How are we supposed to raise healthy kids when all they want to do is find creative ways to kill themselves?

The kids are thirteen months old now. I don't know if they're going through a phase of triskaidekaphobia or what, but as of the last two months or so they've been going out of their way to find new and novel ways to kill themselves. They're really good at this. "Child proof" electrical covers? Yeah, Lilly figured those out about a month ago. She laughs at us when she takes the covers off. Literally looks at us and laughs. Nolan drinks bathwater. He plunges his face into the bathwater and drinks it like a dog. He ends up with a soapfaced Santa look when he's done. And don't get me started with the way they're both fascinated with loading themselves up in the dishwasher.

But today was the cake. The cake with icing on the top. We bought our Christmas tree yesterday, we didn't have one last year. Being the diligent sort that we are, we secured the area with a baby gate so the kids couldn't reach the tree. So far, so good. However, we may have brought a critter in with the tree all Clark W. Griswold style. Oh the things that you don't plan for.

We live in a somewhat wooded area of Dallas. This is relative, of course, but there's a creek in front of our house with trees and tall grass. We also have two cats. Two very proud cats. They've brought us snakes and mice in the past, including one very entertaining moment when we shooed the cat out the front door with a marginally alive mouse in its mouth only to have that same cat with the same marginally living mouse appear at the dog door out back.

It's possible we brought the mouse at the heart of this story in with the tree. It's also possible that one of the cats brought it in last night. Either way...there was a mouse with the Christmas tree.

This morning started well. The kids got up around 7:15. We watched them run around, and kept them from killing themselves. Then they ate aroun 8:15. About 8:45 I excused myself to go read in the bathroom. And poop. Reading and poop. Anyway, I get all settled in, got everything set up how I want it, and I'm all ready to spend the next few minutes of my life undisturbed in the bathroom when I hear it.

I hear my wife screaming bloody murder. The kind of screaming you hear and you instantly think "oh shit, I'm down to one kid now" without really knowing what else might be going on. So I yell out, "What's going on?" Hearing no response, but more screaming, I did what any responsible father would do. I came out of the bathroom to check it out. I'm not even going to tell you how. Anyway, I open the bedroom door and my wife is there and she breathlessly tells me that Lilly was holding a mouse. I ask, "dead"? She says yes. So I return to the bathroom. This isn't an emergency anymore, right? Go throw the dead mouse away and clean the girl's hands....right?

So I get situated again to complete the job I set out to do (I'm a finisher!). Not 90 seconds later I hear MORE SCREAMING! Knowing that the kids hadn't stabbed themselves, and that this was likely just mouse-fallout, I was nonplussed.

When I returned to the kitchen, my white-faced wife was frantically scrubbing both of the kids in the sink saying, "He had it in his mouth!"

I asked for clarification, "Nolan had the dead mouse in his mouth?"

"YES!"

Again, nonplussed. I go examine this mouse, which is located right in the middle of the living room floor.

The mouse was dead. Those cats are cold blooded killers. The mouse had a surgical-precision tooth puncture in its throat. I don't think mousey suffered much.

Apparently, Nolan reacted to momma's total freakout about the dead fuzzy mouse by picking the mouse up, then putting it in his mouth and carrying it in his mouth across half the room. There's a part of me that is really proud of that boy. There's another part of me that wants to call poison control.

The mouse was wrapped lovingly in a paper towel and buried respectfully in a trash can full of food scraps and coffee grounds. His mouse family did not attend. Yes, I did one "he's still alive!" move just to see if I could get my wife to pee in her pants. Close, but not quite.

This story ends with a question mark. Will our children develop the hantavirus? This is the season for that after all, Hanta ryhmes with Santa! Will our children turn into part mouse-part people superheros? The big question has to do with how else the children will attempt to kill themselves. So far they've tried electrocution, intentional drowning, falls, bludgeoning themselves, human dishwashing and now an attempt to poison themselves with dead rodentia. It almost makes me miss that period of time where they couldn't move on their own. Almost.

I'm so scared

The wife, after over a year of caring for our young, has decided that if she doesn't get a weekend to hang out with her friends back in Raleigh that she will probably go crazy. I welcome this trip! I think it's awesome that she finally gets a break to go play and have some fun. It's no problem....you know...leaving the two children with daddy...to keep them alive....and shit...

Oh fuck I'm scared!

I'm sure this will work out fine. Hopefully nobody will need a doctor, or a policeman, or a discreet neighbor to help dig a hole in the park to hide evidence.

Wish me luck!

Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun

Raising twins is not all roses and sarcastic fun about the mental harm we might be breeding. Where having two children at the same time kinda sucks monkeynuts is when they get sick. When one gets sick, the other gets sick. That's fine when it's some benign sickness, like pneumonia, or a cold, or a fever, or SARS....or anything else that doesn't necessarily involve vomit. But when the sickness involves a free flow of semi-processed food out of both ends of two babies, that's when the handy-dandy parental color chart of fear and anger goes to Red.





It started harmlessly enough. A little coughing, some sneezing. Maybe some runnypoo. But then, three nights ago, our son barfed up a little of his dinner while he was eating. Not enough to really even qualify as barf. Sort of a teaser barf. Then, after his bathtime and after going through the alligator-wrestling session it takes to get him in his pajamas (another topic that deserves it's own analysis), my little boy decided to show everybody how much material he could hold in his stomach. It was enough. There are plenty of images on google I could use to illustrate this, but I think this one tells the story....and it's seasonal!



The picture is not to scale, in case you were wondering.

So the boy barfs on the floor while I'm holding him. Real barf. Not "normal baby barf". More like "I tried to drink a case of beer and failed" barf. In case you've never held a baby barfing real people-barf onto a hardwood floor, lemme just tell you that it's a unique-sounding event. Unique....yeah...that's a good word for it. We'll just call that shower of potato soup splattering the floor over the sounds of your semi-gagging child "unique".

So we have to go through the whole process of re-cleaning one screaming baby while trying to get the other baby to sleep. It's a strange coordinated parental dance that somehow works without really discussing things. Eventually we did get the boy cleaned up and back to sleep. It was really pathetic, he was so tired after barfing up all his food.

The story doesn't end here. The next day was uneventful, save for a continuing showing of the runnypoo. We took the boy to the children's vet and the doctor gave us one of those non-descript quasi-diagnoses that conveniently come without any medication to fix the problem. A modern day version of diagnosing the kid with "crud", or "generalized sick". The wife's grandmother calls this "bonkus of the conkus". Which just goes to show that those eight years of book learnin those doctors do aren't worth much! Basically we've got to wait this one out.

Good thing it's just one of the children, right? If you're reading this correctly, you would have just slumped your shoulders and sighed deeply at the knowledge of what's coming next.



Last night we got the children down for sleeping. The kids sleep great. In fact, one of the reasons I don't post more than I do is because the kids don't make me nearly as crazy as they used to. They're great kids at this point, and posting day after day about how awesome my kids are makes for really lame blogging. So the kids sleep great, which made it weird that the girl woke up last night at 2:30 in the morning. Freaking out! Just flat.freaking.thefuck.out. So we did what any normal parent of twins would do, we tried to wait it out so we could go back to sleep.

That didn't work.

So I got up and went in to calm the girl. When I got in there, I saw that the poor child was covered in her own sick. Just barfed her little lungs out. So we had the screaming-baby-covered-in-barf episode again, but this time with the added bonus of it being 2:30 in the morning. My poor saintly wife stayed up for another hour trying to get the girl calmed down enough to go back to sleep. So that's how that night went.

We're not done yet. And somebody tell those old geezer hecklers to shut up, I'm getting to the end!

Today was encouraging. The kids ate just fine. They were a little fussy, but nothing special. They went to sleep without issue. But then those little barf ninjas ganged up on us! Baby girl barfed her guts out in her crib around 8:15, and baby boy followed suit by painting the inside of his crib an hour later. So now we're out of clean sheets and we're running so thin on pajamas that my son is proudly rocking the pink PJs! They at least had the good sense to do this at a reasonable hour! There really is nothing sadder than a baby who is done barfing their guts out. Everybody knows how terrible you feel after a really good hurl. The head-in-the-toilet / I'm-going-to-die-and-that-sounds-good kinds of hurling. The kind of hurling where you've got leftover hurl on the side of your face, and you're a little sweaty and you might have some tears in your eyes. Olympic-level hurling. You feel awful. So you can imagine how sad it is to see a little baby who doesn't have the ability to comprehend how terrible they feel. It's not a fun thing. The bright spot is that I think they might be getting better (I hope)!

This is the end of this tale. The cat made some sort of hacking noise when the wife left for bed. Seriously, the next animal that barfs in this house is going to live on the farm!

The End

but wait, it gets even awesomer

After writing all of this (which was last night), my wife was gently rocking the baby girl back to sleep she gurgled up some barf again. Seriously. She barfed again! So that was fun. So to recap last night it went:

7:00 -- bed
8:15 -- Girl Barf
8:45 -- Boy Barf
10:30 -- Girl Barf, part deux
oh and don't let me forget to tell y'all that my son thought it'd be awesome to wake up this morning at 5:45.

After the second girl barf of last night, we might have wiped the barf off the sheets instead of changing them because we were out of clean sheets. We might have done that. I mean, we wouldn't, because that would make us awful people and parents. I'm just saying that it might have happened.

Our Babies Do Chores Around the House!

How blessed are we? Not only do we have two children who are healthy and smart with all their fingers and toes (STILL!), but we have the added benefit of having children with a built-in desire to help around the house. I don't know where they get it, but they've got it!

Lilly Doing Dishes

The other day we looked up and saw our daughter "doing" the dishes. That was sweet of her. Our first reaction upon seeing our baby girl literally standing inside the dishwasher was QUICK, GET THE CAMERA! What can I say? I make bad judgments when it comes down to particularly dangerous situations which also appear undeniably cute. The point/counterpoint goes like this: "Well, I could take that knife out of her hand, but really, what's the chance she'll cut off something that really matters in the twenty seconds it'll take to get these pictures?" Add it all to the list that I'll have to answer for in therapy.

The thought process here was, "is twenty pounds of baby enough to break a dishwasher door?" I figured it was close enough to make it worth it if the baby girl happened to destroy our dishwasher.

Here she is -- "Helping"

At one point, she looked like she might actually know she shouldn't be doing this.

And then, of course, her older brother Nolan got into the mix. It was about this time that we had to shut it down. That was enough dish helping for one day!

Nolan Helping with the DoggieCare

We have two dogs. I believe they've posted on this blog a couple times. Those dogs are crafty, and they demand attention. Fortunately, Nolan is around to assist with the dog. Once again, my parent-brain had to decide if I was going to allow our germ-ridden 100 pound dog to lick all over my son in the middle of flu season and potentially eat his face, or if it was worth the risk for a couple good pictures. I chose wisely!

Lastly, and certainly least -- Lilly helping with the groceries

How do I even editorialize this. Here's Lilly putting groceries away. She's a super-helper, as you can tell, What might not be totally captured here is her awesome ability to take things that are already put away, and throw them on the floor.

She's a little mischievous.

So there it is. The kids are moving at warp speed and getting into everything. Nolan is a little more subdued than Lilly, but I think that'll change as time goes on. Lilly is walking (wait for the video on that one). Nolan is just crawling at light speed. It's been almost a year since the twins were born, and it seems fairly obvious that this shit ain't gonna get any easier!

Our kids are on youtube now.

Real life marital conversation last night

Wife:

Did you really take a picture of our son chewing on an electrical
cord?

Me:

What? It was unplugged.

Holy shit, they're moving!

Every parent in the world warned us of this. A mere warning shouldn't be surprising, every parent warns every other parent of everything that faces them in the future. "Just wait until they poop solid" or "just wait until they cut teeth" or " just wait until they won't go down for a nap" or "just wait until they get sick for the first time". All of these comments are born out of good intentions, but you get warning overload after a while. But there was always one warning out there that kinda made me pee a little out of fear.

"just wait until they start crawling"

Of course, that day would never come. I don't need to worry about that crap, because my kids will be permanently the same as they are right now. Crawling? Shit, have you seen my kids? With my genetic poisioning, they're lucky they're coordinated enough to make it through each day! They're never going to crawl!

Well fuck me, cause they're crawling now. They're pretty good at it too. This started out slowly. Lilly started getting up on all fours and muttering about things out of her reach. Cute, right? Then she started trying to pull on things in a feeble attempt to stand. Adorable, right? Then she started to actually move a little and actually pull up on things to a semi-standing position. And then she started moving on all fours. Just a little at first. Enough to give us plausible deniability. "Oh, she's not crawling, she's farting or something".

She was crawling. Of course, in true Lilly fashion, she does it all tarded like. She humps her right leg behind her while she crawls. It looks like a crab. We laugh at it. The baby vet says it's normal. Sometimes she crawls normal, but most the time it's tarded crab crawl city for our Lilly!

Then she just started standing up on her own. Like "tah dah, I'm standing now guys"! I say "standing" but she was kinda wobbly, like dad in college on a Tuesday night.

So then there's Nolan, who basically just sat around watching his sister do these things. Well, he also got into the act. But his crawling, for whatever reason, was met with more faceplants than Lilly's.

Speaking of faceplants, when a baby does a faceplant, it's fucking serious! It's a legitimate "bam!" right on the face! No bracing, nothing. Just a "lah lah lah, I'm a baby and *wham* shit, now I'm on my face". If this ever happened to me with the kind of force it happens to babies, I'd probably go to the hospital. For some reason, the babies don't seem to mind that much. Seriously, they just sorta shake it off. It's strange.

But I digress. So there's Nolan and he's putzing around trying to crawl. Again, this is ridiculous, right? They're not EVER going to crawl! They're just little tiny babies!

Fast forward two weeks. They crawl now. They crawl really fast, and never in the same direction! It makes it very hard for me, as a parent, to sit and surf the internet and drink my coffee and otherwise be uninvolved when they're crawling around looking for dogs, or electrical cords, or knives.

Yes. Electrical cords. For some reason or another, the sweet smell of rubber-coated copper alive with 120 volts of death draws in children faster than meth smoke makes Amy Winehouse appear. It's a constant challenge keeping the kids from lighting themselves up.

So it's a challenge. Every day they get into more stuff.

Here's video of Lilly doing her tarded crab-crawl to the doggie door. She doesn't actually figure out how to get outside, but it's really close.

The day after this video was shot, we got this picture of Nolan AND Lilly checking out the doggie door issue.

Lastly, I have this example of the shit I'm dealing with. Electrical cords AND a doggie door. It's like the trinity of things that will maim our kids. Except it's only two things. Stupid failure!

I is a Nolan, and I has new trix!

Hallow. I is a Nolen. I am a boye. I alsos has a seester. She iz a lillie -- she is not boy becuz she broke her boyepart off.

I is all babye. I eet like baybe, and i talk like baybe. One time waye bak like 2 dayz agos i used to slep like baybe.

I stoped dooing that. Hahahahahaha!

Herez whats i dos nows... I goes to sleeps after mah bottlez. thats tha wahe I alawyz dids it beforee toos. But nows, at least for the past twoe dazy, I cry at 8:30 and then barf a lot so mah momma and dadda come in and change mah sheets and play withe mee agains! Is soofunne! I laufffs! And barfes!

I dunt think i is sicks or nothings. I just barfes at nights and cryes. Daddie goes outs of townes tomorrowes for a week. Maybes i will keeps barfings and torture mommies.


i is a funnie boe! hehahhahaha

Happy Birthday America and Freedom....now with babies!

We had the best fourth of July EVAH!

It started out on the morning of the 4th. Our neighborhood had a parade. Complete with Sousa march music and all the young parents and the old residents. We even had a 1928 Chevy pulling up the rear honking the slow pokes to move it. The kind of thing that pre-parenthood I would have thought was totally dumb. But now it's pretty cool.


As you can see, we brought the dog. Maggie had a great time. The kids mostly slept, but we got pictures to remind them how much fun they had.



Here's Nolan loving on his doggie.. He loves his doggie. Maggie, she's not so sure yet.




After the parade, we went to a pool party out in McKinney. Yahhh! Pool! The kids hadn't ever been in a big swimming pool before. Lilly got a nice, calm introduction into pool life. I think overprotective parents like us have really nice thoughts about how to introduce children into the water. Quick dips, reassuring holding, laughing, all that stuff. Not my honeybunny! She thought it'd be awesome to take a misstep in the pool and fall into the water with Lilly. Lilly loved it. Thought it was great. She's definitely our wild child. The wife, on the other hand, thought she might have scarred the child for good. Turns out it wasn't the child she scarred, but rather the inside of her foot, which she cut on the pool. She wrenched her knee too. (EDIT -- it turns out that the wife actually tore her MCL in the fall. Opps!). But the kiddo is just fine. Lilly loved the pool!



Here she is doing her Lilly dance! She's our dancing queen.




Lilly's dancing might be more proof of her tardedness





Nolan also had a great time in the pool, although his experience was less dangerous. He rocked the fauxhawk, because he's that awesome.

Here he is in his pool boat. That face he's making is part of his new routine where he sucks on his cheeks and makes a "fish face". He's just now discovering his lips or something. Whatever it is, it's just cute.

Our first fourth of July with the kids was awesome!

Follow up on all that touchy-feeley stuff

Lilly pooped a turd this morning. A real honest-to-goodness turd. Yahhhh!


Edit on the turd. The wife tells me that this changed later in the day. Apparently the turd was just plugging up the lake behind it.

Oh and Happy Birthday to our twins' friends who are also twins Willa and Dovie.

"It changes everything"

*Disclaimer* -- this is being written after twelve days of sick children. My previous post about how great the kids were was before their snotty noses and congested chests kept them from sleeping through the night. We've been sucking snot and boogers out of their heads with a medieval torture suction device for almost two weeks. And we're sick too. And I've been barfed on three times in the last two days. Without request or consent. So if you read this at any time and think, "fuck, this guy is bitter", consider the circumstances.


*End Disclaimer*

We had my father-in-law's 60th birthday party on Saturday night. It was a really fun time, many of his friends and family came out. The wife and I (read my wife) put together a nice collage of pictures of my father-in-law's youth; from the time he was a baby to high school and beyond.

My father-in-law's mother was also there. She's in her late 70s. During the party, my wife and I quizzed her about the pictures of my father-in-law. We recorded this on video. While I was filming this, I thought about how damn cool it is that my kids get to see their great grandmother tell stories and explain pictures of their grandfather from when he was just a baby. What an amazing thing to be able to share with them! Putting myself in their perspective, I can't imagine how neat it would be to see video of my great grandparents (who I never knew) explain what kind of children my grandparents (who I barely knew) were.

It was one of those "neat" things. One of those things that makes you feel awesome inside.

When we were expecting children, I was annoyed at how many people would pat me on the shoulder and simply tell me that having children "changes everything". There were variations on this, of course. "Nothing will be the same", "you'll never view things the same", the perpetually aggravating "get your sleep now", and the ever-so-nice "advice" I got from a defense lawyer in Florida, "you won't get a full night's sleep for about....oh.....eight years".

I took this advice with a smile. Inside I was thinking, "Thanks a lot, asshole". What the shit kind of advice or guidance is it for an expectant parent to hear how much stuff is going to change? How does that help? What the fuck does that even mean? "Everything is going to change", shit these people made it sound like I was living in some pre-apocalyptic utopia where everything was nice and nothing was going to hurt you. The pre-judgment day from the original Terminator movie, only to be met by a future plagued with sub-par special effects of death machines flying through the sky to kill me.

Turns out, it was probably the best advice anyone could offer.

How do you explain being a parent? How do you tell somebody else how to expect to be a parent? Everything about this experience is new. All of it. The clearest thing about all of this is that it has, in fact, changed everything. Our life pre-baby is done. Over. It simply doesn't exist. Who I was pre-baby is done. This is an amazing job, and you really have to take it all. You have no other choice.

My wife and I left the kids with the grandparents for a little while today so we could go shopping for groceries and stuff without them. We were gone for about two hours. We talked about how much things have changed. There's the things that we miss. The obvious things are easy, things like sleep, naps, dates, stuff like that -- that's easy. But there's the other stuff. We miss not having to have our lives revolve around the feeding schedules of these two small lives. We miss being free to head out at night to meet with friends. Even the simple act of lounging is gone. That 30 minutes to an hour in the mornings on the weekend when all you non-parent people hang out and do nothing while you figure out your day -- that doesn't exist. Finally, we miss the financial freedom that comes from not having to spend hundreds of dollars a week on things that will be consumed either in food or in clothing to catch the food once its processed.

Our entire lives revolve around their lives. All of it. Planning, my work schedule, sleeping, cooking meals, making bottles, going to the store, even the most simplest of tasks, like having a moment to take a nice half-a-magazine dump or a shower has to be scheduled around their needs.



And it never ends.

We will always be their parents. We will always be responsible for keeping them alive and helping them grow into peoples their communities can count on. We can't "walk away" from any of this. There's no left-handed relief pitcher warming in the bullpen to bail us out. It's just us.

But that's the way it is. That's what being a parent is. And that's what all those assholes were trying to tell me when they told me that this experience would "change everything".

The reward for this is paid out in small, but valuable, pieces. A smile. A laugh when you walk in the room. A baby that stops crying when you pick it up, because you're it's daddy and they love you. The look on a baby's face when you go in the morning to get them and they look up and say "hey, you came back for me"! Seeing how your baby really is yours as it gets older and bigger and makes it clear that it really is a part of you. These brief and fleeting moments overwhelm any despair that even a more cynical father than myself might harbor. It really does fill up the old emotional bank account. So much so that events like when my boy barfed on me twice today become "cute".

The strangest thing about all of this is that it's all worth it. The crying, the sleeplessness, the stress that comes from having newborn twins, it does all pay off. Sometimes in big pieces, sometimes in small ones, but for every moment where something makes me think "gahhh", there's a more valuable moment where I'm flat out floored by this whole experience. In a good way. I'm sure this continues. I'm sure I'll bitch to no end when I find out that my kids were lippy to their teacher in class, but I know they'll pay it back to me somehow. They better.

Everything really has changed. The idea that being barfed on twice in a day would be "cute" just goes to show that what was the way it was a year ago is gone. How in the world could anybody have possibly told me any of this in a level of detail sufficient enough for me to understand what they meant?

Cutting back to the start, while I was recording my grandmother-in-law talking about her son, my father-in-law, I realized that this is truly a universal experience. We're fortunate to be able to share that moment of family history with the kids, long after their great grandmother and their grandfather are both no more for this Earth. I have a feeling that while granny was telling the story about her son, she was also feeling some great sense of how much everything paid off for her too.

So if you're having a child, and you happen to ask me anything about what's in store, please don't think less of me if I grab your shoulder and just tell you that everything is about to change.

Damnit damnit damnit!!!

Every single freaking time I say something good.....GAHHHH!


Do y'all remember this crap?

Lilly even un-fucked herself enough to stop waking up at 5 A.M.
Yahhh!

Posted on flippin SATURDAY???


Guess who decided it'd be just super-awesome fun to whine-cry (not real crying -- that'd be rude) from 3:30am to 5:30 am? Just guess? That little girl with the wookie growl.

Parents -- don't ever say good things about your kids. They'll just go and fuck you on it.

I guess the good news is that she did eventually work out her issues and go back to sleep. Lilly honey, if you're reading this, that's not a complement -- so don't decide to stop doing this just cause daddy said nice things about your self-soother.

Updates are in order!

I believe that all parents find that six or seven months into things, you begin to get the hang of how the situation works. What was novel and new at the beginning is now commonplace. So when Nolan barfs up dinner and his bottle right before he goes to sleep -- thats an event that would have been blogworthy five months ago, but is now just another Wednesday. Likewise, the wife and I used to comment "oh -- I was holding Lilly up over my head and she spit up in my mouth". Now we just say "good morning". Our lives have changed. Things are much different for us, but gradually they're turning back towards some degree of normalcy.

We've lost touch with some friends, but we've also gained new friends through this experience. Our priorities are totally different, which makes heading out for an 8:00 PM drink with buddies a zero percentage possibility. On the other hand, the value of things I considered pussy olympics five years ago -- things like "play dates" -- is now tremendously increased.

This whole experience has also made me feel closer to my parents in a weird "paging Dr. Freud" kind of way. I feel like I've somehow validated the trouble I gave them for most of my 33 years by giving them these two bundles of adorable goodness. Maybe I'm reading too much into that. Then again, the thought that either Lilly or Nolan would treat me like I treated my parents makes me cringe a little inside. They better not! Filthy bastards.....

The kids are doing all sorts of cute things. Lilly dances in her exersaucer. Freaking dances. It's the cutest thing ever. And Nolan -- that little kiddo just loves his daddy. It's great, he laughs his head off when I "attack" him. They're healthy happy little children. So yeah, they still poop nuclear shit that I believe is the base material Saddam cooked into the chemical weapons he used on the Kurds, but they make up for it.

Lilly even un-fucked herself enough to stop waking up at 5 A.M. Yahhh!

We had our six-month photos.. Here's a taste

Site change

The web url for this blog is now twindergarten.blogspot.com -- just a small change. Something a little too non-anonymous about the last site. Not that this one disguises who we are all that well.

Six Months Down!

Can you believe it? The kids are six months old now. They're starting to act like little people instead of little buckets of cry and poop. We're also discovering that they need attention. All.The.Time. One of them needs to be held or talked to and the other one needs to cry while the "good" one is being carried or rocked or spoken to. It's fairly high maintenance, and once again I find myself quietly cursing those parents who only had one at a time.

I make this sound like I'm the one doing the day-to-day work with the kids. Not so! Not at all! The wife has taken on the full-time role of taking care of babies. Honestly, I feel for her. I'd go crazy if the only conversation I had was with two babies and two needy dogs. I'm like the low-cost cell phone provider of fathers... Nights and weekends.

The kids have little personalities now, allow me to share.

Lilly

Lilly is clearly our chatterbox. She's always making noises, shrieking, playfully wailing, laughing. She even growls. No shit, she'll sit there and make these long draw-out growling noises. GAarrrgalllllalllggrrrralllllGRRRALLLLl. The wife and I call her our Wookie baby, even though my wife doesn't know Empire Strikes Back from Empire of the Sun.

Lilly also said her first word. At least we're counting it as her first word. She says "da-da". She's probably just throwing consonants and vowels together, but we're counting it. If I ever get the time, I'll throw video up on this shizz.

Lilly still thinks it's a-ok to wake up at 4:30 or 5 every morning. We've tried telling her to stop that shit, but she doesn't seem to understand. Other than the extraordinarily early rising, she's been a good little sleeper.

Lilly is a big baby. Both babies are actually pretty big. She's between 15 and 20 pounds, and we're almost certain that Nolan is over 20 pounds. He's a chunky monkey. She's come a long way from her bird legs she had when we took her home.

Nolan

Have you ever seen a cuter baby? Just go ahead and say no, because you haven't. Nobody has! This little pudger is about as adorable as it gets. Taken in with his sister, who's also a darling piece of pie, and it's like cute overload. Like Trainspotting, except with babycute instead of heroin.

Nolan is our "calmer" baby, but that's not saying much. He'll still throw a king-sized tantrum and he's still high maintenance. But he sleeps much longer. Nolan is a happy boy, no question. He's always smiling or laughing, and he'll find the oddest things hilarious. His daddy for example. For some reason, I'm the funniest thing he's ever seen. Ohhh, I can take that one in a hundred different directions, none of them good.

As you can see, Nolan hasn't missed too many meals. They're both so big, just big ol chunker babies.

Over the last couple months, there's been a number of really great parenting experiences. The wife and I are going to try to share some of them. Some of the long-time followers might be wondering where the sarcastic and cynical author of the earlier posts has gone. It turns out that when you get more than 3 hours of sleep at a time, you find yourself less twisted with black humor.

Real Food Postscript. Apparently Real Food = Real Poop

I forgot to add that the addition of rice cereal to the children's diet has added an unfortunate side effect. I've been warned by other parents for months now about the coming awfulness of the backside of real food. Apparently it'll get worse once we switch over to fruits and vegetables.

It's bad. Not crawl in the corner and shiver bad, but definitely "I need a hug" bad. It's really hard to mentally resolve the smell of diaper gravy cooking your nose hairs juxtaposed with a cute-ass grinning baby smiling back up at you. You want to ask God how it could be that something so small and cute could produce something so absolutely disgusting. I think God has a sense of humor, and this was where she was thinking "I'll fuck with them by making their poop smell awful!" Silly God.

Feeding Time -- Now With Real "Food"!

It's been a little bit since the last writing. The wife and I are writing this post together, so I have to limit myself as to how many times I can say "fuck."

Anyway, since the last writing, we had St. Patrick's Day. This really should just be called adult recess day, because it has almost no connection to the guy who led the snakes out of Ireland. St. McDrunkey and O'Bnoxious Day would be more appropriate. But I digress. The children dressed up for St. Pat's.

Pretty flippin cute if you ask me. Nolan passed out shortly after. Seems he can't hold his beer.

In other news, the children have begun eating real "food."

I put "food" in quotation marks because all we're talking about here is rice cereal. The wife tasted it, but I'm too much of an enormous weenie to eat that squishy shit. Wife reports that Nolan's tastes like yummy porridge, but Lilly's tastes like bad breath. It seems that the formula we mix the cereal with a lot to do with the taste. The kids have different formula, Nolan's apparently is less "breathey" than Lilly's. That girl will apparently eat anything.

The feedings are more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Lilly is clearly our champion eater. She instantly took to attacking the baby spoon and sucking that bad breath baby food off the spoon. She even insists on kinda eating at the actual spoon. That part concerns me a little. She also literally sucks the leftover barfy spitup and droppings out of her bib. No, seriously, she takes her bib with her little baby hands and sucks the food out of her bib. That's my girl.

(This is pre-bib sucking)

(This is intermediate spoon and bib sucking -- you get the idea)

Nolan, on the other hand, took a little while to warm to the whole spoon-feeding thing. He'd just let you basically smear baby formula all over his face and he'd sorta laugh about it. Or cry about it. I forget. I think he figured out that he's supposed to eat that crap. He must have gotten hungry or something and added 1 and 1. So now he eats the rice cereal from a spoon. Pretty well too, but not like Lilly the human baby shop-vac. I swear one of these days she's going to inhale most of the actual spoon.

Nolan says "Hi....I have creap on mah faces!"

Eating or no, Nolan is still straight up pimpin. Here he is throwin up his good will peace sign for his peeps on the internets machines.

In our last bit of news for the day, we had one of those parental moments on Friday that I suppose all parents have. At least, that's what we're telling ourselves so we don't feel like we need to go to jail. I took Friday off, and the wife offered to let me sleep in. The kids got up around 7:00 AM. I was in a hazy bit of sorta sleeping when I heard *THUD*. First thing I thought was "a kid just landed on his/her head." I was right, mainly because I'm always right (just ask me). Sure enough, Lilly decided that Friday would be the day she learned how to sit up enough to get out of her boppy pillow and faceplant off the sofa onto the hardwood floor. Pretty impressive if you ask me. So I crawl my lazy ass out of bed and find both kids screaming. Lilly because she just ate the floor like Greg Louganis ate the diving board in 1988. Nolan was crying because he basically got flung onto the couch so momma could attend to the now possibly-brain-damaged-like-her-daddy Lilly. I took Nolan, wife took Lilly. A couple panicked web searches and phone calls later, and it turns out everything is fine. It seems that kids are tougher than burned steak.

The good news is that if Lilly suffered any kind of injury, it's going to be almost impossible to tell. Here's a picture of her BEFORE she tested the law of gravity.

See? Tarded.

Lilly had a hard Friday. After eating the floor, I took her to my office, where I proceeded to bash her head into the car door while in the process of taking her out of the car. Then, when putting her back in the car, the brim of my hat plugged her in the head again. I'm not fucking kidding, you wanna talk about feeling like the worst parent in the history of time. At this rate, I'm just hoping she ends up capable of feeding herself someday in her life. Then again, I suppose sucking the food off the bib qualifies as feeding herself, so maybe this head trauma isn't all that bad after all.

OK, I gotta go. CPS is calling.

Well that worked out sorta well!

We tried a couple new things with the children last night. We separated them, so Nolan slept in one room and Lilly in the other. We did this to see if Nolan would sleep better if we let him cry for a little longer instead of rushing in to "save" him every time he peeped. We were always so worried that he'd wake up his sister (who sleeps like a champ) that we'd never let him try to self-soothe himself.

We're not Ferbernazis or anything, but we felt like he wasn't getting the chance to learn to take care of himself. So he slept in the other room by himself last night.

It worked like a charm! Nolan slept for 10 hours (really). He only got fussy once or twice and both times it was something he corrected within 5 minutes. So it falls in that "good night" category.

Feeling adventurous, the wife and I decided to take the children out for their first dining out experience this morning. We went to Cafe Brazil in Deep Ellum. It went OK. The kids were really good -- strangely good -- for most of the time we were there. Lilly started going downhill about the time I finished eating. It makes sense, she didn't have her morning nap.

Fortunately, I inhale my food, so I finished eating and took her to the car while mom finished eating with Nolan. She got out of there about the time he started melting down. It wasn't the most relaxing Sunday morning breakfast, but all in all, it was a success.

-

The boy is paying us back right now by refusing to take his morning nap. And wheewwww, what's that smell???? Good lord, I think he's been eating beans!

Now -- pictures!

"Sleeping through the night"

My wife tells me that some egghead doctor classifies "sleeping through the night" as 6 consecutive hours of sleep. That's the biggest load of garbage ever.

Hey doc -- when you sleep from 10PM to 4AM, that's not "through the night". That's not even to the middle of the night! That's "I woke up at 4AM."

There are even stupider moron doctors out there who call "sleeping through the night" at 5 hours. These mouth breathers don't know people like me. How could 5 hours of sleep be sleeping through the night? Does that mean that I used to sleep through the night TWICE in one night? (God I miss those days).

From bottle warmers to doctor jargon, there's a whole lot about babies that make no sense.

We changed our settings -- so anyone can comment

I didn't realize this was set up so only "blog followers" could comment. Its been changed. So feel free to comment away!

Wow!

Categorize this under amazing and shocking... daddy and I woke up this morning On. Our. Own. No crying. No screaming. (from us or the babes). Granted, we were up for feedings at 11:30 and 3am. But even so we are usually awakened again by someone's hysteria by 5 or 6. Not today! And here's the even crazier part: I went into the nursery and they were BOTH AWAKE! Just lying there contentedly cooing and playing! What? Whose babies are these? I had heard of this happening, but MY babies were doing this???
Crossing fingers for a repeat, yet if the last 3 months have taught me anything, it's that repeats don't come in a row. Especially the ones you are hoping for.

Oh....hello. Yes, we're still here!

If you read just a couple posts down, you'll find me apologizing for not blogging more often about the babies' progress. Apparently, I've failed to keep this blog properly updated again. It's Valentines Day 2009, which means it's been about a month since my last post.

Sorry. I'll make up for it by breaking this one down into a series of separate stories.

First Story: My excuses

I'm lazy. How's that for easy? Coupled with my laziness though is something a little more legitimate. When the kids first got home, everything was new. The car seats, the screaming, the pooping, the screaming, the cribs, the barfing, and the screaming. It was all new. So I had a lot to write about.

Now the kids are three months old (time flies). They're in a bit of a routine, they go to sleep at 6:00 or so, Nolan wakes up around 11 and again at 3 or 4 to eat. He eats and usually goes right back to sleep. Lilly will usually sleep until 5 or 6 am when she'll wake up for the morning. So I've got one kid who sleeps for about 5 hours at a stretch and another who will go for 10 to 12 hours. Not too shabby.

Also, not much to write about.

Now I could run this blog like many other parents and go on and on about how awesome they are or how much I love them or how cute it is when they smile at me, but y'all know that. You know that part already. It IS awesome, but that's not the news that keeps you coming back. I typically think of things to write about during moments of pure hell. Those parent-learning experiences that are too weird for words. I simply haven't had many of those lately, and it's because my kids are better than anybody else's kids ever in the history of time.

Except for now. Now is the exception. Which brings me to my second story.

Story 2 - That asshole who said that sick children wouldn't be that bad is a motherfucking liar

The title of this story is made up. Nobody has ever told me that a sick child was anything less than the parents take-home version of waterboarding. I think I've got two sick kids, or at least congested kids.

Now spare me the bullshit about "congestion doesn't mean sick". When the boy is stuffy and can't breathe normally it scares him. He's only three months old, and as far as three month olds go, he's mostly badass. But this "oh crap, can't breathe" thing tends to wake him up. At 1. At 3. At 4:30. And at 6. Lilly complemented Nolan by also waking up at midnight and at 6 (for the morning). So that was our Friday night. Somewhere in the back parts of my brain is a memory of Fridays where we'd stay out all night and party, go to sleep around 2 and roll out of bed whenever on Saturday morning or afternoon. Stoopid maturity.

The babies aren't seriously sick, just kinda sick. Neither are running fevers or anything, they're just less than 100%. It might be passing. So all that is fun.

And by "fun" I mean, "not fun at all". The wife and I are at the end of the line. I've been in West Virginia of all places this last week, and she's too (ahem) strong willed to ask for overnight help when she needs it, so she's been troopering this baby whirlwind all week. I came home Thursday night exhausted and the both of us have been dealing with this ever since. We could use a nap right about now.

Story 3 -- Some baby products are absolutely fucking worthless

New parents -- when shopping for stuff you need for babies, take a pass on this piece of shit

This colossal waste of time and money is a "bottle warmer". It has the following problems:

1. It doesn't fucking work

2. By "not working," I mean it'll make your bottle nuclear hot and unusable or it'll require you to do the whole thing twice because it doesn't warm your bottles enough

3. It takes forever to do, especially while holding a screaming baby.

4. It costs money, which should be illegal. I thought our government protected us from products like this. I could literally poop in a bag and sell it for the same money and it'd be a better value to you.

Here's what you need to properly warm bottles.

1. Water

2. Coffee cup

Zero dollars. It can even be a coffee cup with a picture of my friend Ed on it looking really happy to be holding a Care Bear pillow

This is the picture that keeps on giving.

Seriously though, there are plenty of baby items you need. So far, I've only found one item that has absolutely zero use and actually makes life MORE difficult instead of less difficult. It's that stupid ass bottle warmer.

Skip it. Perhaps beat the inventor for me.

Story four -- Valentines Babies

The babies say "Happy Valentines Day"