Growing Pains

Today I was visiting a twin mom who is on hospital bed rest and while I was chatting with her and feeding the twins cheese I realized that my finger kept hitting something sharp while I was feeding Mason. On closer inspection it was his first tooth!

Now, the boys are certainly a bit old for their first teeth (11 1/2 months to be exact), so I was pretty excited. It explained a lot about their behavior over the last few days (especially nights) and I'm pretty sure that Ronan has one about to pop through, too.

Beyond excitement I realized I was feeling a bit sad, too. For some reason seeing a tooth in his mouth made me more sentimental about his babyhood than seeing him try to walk or pull up. Somehow he was still a baby until I saw that sharp little tooth sticking up, but now he's a big boy ready to bite his Mommy!

I may also have been feeling the sentimentality of visiting a mama who is lying in the hospital missing her kids at home just like I was one year ago. I even got to talk to a nurse on the way out who remembered me and Kyan and was so excited to see the twins. She even remembered my name!

I am so thankful to be through that difficult time, and I am seriously confident that I do not want to have another baby, but something about it all made me a bit sad. Just knowing that I will never have another newborn, or witness a first tooth, or celebrate a first step after the twins reach all of these milestones.
Ronan has taken his first steps, Mason has his first tooth, they are eating mostly finger food and rejecting purees, they race each other across the room pushing their walkers, Ronan is CLIMBING things, and I am watching it all with a huge smile on my face and a bit of an ache in my heart.

There's this other part of me that is not sentimental at all and cannot wait until I get to sleep through the night and stop chasing babies around to keep them safe. I have this vision of my boys and Ben and I all on a camping trip hiking through the woods and roasting marshmallows over campfires. I see us traveling across the country and enjoying the wilderness. Ben wants that all right now, but my vision doesn't really including figuring out how to keep two toddlers safe in the woods or get them to sleep even in our amazingly wonderful camper van!

In only 3 weeks my babies will be one year old! That is so amazing to me! Watching my poor friend miss her girls while she lies uncomfortably in that hospital bed and wonders what the future holds for her with two newborns on the way has really made me reflect on my experience. I didn't keep much of a pregnancy journal because I honestly wasn't sure if I wanted the twins to know how I was feeling or managing during my pregnancy. I was afraid they would only hear how difficult it all was and that I wouldn't get across the message that they are well worth the pain!

yes, pain! 38 weeks and going in to deliver!

They warm my heart and I am so excited for the future and for every little step they are taking...if only I could freeze little moments of time so that I could come back and relive them every now and then! These crazy little monsters make me smile so much that my cheeks hurt and that's what I want them to know about this process. So, I thought I'd mention that instead of how tired I am for a change :) I love you my sweet little boys!

Dancing To the Beat

It's been so long that I almost forgot I had a blog. I don't know if it's me or the circumstances, but sometimes I am drawn to the computer to type whether I have time or not and others I am so tired that doing anything requiring thought is way too much to handle.

I have however been composing many blog entries in my head and it has made me think of my Grandmother who composed poems in her head while doing housework. I looked around the bathroom today and decided that I would forgo cleaning it in order to write a post. The twins are sleeping and Kyan is playing with his friend in the playroom. I almost had to suspend the entire blog plan in order to search for a missing frog, but I have realized the search is futile and if she shows up she shows up.

Hopper, the missing frog

Last night while lying in bed Ben and I talked about how hard it is to be a parent. I know we were challenged by Kyan, but it's nothing compared to the challenges of having two babies AND a 4 year old at the same time. It is amazing to me how much I can love being a mother and hate it at the same time. Ben and I are so tired and irritable that we barely feel like ourselves and we rarely seem to connect to one another anymore unless we force ourselves to break the bubble of exhaustion and indifference and communicate about something other than baby poop and time out.

It is easy to see how marriages can be rendered unrecognizable by the joys of parenthood. My midwife kept telling me during my pregnancy that divorce rates among twin parents are much higher. I basically ignored her warnings, but I get it now.

The thing that Ben and I keep discussing is the reality that our troubles are not really about us. There is no problem with our marriage. We are tired, we are stressed out, we are overwhelmed, but we are still in love, we just don't really have the time to attend to it. It seems like knowing that is half the battle, but we still seem a bit too tired to fight the other half of the battle.

I actually didn't intend to sit down and write about my marriage, and maybe Ben will not appreciate that I'm talking about it, but I think it's an important discussion. When Ben and I got married we talked a lot about it beforehand. Neither of us intended to ever be divorced, so we didn't want to get married unless we were as sure as we could be about it. At one point it almost didn't happen because Ben couldn't guarantee me that he wanted children and that was a deal breaker for me. Eventually we settled on a shaky understanding in that department, mostly based on the fact that I knew he would be okay with it in reality, he just had trouble with it in theory.

Now I think I know why Ben was unsure about fatherhood; he is intimidated by babies. Right around the age of two he relaxes, but babies overwhelm him. I can't say that I blame him; It's the crying really. We were extremely lucky to have three very even tempered babies. None of them had colic, none of them were super cranky, and they are extremely adorable. Ronan, however, has a cry that could topple anyone's tower of calm, and he reserves it mostly for nighttime. The problem with this is that there are times when I have to have help at night because they are both awake and want to eat.

I can't tandem nurse them anymore because they beat each other up and no one gets any milk. Ronan won't go back to sleep if Mason is crying and Mason can't go back to sleep if Ronan is crying because it is so loud and shrill that our eardrums barely remain intact. So Ben must hold one baby, and usually that means he is holding a fussing or crying baby because they do not want him, they want me and my breasts. So Ben gets frustrated with them, which makes him feel frustrated with himself because he knows they are only babies and he can't be angry at them for crying. I get mad at Ben for being mad at them and they get mad in general because there's so much jittery energy around them. This doesn't happen every night, but it happens enough that if I wasn't sure about my decision to not have another baby, I'm sure now.

This nighttime dance is where all of our exhaustion and frustration begins. I have a tendency to choose a future event or date as the time when difficult things will be resolved. Even if it doesn't happen I at least have a sense of closure on the horizon that comforts me through the long haul. Right now I anticipate that weaning the twins will be the answer to our problems. If I can just make it another month I can start to wean them off of breast milk and then maybe they will begin to sleep through the night. (I, of course, realize that new challenges will replace the old ones, but I don't need to think about that now.)

Sleeping through the night feels about as real as winning the lottery. I think the last time I slept through the night was probably before I was pregnant with the twins, or at least in the first 2 months of the pregnancy. I got up to pee about every hour or two for at least 7 months and haven't actually slept for more than a 4 hour stretch since the twins were born. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not.

newborn babies...the end of sleep!

While I am enumerating the difficulties of parenting twins (don't worry, I'll get to the joys in a moment) I should add that I need to go to the doctor and the dentist and have needed to do this for months. I have even called to make appointments, but can only get them at nap times, so I decline. I have had one massage and one pedicure since the twins were born. Those things took a lot of planning: finding appointments that didn't interrupt nap times since I am the only one who can put the twins down for a nap, making sure I pumped or came home within 3-4 hours so that they wouldn't freak out on Ben, and sometimes finding alternate care for Kyan to make it easier.

I have had four nights out since they were born: the first was a Christmas party I went to with Ben and it went fairly well for Nana and Papa. The second was a ladies comedy night with my Full House Mom friends (only a bit over a month ago) and I came home to find Ben cuddling a screaming Ronan and Mason asleep in the swing. The third was the night of the FHM resale and I ended up at dinner with my friend Patty at about 10 pm. I was so tired and so nervous about what Ben was enduring at home that I couldn't even relax. When I got home they were both asleep, but Ben had let them cry it out for over an hour. The fourth was when Ben and I went to a play as a birthday present from my in laws. That went pretty well, but we were on edge the whole time and talked mostly about the kids and whether or not they would go to sleep for Nana and Papa. The moral of these stories is that things tend to go fine without me here, but that I cannot relax for fear that they won't go fine.

Now that I've completed my vent let me tell you how amazing it is to be the mother:
Lately the twins have become very good at independent play, which I count as play that doesn't involve me, but does involve one another. Sometimes I look over and they are passing a toy back and forth and laughing at their game. After a nap they both want snuggles so I sit on the couch with them and we all hug and coo and kiss. As a mommy I have an amazing power to soothe my children; it seems that approximately 15-20 kisses in rapid succession all over the face of a baby can make a pretty bad bonk fade away instantly. The smile on the faces of my babies is enough to light up an entire building, and they are very generous with their smiles.

This morning while I was in the shower Kyan came in and said, "Mama, I just wanted to say, last night, thank you for the meat you gave us." Because Kyan and I have been doing preschool together he gets so excited to share any experiences he has without me, especially if they relate to what we've learned. I get the feeling that an experience isn't complete until he comes and tells me about it. I feel not only special, but necessary.

Most of all there is so much love in my heart that at times I feel breathless. This is the excruciating irony of parenting. Often times being a parent means giving up yourself for awhile and focusing on the needs of your children before your own needs. This can be difficult and at times it can bring with it a feeling of resentment or frustration, but what's amazing is that all it takes for the ugly feelings to subside is one toothless, dimpled grin from a naughty little boy.

I wouldn't change a thing. I know that whatever struggles Ben and I are having with each other or with being parents, we will get through them. We both know that. I know that there will be a day when we sleep for 8 hours and we wake up and the world is a few shades brighter and we will know we have reached the summit and can begin our descent into normality again (that is until we come across the next mountain). This beautiful and painful dance is going on all over the world and we are just one little family in the midst of it all.