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.