bad is Bad

Recently, Kathy and I have been in a nice little parenting groove. For the past couple months, Leah and Riley have been pretty darn happy campers -- sleeping well, eating well, pooping well, playing well. I wouldn’t say it’s gotten “easy” exactly, but we’ve gotten to the point where we sorta feel like we almost know what we’re doing. And of course you know what happens when you start to think you know what you’re doing…

Yep, this weekend, the other shoe dropped. And man, was it a big shoe. A big, Shaquille O’Neal sized shoe. A big, Shaquille O’Neal sized shoe filled with diarrhea and vomit. There's a nice image for you. Sorry about that.

Anyway, Leah and Riley both came down with some sort of stomach virus this weekend, and the results were most unpleasant. Unpleasant as in I got vomited on three times this weekend and got poop on me more times than I care to count. This weekend marks the first time in my life I’ve had to clean vomit out of my hair and from behind my ears. And for the record, I don’t recommend it.

This weekend reminded me of sitting through a really horrible movie, like, say, Grease 2. At first, the movie is bad, and it’s physically painful to sit through. But then the movie gets so bad that it becomes funny, and you find yourself laughing at all the horribleness. But eventually the horribleness reaches a point where it’s just, well, horrible, and that’s when it really gets painful. You sit there with your Adrian-Zmed-induced headache getting worse and worse until you finally decide to end the pain by either running screaming out of the theater or hurling your DVD player out the window.

This weekend was just like that. When Leah first vomited on me, it was, let’s face it, gross. Then things started spiraling more and more out of control. We’d just finish cleaning up after Leah, and immediately Riley would make a mess, so we’d clean up that mess, and immediately Leah would make a mess again, and so we’d have to clean up that. And so on and so on in an infinite loop. By the time Leah vomited on me the second time, I wasn’t really grossed out anymore, and the whole situation had become so off-the-chart ridiculous that it just became funny.

What made it funnier to me is that Leah and Riley weren’t the least bit unhappy about the whole thing. They weren’t actually acting sick at all. They would be smiling and babbling, then they’d pause for a few seconds to vomit all over the room like the Exorcist girl, then they’d grin sheepishly and go back to smiling and babbling. It was all quite adorable, if you don't count the whole vomiting and explosive diarrhea thing.

Even with the whole cuteness thing factored in, cleaning up vomit and poo gets old very fast, and by the time I got barfed on for the third time, I felt thoroughly and completely defeated. I wanted to just climb into bed and pull the covers over my head and wait for it all to go away. Except I couldn’t because I would've gotten baby-vomit all over the bed.

But then, finally, mercifully, the weekend came to an end. Like all bad movies do, even the one whose name we shall not mention.

Point, Da-Da

Kathy is always accusing me of being too competitive. In our pre-baby days, we would play board games against each other some nights, and Kathy would usually lose because I grew up playing these board games all the time. And in the aftermath of another loss, as I tried to keep myself from gloating, Kathy would glare at me and say “You’re so freaking competitive”. Although sometimes she would use a different word for “freaking”.

I have to admit that I’m fairly competitive, but I always thought that Kathy calling me competitive was like the Pot turning to the Kettle and saying “You’re so freaking black”. After you’ve known Kathy awhile, you realize that she is actually very competitive about things that she decides to be competitive about. The babies, it turns out, are one of those things.

The girls are now 9 months old, and although the books say that many babies start crawling around 8 to 9 months, Leah and Riley are not yet crawling. This is driving Kathy bonkers. Never mind that the books also say that some perfectly healthy babies don’t learn to crawl until 10 to 12 months and that some babies actually never learn to crawl. Never mind, also, that our lives are going to get a heckuva lot more difficult when the babies do actually learn to crawl and that all the parents of crawling babies tell us to enjoy this time while we can. Mommy sees all the other babies crawling, so she wants her babies to crawl because dammit, we’re getting left behind here, girls.

When we meet parents at the playground or through other friends, the first thing Kathy will do is find out (a) how old their baby is, and (b) if he/she is crawling yet. Whenever the mother says that her baby is older than Leah and Riley and is NOT crawling yet, I find it fun to watch Kathy try to keep a straight face when I know that her gleeful heart is saying "Yessssss!". And the other day, when we were listening to a mother talk about how her babies had started crawling at 6 months, you could almost see the dark cloud of bitterness and envy raining down over Kathy’s head, complete with little lightning bolts.

I have to admit, though, that my competitive side was pretty pumped last week when I won the ever-so-prestigious "ma-ma" versus "da-da" competition. That's right, folks. Leah and Riley have both started saying "da-da" on a consistent basis, and much to Kathy's dismay, we've yet to hear from "ma-ma". I realize on some level that the fact the girls said "da-da" before "ma-ma" doesn't mean anything except that they happen to like the way the letter"D" sounds better than the way the letter "M" sounds. But I'd be lying if I said that part of me isn't secretly gloating, saying "in your face, ma-ma!" and doing a little touchdown-style dance of joy. "Secretly" being the key word, because I wouldn't want Kathy to think I'm competitive or anything.

And For My Next Trick...

Everyone knows that taking care of infants can get a little mind-numbing sometimes, but I’ve found that one way to keep things entertaining is to teach the babies little “tricks”, and then watch them perform those tricks again and again even though they have no idea what they mean.

My first triumph was teaching Leah to clap. One day, I just applauded at everything Leah and Riley did, and then, presto, the next day, Leah was suddenly applauding at everything she saw. The cat walks in the room: Leah applauds and says “aaay!” Daddy spills food on the floor: Leah applauds and says “aaay!” Daddy opens Leah’s diaper and finds a foul-smelling surprise: Leah applauds and says “aaay!” Of course, Leah has no idea what applause means, so she doesn’t always applaud at the appropriate times, but who cares -- you cannot deny its cuteness, and as a party trick, it never fails to get a room full of people to applaud and say “aaay!" So it's a win-win.

Next was waving. Waving didn’t work quite as well. I did the same thing and pretty much waved at Leah and Riley all the time for a couple days. Leah has kinda started to wave now, but she doesn’t have the motion quite right yet, so she has the weird, two-handed wave that basically looks like she’s trying to do jazz hands. Plus I think I overdid the waving thing a little, so she doesn’t quite understand at all that you’re only supposed to wave when you’re greeting people or saying goodbye. So basically, Leah now does jazz hands at one minute intervals, all day, every day.

The nice thing about having twins is that you only have to teach the trick to one of the girls, because you know that the other girl is gonna pick it up from her sister, just by baby-osmosis. Sure enough, two days after Leah learned to clap at everything, Riley started to clap. So now, we have two girls who applaud everything their parents do. Which is an undeniably nice little ego boost, for some reason. It's nice to get applauded, even by babies who don't know what the hell they're doing.

Unfortunately this also means that I now have two girls that do jazz hands all the time instead of waving. If this keeps up, it might turn into somewhat of a social impediment, but hey, I gotta think there’s a possible future out there for a 1920s-style jazz dancing twin duo, don’t you?