Happy Birthday to You and You

Leah and Riley turn one this Friday and we've got their birthday party coming up on Saturday. I've been to a few 1-year-old birthday parties now and I find them to be fascinating little curiosities. Are there any other times in life when the guest of honor at a party has absolutely no idea that they're the guest of honor and no idea what the hell is being celebrated? Okay, besides a funeral?

It all must seem very random to the 1-year old who has no idea that he/she has done anything worth celebrating. I enjoy watching the face of the 1-year-old as he or she sits in front of the cake during the Happy Birthday song. Total blankness and non-comprehension. It would make one heckuva poker face. I like to think about what's going through the 1-year-old's head during the Happy Birthday song. Hm - there are a bunch of people gathered around me that I don't recognize, and, um, they are all smiling at me and singing some song I've never heard, and, um, somebody has now shoved a block-shaped thing in front of me that has a picture of Mickey Mouse on it, and um, the block appears to be on fire, but nobody seems to be very concerned about the fire, and, okay, now they're done singing, and now they're clapping and they're looking at me like they're expecting for me to do something. Um--Line?

Babies never really seem to "enjoy" their first birthday parties, and yet parents always insist on throwing them. I never understood why before, but now that my daughters are turning one, I totally get it. 1-year-old birthday parties are not really for the kids -- 1-year-olds don't give a damn about cake or presents or birthday songs or picture-taking strangers. No, the purpose of the 1-year-old birthday party is to celebrate the fact that the parents made it through the year without breaking down or causing injury to themselves or their children.

And I think the importance of this celebration is even greater when there are twins involved. Not to toot our own horn or anything, but getting Leah and Riley to age 1 was pretty darn hard. Not impossible, and not hard all the time, and there were periods where it was actually kinda easy, but overall, it was a pretty difficult and tiring year. A great year, an incredibly rewarding year, but a tiring year nonetheless. I think we've earned some sort of celebration. Heck, Kathy went through twin pregnancy and twin labor and twin non-Ceasarian delivery on top of it, so I'd say she's earned a ticker-tape parade down Market Street, but hey, I think she's willing to settle for some Mitchell's ice cream cake.

I'm fresh out of ticker-tape, but I'm hoping that Leah and Riley will join me on Friday in saying a few words of congratulations to their mom for doing such a great job over the past year. Or as they'll probably put it,: "Dah! Pbbbbthhhh! Meh! Bibibibidibibidibi. Doi-doi-doi. [Clapping.] Dah!"

We made it, Kathy. Now all we have to do is, um, survive the toddler years. How hard could that possibly be?

Wait, don't answer that.

Do I Have to Separate You Two?

Raising twin infant daughters is hard work and all, but supposedly the upside is that once the girls get to a certain age, everything gets SO much easier because they can entertain each other and you need to spend as much energy making sure they don't get bored. I'm not really sure when this "certain age" is supposed to hit, but lemme tell ya, it ain't gonna hit any time soon.

So far, I'd say things are moving in the wrong direction. Here's an approximate timeline on how Leah and Riley interactions have progressed over the past months:

• Phase 1 (Months 0 through 5): Leah and Riley ignore each other.
• Phase 2 (Months 6 through 9): Leah and Riley ignore each other, unless Sister A is holding the toy that Sister B covets at that time, in which case Sister B yanks the toy from Sister A and makes Sister A cry.
• Phase 3 (Months 10 and 11): Whatever toy that Sister A is holding now automatically becomes the toy that Sister B will covet, no matter how undesirable that toy was to Sister B ten seconds ago when it was just sitting there in front of her. It doesn't matter if Leah is holding a blue rectangular block and Riley is also holding a blue rectangular block of exactly the same dimensions - Riley will discard her blue block, crawl over to Leah, and unceremoniously yank Leah's highly superior blue block out of her hands.
• Phase 4 (Month 12): See Phase 3, but as an added bonus, Leah will now occasionally go into "affectionate twin sister" mode, which sounds great in theory but, trust me, it ain't all that. This is because Leah typically displays affection in one of three ways:

1. Leah yanks Riley's head into her lap, rubs her head against Riley's, and giggles. This, I know, sounds incredibly cute -- and it was mighty cute the first couple times she did it. But babies aren't very coordinated, so if you think about it, this maneuver basically amounts to Leah grabbing Riley's head and head-butting it, then giggling. Riley liked it the first two times, then grudgingly tolerated it the next few times, and then yesterday let out a yowl of protest and gave Leah a look that roughly translated to "get your big ol' noggin away from me, ya freak!"
2. Leah coos and gently holds Riley's face with one hand... and then pokes her finger into Riley's eye with the other hand. Riley's starting to get wise to that maneuver too.
3. Leah coos and sticks her hand into Riley's mouth, then Mommy and Daddy scramble to pull Leah's hand out of Riley's mouth before Riley decides to use her hand as a teething toy.
   

So Kathy and I currently spend a lot of our time trying to decide whether we should intervene and keep Leah and Riley from inflicting injury upon each other, or just stand back and let whatever's going to happen happen, in the hopes that over time our girls will learn valuable lessons such as the value of sharing and compromise. And um, ya know, don't stick your hand into Riley's mouth, for Pete's sake. Girl's got some jaws on her.

So far, our lessons have been going out the window, 'cause we're always breaking down and intervening. So, if some kindergartener ends up biting Leah's hand off and Leah grows up with a stump where her hand should be and everybody in school calls her "Stumpy", we'll only have ourselves to blame.

Poor Coyote

I've been trying to avoid posting about baby milestones, but the truth is that Kathy and I are totally obsessed with them. It's pretty much all we think about or talk about. Of course, everybody says that all babies progress at their own rate, that you shouldn't worry if you're baby is "behind" on certain things, just love your babies and everything will be all right, fa-la-la-la-la. And I like the concept, I really do. But it's a little hard to follow through on that advice when you're sitting at another baby's birthday party watching seven other babies that are almost exactly the same age as your girls. You can almost see the little mental scorecards floating above the parents' heads. Okay, Bald-Girl and Red-Suspender Boy can crawl, but Nervous-Looking-Boy can't yet, but Nervous-Looking Boy can cruise pretty well, and Bald-Girl can walk but can't lift herself up yet, and Red-Suspender Boy can cruise but his confidence is lacking. Overall, I'd say No-Eyebrows-Girl is the one to beat.

And having twins presents an extra little dilemma. There have been a whole bunch of milestones lately for Riley - pulling up to standing, short-distance crawling, sitting up from a lying-down position, etc. - and with each milestone that Riley reaches, you can see Leah's frustration building up and the angry black cloud over her head growing. Not being able to do things that your twin sister can do has got to be a blow to the ol' self esteem. With each new Riley milestone, Leah finds herself at a bigger and bigger disadvantage. Those cute little tug-of-war matches for toys used to be fun to watch because they were pretty evenly matched, but now when Riley takes a toy from Leah and then gleefully crawls just out of her reach, leaving Leah bawling in frustration, it all seems a little less cute. Nowadays, when Riley reaches a new milestone, it's hard to feel good for her without at the same time feeling kinda bad for Leah.

And let me tell ya, Riley is not a gracious winner. Like sometimes she'll wave her stolen toy just outside of Leah's reach with this smug grin on her face - a grin that says "yes, I'm pretty impressive, aren't I?" It reminds me of that grin that's always on Road Runner's face as she taunts Wile E. Coyote, right before she says "meep meep" and disappears in a puff of smoke.

Or, wait. Is Road Runner a "he"?

Anyway, I'm convinced that in the end, it will be Riley's air of smugness that finally motivates Leah to start crawling and pulling up. Having grown up with a very competitive brother, I know that there are few things in life that provide better motivation than trying to get even with a sibling who just rubbed their victory in your face.

And once Leah defeats Riley, I think she'll probably set her sights on taking down No-Eyebrows-Girl. She seemed a little full of herself too.

Spontaneous Combustion Averted

It was 7:35 pm on Sunday night, and Kathy and I were in parental hell.

Parental hell can take many forms, I suppose, but in this case, our hell was sitting in stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge with a tired, hungry, bored, thirsty baby Riley in the backseat screaming her lungs out. We were driving back home from an afternoon barbecue in Richmond -- a drive that normally would take about 30 minutes or so -- but with the Bay Bridge closed and some art festival thing happening in Sausalito, we had been in the car for 1 hour and 45 minutes and counting. Leah and Riley were pretty wiped out and had so far slept most of the way, but Riley woke up just as the Golden Gate Bridge was coming into view, and lemme tell ya, she was PISSED OFF to find out that she was still in the freaking car.

Parents know that their babies have different levels of crying, ranging from impatient whining to mild complaining to indignant exasperation, all the way up the line. Usually, Leah or Riley will start off with a little mild-complainey cry, and gradually work themselves upward on the scale. On this occasion, however, Riley dispensed with the usual protocol and went straight to DefCon 1, the "Riley-Special" cry of agony and anguish, the one that roughly sounds as if we had just left her in a cage with some hungry wolves, and she was screaming "WHY-OH-WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS TO ME, MOMMY AND DADDY?"

The worst thing was that there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. We were stopped in wall-to-wall traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, a bridge that has no shoulders to pull off on to. Plus the babies' car seats face backward and take up basically the entire back seat of our little Honda Civic, so there was no way to comfort Riley other than to awkwardly try to pat her shin bone and say pointless things like "we're sorry, Riley!" and "everything's going to be okay, Riley!"

And that's just about when Leah started waking up. Yep, we were now totally screwed, and we knew it. Riley's crying was going to scare the crap out of Leah, and then Leah was going to start crying, and then Leah's crying was going to upset Riley even more, which was going to upset Leah more, and on and on and on until the chain reaction caused our Civic to spontaneously burst into flames. I started formulating desperate plans to escape the bridge. Maybe I could jump over the curb and onto the pedestrian walkway! It works sometimes in the movies, doesn't it? There weren't all that many pedestrians on the bridge! Or I could veer into oncoming traffic and dodge cars like in Frogger! I used to be pretty good at that game!

Instead we just waited for the onslaught, because really there was nothing else to do. We just braced ourselves and waited.

Except the onslaught didn't seem to be coming. I listened closer, and through Riley's desperate screams, I could hear Leah quietly babbling in this low soothing voice, like the voice Kathy and I use when we tell bedtime stories. Kind of a calming sing-songy voice, the kind Mr. Rogers used when he was trying to calm down that jittery Mr. McFeeley guy. Leah babbled on and on like this for a solid minute or two, and as she did the most miraculous thing happened. Riley's crying got quieter, then got replaced by those post-crying-sobby-hiccup-things, and then just as we reached the toll plaza, the crying stopped altogether. Silence.

Leah had just talked Riley down. Like a policeman talking down the suicidal man from the ledge.

It was a Labor Day's Eve miracle.

Hey, whaddaya know, sometimes that whole having a twin sister thing pays off.