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?