No Fear

Around when our girls turned one, I read this book that gave advice about raising twin toddlers. It scared the living crap out of me. The book was full of stories of the two toddlers conspiring to wreak total havoc around the house - anecdotes about the author taking her eye off the twins for 30 seconds and then turning around to find them climbing on top of refrigerators and kitchen counters and televisions and into the oven and dishwasher and laundry machines. Or sprinting after their kids as they toddled into the street, in two different directions. As I read these stories, I got this pit in my stomach. This was going to be my life, and it kinda sounded like a suck-y life.

So now the girls have been toddlers for a good year or so, and none of this stuff has ever happened. No girls climbing into dangerous locations and giving Dad a heart attack. No interest whatsoever in participating in any death-defying acts of any kind. Riley and Leah would rather pretend-feed their dolls for an hour and a half. On the ground.

Our girls are little scaredy-cats. Excellent. Score one for daddy.

Last week, we brought them to the local crazy Christmas house with the crazy Christmas lights and crazy 50-foot Christmas tree encircled by dolls and model trains and jack-in-the-boxes and shiny ornaments bigger than your head. And the girls were totally entranced and enamored with the lights and the spectacle of it all. Until a joyful Santa Claus came out to hand out candy canes and sit on his little Santa Claus throne. At which point a panicked Leah ran and buried her face in Kathy's thigh. And a wide-eyed Riley froze like a statue with the exception of her slightly-trembling lower lip until I picked her up. And this was with Santa sitting about 10 feet away. So much for the whole sitting-in-Santa's lap thing.

And of course, when it comes to things that they probably should be afraid of, like say drowning, the girls are totally fearless. We've been taking Riley and Leah to the pool for "swimming lessons" for months, and as a result, they are totally comfortable in the water. Which sounds like a good thing, but trust me, "comfortable in the water" is a heckuva long way from "swimming". To Riley and Leah, swimming means flinging yourself into the water, giggling, kicking your legs for about 0.7 seconds, and then sinking like a stone until mom or dad rescue you. Then giggling again. And Riley and Leah don't yet have the common courtesy to give mommy or daddy some kind of warning before they fling themselves to their death or even check to make sure that mommy or daddy is actually watching them.

And now, over Christmas break, we're headed to Cancun with the girls to stay at resort with, like, five different pools. Sounds great, but this means Kathy and I will basically be spending our whole vacation frantically trying to keep our girls from drowning themselves.

Clearly, we need to install a little more healthy fear into these girls. You think we can get the resort to paint a giant Santa Claus on the bottom of their pools? That might work.

Have a great Christmas everyone! Here's a cute picture and video to tide you over until 2011: