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!