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.