Returning to Manageable

Noah is out of school for the next month.

With his high level of energy and wild pendulum swinging between Most Lovable Kid Ever and the Constantly Screaming Rudeboy, having him home for vacation can either be easier (no carpool to interrupt our day!) to much harder (trying to put out three fires at a time instead of the usual two, while cleaning house, and trying to make life entertaining and educational for young people).

But this time it has been different. And I think it's because the twins are maturing!

You know how people say "Oh, Honey, enjoy them while they are young! They grow so fast!" Well, don't get me wrong, I am totally enjoying them. But I look at women at the grocery store with middle-age kids and watch how the mom just shops and the kids actually follow without getting hit by cars or shopping carts, or knocking things off the shelves! It's downright astonishing!

And I yearn for my kids to be middle age: to go on adventures; to not be tied down with naps.

Look at the last four school breaks (Noah's school has 3 one-month breaks a year, not all together in the summer like most folks do). For the first of the last four breaks, I had Noah in day camp because it was just too hard to entertain him and manage the twin toddlers. I mean, I could do it, but it meant rarely getting out of the house and doing something fun for them.

Noah hated camp.

The last two times, I kept Noah home from day camp because he wanted to be with us. Why spend the money? I was able to manage getting out to some playgroups and such, playing in the back alley with the neighbors, and going to the neighborhood park. The twins had just turned three.

This current vacation break? I took all three of them to the dentist, across town to see a house for sale, into the post office, and then to the local kid friendly coffee house for play time before heading home, and all before LUNCH, baby!

And then today, the very NEXT day, we went to the park, had a picnic, rode a bus, went to a mobbed train museum (it was free museum day), ate cookies on the grass, rode a bus again! All without a stroller! The kids stayed with me, they followed direction, they held hands, they didn't fight, they dealt with crowds, and had a great time!

The twins are three and a quarter now. Some of you might think my kids should be able to manage all this just fine by now, but keep in mind, with twins, they don't get the practice singletons get walking with a parent and following along because if one goes off one direction and the other goes another, you can't keep them both safe. And if one gets out of the stroller, the other must as well!

Some years back, I was told by two separate twin moms that it all starts becoming easier, and more like normal life, like other people's lives, when the kids turn four. For singletons, it's age two. Double that for twins. But I think I am getting a reprieve. I think we are going to be an on-the-go family again, on a regular basis soon.

Very soon, indeed.

Our Twosome is Three

Well, it seems my babies are turning THREE today. And I guess I will have to face up to the fact that I don't have babies anymore. Having twins has been such a body slam of a learning experience, but as difficult learning experiences go, one couldn't ask for better.

I thought it might be fun to look back on some pictures of the kids' first three years.

They were born in 2005, five days before Christmas. But they came six weeks early, after a futile night of drugged stupor trying to keep them inside my body for as long as possible. It seemed Luka was pushing Ethan out and wanted a room of his own, as he stayed inside more than an hour after Ethan emerged.

Both boys were head down, and I succeeded in giving birth the natural way, even though we did it in the surgery, with the docs and nurses scrubbed for a possible sudden C-Section. As the birthing went on in a gentle, normal way, the masks came down, the gloves and little paper hats came off, and it was a very relaxed and happy environment albeit more sterile than the pretty birthing rooms down the hall.

They were both little over four pounds each and were whisked away to intensive care, where they were tubed, wired and gently cared for. It was not the "mommy and me" moment I had been imagining but I really wanted to know if they were okay, and have any immediate treatment given if necessary.


Luka seemed happy to see Ethan again when they were reunited. Despite being six weeks early, the medicine they gave me the night before to quickly mature their lungs seemed to do its job, and aside from a short period of being given oxygen, they did quite well on their own.

I did get some skin on skin time shortly afterward. This is Luka above and Ethan below, just outside of their little incubator beds they would spend the next three weeks sleeping in, when not cuddling with Mommy. You can see the strain of the nasty Magnesium Stupor I was in (the medicine used to keep the babies inside me made me stu-pid!). Look how little Noah was. He had just turned three... the age my (not) babies are today.

Our hospital was AWESOME as they provided a FREE room for me to live in for three weeks so I could bond with the twins and provide as much breastfeeding as possible. It was odd to call the hospital home. Snowstorms raged outside and I hung out in my hospital room and ate every meal in the cafeteria. Every three or four hours around the clock I would go to the NICU and scrub in, and attempt to breastfeed and pump what was left over to be sent down their feeding tubes when they grew too tired to drink anymore. While being willing, they never really became adept at taking in as much as their bodies required, so I fed both babies and the pump for the next few months.

Here they are with Daddy in their Christmas best! That is Ethan in green and Luka in blue. The NICU nurses decorated all the little beds for the holidays and surprised us with ornaments that had their footprints on them. Every one of those nurses was beyond wonderful, specially chosen to work with these tiny troubled babies.

Here they are sleeping together in the NICU. I love the intensity of Luka's eyes. This might have been the last time Ethan was the sleeper while Luka was awake. Their heads, when born were just a little bigger than tennis balls. Those are my hands.

After three looooong weeks, they jumped through the NICU's hoops, passed their "thriving" tests, and were allowed to go home. Ethan actually got released a couple days prior to Luka and stayed in my hospital room with me. The last two nights before heading home I got NO sleep at all as Ethan was the LOUDEST tiny sleeper I have ever seen. Even when I wasn't wheeling him to the NICU to visit his brother every three hours, his crazy snoring kept me awake in the short naps I attempted between feedings. I went home in such a fog.


At home, I had the benefit of my mother's help, who moved in with Michael to care for Noah the whole three weeks I lived with the twins in the hospital. Then she was there most every day to help us out at home. I have no idea how we would have managed otherwise.


After easily fitting into our home and our family, Luka and Ethan's personalities began to emerge.

Especially Ethan's...



And Ethan taught Luka to be as goofy as he was...

Living in Ohio just outside of Twinsburg, we took advantage of the annual Twins Festival. These guys were voted "most alike". Our guys could probably have won "least alike" if we had tried.


Noah never really went through that whole sibling jealousy thing, thank goodness. He has been a pretty caring big brother. Mostly. Heh.


We laugh sometimes that we have a dark boy with black hair, a medium boy with brown hair and a transparent boy with blond hair.

As much as I looooove my boys, some of my favorite times are the rare occasions when they are both unconscious.


It's been SO fun watching them grow and learn...


...and become friends as well as brothers.


I could live without all the mischief and destruction of personal property.

The boys are as different as night and day. Luka, despite being the quiet one, might well become the leader. He is physically gifted, balanced and exhuberant. He hops and runs more than he walks. Ethan is the jokester. He is also "the lover" of my three kids, giving me the cuddle-fixes I need on a daily basis. He knows how to work his flirting skills as well.

I love this picture... they actually look like twins in this one.


I love that they have each other, and always will.


Despite their differences, they will be in each others lives in bad times...



And in good times.


My birthday wish for them is good times.
And lots of them.

Happy Birthday, Sweetie-boys!

Wordless Wednesday: When Toddlers Decorate the Tree

************************************

Check out other Wordless Wednesday Participants

here and here.

For those just popping in,

my blog is about raising my three sons,

two of whom are twins who are just ending

their terrible twos,

and all the crazyness that comes with all of that.

It's also about my love for photography, photoshop,

and the sweet life.

I grew up in Findlay, Ohio

and now live in San Diego with my family.

If that sounds at all interesting,

bookmark me and stop by again sometime!

I know... yer busy WW-hopping right now.

Me too!

The Difference Between Our Twins

...based on a description by my husband:

So, Michael goes to give the twins some candy from their Halloween pumpkin bucket. Swedish Fish. Kind of like Gummi Bears, but fish. Four for Ethan and four for Luka.

Ethan says... "Ooooh! Fish! Four fish! Red!"

He lines them up in a perfect row like little soldiers before the firing squad and picks up the first victim between a finger and a thumb and puts half in his mouth and slides it back out again, examining it.

"Mmmm! Yummy! Oooh, shiney! And RED!"

When Michael lays the four red Swedish Fish on the table in front of Luka, Luka scoops all four up and shoves them all in his mouth at the same time and begins to chew. With open mouth full of fish jelly, and red slime oozing down his chin he forces out the barely discernible words, "More Fish!???"

Daddy tells him to finish what he is eating.

He works his way through the mouthful of sticky red fish goo and swallows it all down whole. He then looks over at Ethan who is half way through his first fish (admiring it in all its wet, shiny, red splendor) and he spies the little row of three remaining fish. He scoops them up and stuffs them in his mouth.

Ethan commences with the "injustice cry" which we all know and love so well.

That's our boys. In a nutshell.

One For the Grandmas

Okay, I had to take a little break in all the Hawaii photos so that I could give my mom her twins-fix. She has seen lots and lots of pics and video of Noah here lately, that she was jonesing for some toddler love. And I know that Mima wouldn't say no to some cute photos of twin antics.

So here goes.


We were playing in the little nylon "room" that their Aunt Terri got for them a year ago, popping up out of the roof like mad Jack-in-the-Boxes, and their hair was getting full of static electricity, it was standing straight up! Luka calls the nylon-folding room "Wass" which is his word for "house". It rhymes with... gosh, nothing.

Okay, it rhymes with the Spanish word, "mas" as in "uno mas, por favor!"


Check out Ethan's teeth! Can anyone say, "Orthodontia"? Donations for future work kindly accepted. He kind of looks like Ron in the Harry Potter movies here, don'tcha think?

But I am a bit cranky with Ethan lately. He has been throwing things on the floor just for fun: his plate when he is done eating, his cup when he is done drinking, whatever is on the kitchen counter that he can reach, all the spoons in the utensil drawer, all the papers on my desk, and yesterday (GRRRRRRR!!!) I heard something break when he was playing in the back courtyard and I went out there to make sure he was okay and he was standing among about 7 or 8 smashed terracotta pots with plants in them (or at least they had been in them!) that he had taken off a low table and thrown onto the cement one right after the other!

Okay, a couple of those were plastic, but ARGH!!!!

(taking deep cleansing breaths...)

(focusing on how cute he is in that last photo...)

(breathing... and... moving on!)

I know this last one of the pair of them is a bit out of focus, but its so rare to get the two of them in the same shot that I just went with it anyway.

Awwww, how cute is that? I asked Ethan to kiss Luka and he planted a big wet one on him, but that shot was even MORE out of focus.

Okay, Mom, will this hold you for a couple more Hawaii posts?

My Readers Are Revolting!

Wait, that didn’t come out quite right.

What I meant to say was that my readers are begging for me to start getting back into the swing of blogging again after my foray to paradise and my trip through moving-hell. Now that I am somewhere I can call home again, maybe I should.

On Tuesday, I took the twins in to a clinic for a speech evaluation, to see if they really were behind schedule with their language. In recent months, I have run into three kids who were almost exactly the same age as the twins and were speaking in sentences, as well as clearly having a much higher level of comprehension of what their parents were saying than my boys do.

We went into a little playroom with them and the woman played with them, asked them to do a couple things, showed them pictures, asking them to point at things, asking them what things are called, and then she tallied up their scores.

As expected, Ethan scored higher than Luka. They are both on the bell-curve of what is considered normal. They are way down at the bottom end of it, but still on it. When it comes to speaking, Luka is off the chart, but only slightly, but his comprehension score averaged him back up onto the very edge of the curve, so both are considered “normal”. No therapy is recommended.

She did give me some tips on how to help them along some more. Mostly stuff I am already doing, but good reminders.

Luka has clearly become more interested in being understood in the last three weeks and has finally started attempting to say words he didn't already know. He mostly won’t use a word unless he has mastered it, so he doesn’t babble at all. He has just started pointing at some things and attempting to name them, although not often.

Ethan is becoming extremely chatty but you can only follow a couple words of it. And its all in the highest-pitched voice you can imagine.

Too funny.

In other news, I think we are actually getting our main (big!) computer set up tomorrow. So, maybe PHOTOS will come soon after! I am still working on the laptop, which has been another reason for unpacking instead of hanging out in the office, writing blog posts.

It’s so dang hard to type on a laptop with fingernails!! THEN, I will be able to download all those photos from Hawaii into my Lightroom program and see what I have (gosh, I hope it’s worth the wait!!) I hope the internets are working well enough for us to get it all up and running this weekend.

We have had a crazy amount of trouble with our appliances and our utilities since we moved in. It’s like the freakin’ twilight zone around here with everything that is working incorrectly!

But that is for another post. More soon.

Really!

Pictures of Haircuts, Finally

All right, Mom, I will stop torturing you with days of "before" and "during" pictures! The wait is over.

I survived. And in the end, the haircuts make the twins look like what a lot of folks would describe as a couple kids who need a haircut. But, hey, I like their hair long, and I am their Mama.

So there, people!

.

After all this buildup I realized that pretty much every picture of the kids I have, post-haircut are blurry images, mostly of Luka. Luka's hair, the more I look at it, probably does need a trim. I kind of like how he looks in these pictures, but his hair was really dirty (they didn't wash it when they cut it) so I think it laid more nicely. Now that it is clean, it is a lot fluffier and shaggier. So I might trim it up a bit, if I build up the nerve.

Ethan's hair looks fine, but it is kind of sad. In the photo I showed to describe what I wanted, the boy has curls in his short hair. Sadly, Ethan's ringlets were mostly in the bottom of his wee mullet, and they are all gone. He has some serious waves, more so than what shows in this photo of him, but its still kind of sad.

But I am fine.

I know it will grow, and get cut, and grow and get cut. It's just a little hard because its another step toward being big-boys and loosing my last babies to the march of time.

Haircuts, Finally (Part Deux)

I know.

I am dragging this haircut out like its some epic drama, but its the only thing that I have photos of that I can blog about right now. And frankly, I have so many cute photos that I have to spread it out so I can post all of them. I mean, look at this. Poor, tortured guy.


I found this cute little place in La Jolla that is a salon just for children called Little Locks. The woman who cut their hair was named (I think) Larita, and I HIGHLY recommend her if you are in the area because she did exactly what I asked her to do.

Which was basically, "leave it long".


I told them that there were some photos online that I would like to have their hair cut to look like, and the folks there were happy to let me bring up the web pages. Here are the links for what I showed them for Ethan and for Luka.

Larita took such a quick look at both pictures I was worried she wouldn't really do what I asked, but she was spot on. She even asked if I wanted to cut a bit more from Luka because it was still pretty long on the sides (like the picture) but I hemmed and hawed and finally told her no. I figured I could cut it more if I needed to, myself. (And a couple days later, it looks like I might just do that).


This place has it all figured out. The kids sit in little cars or airplanes while getting their hair cut, they have cartoons to watch, and you literally have to walk through a toy store to get to the salon! They seem to be okay with the kids playing with the toys while waiting, and there are even live bunnies to look at in cages that are housed at toddler level.


Look at Luka.

What a little trooper he was. Of course, he had his lovey, "Lambie" clutched tight in his lap. I think the cuts would have gone better if the kids hadn't gotten spritzed with water bottles before the cut. But it was necessary to get those crazy locks tamed.

So, yeah, both kids cried. Both kids survived. Both kids still look cute.

Here is evidence of the carnage:


The "After" pics will be in the next post.

Sorry, Mom. Nyah, Nyah!

Lord, you'd think this story was a Penny Dreadful the way it goes on and on!

Haircuts, Finally. (The Before Shots)

Well, we did it. We finally bent to the social pressure and had the twins' hair cut!

I am SO thankful that none of the social pressure came from ANY of my family members. It mostly came from from well-meaning ladies at the grocery store who are constantly telling me how lovely my girls are. And the rest of the pressure came from my own internal dialog (which can be social pressure if you count ALL the voices).

So, for your perusal, I give you the BEFORE photos of their hair.

This is the side of Ethan's hair. Can you see why it was hard to cut this? He actually had Shirley Temple ringlets in the back!! Here is the front:

I have always cut Noah's hair, it being so straight and simple. The curls and waves on the twins threatened and intimidated me. And as their hair grew longer, I learned I preferred longer hair to shorter hair on these boys.

I kept expecting the grandmas to give me sweet gentle nudges toward the scissors, but one insisted I not cut it until she came to visit in 5 weeks and the other insisted they looked just perfect the way they were. I thank you, ladies, for letting me do this when I was good and ready.
And, finally I was.

I mean, who wouldn't be... Luka had passed from lovely locks, through mullet-ville, into Crystal Gayle Land!

I mean just look at the back! Not a curl left, which was my original excuse for not cutting it. When you washed it, it lengthened out to past the middle of his back!

I am mad for this picture of Luka, though. I am going to miss those shoulder-length locks. Not that its not still a bit long. As a preview, I will say there are those who would look at Luka post-haircut and say he is ready for one now.

Ethan, in my opinion, could have gone a wee bit longer, but with twins, you tend to do things at the same time to save yourself the extra trips.

I decided to take them to a hairdresser, which I may continue to do in the future, after I deduce whether or not I can cut their hair on my own after careful observation of a curly-cut. Not that Luka had a curl left on the back of his head.

I clipped a curl or two from both their heads, just in case I never saw those curlie-ques again.

To be continued.

Party Time, Twin Style

The twins' second birthday was on December 20th, but we decided to have their little party on Saturday. I present, for you viewing pleasure, a little photo essay of the day:

I have to tell you it went WAY better than their first party, which happened outside past sunset because we couldn't "get it together" as it were. Then, neither boy wanted to sit at the decorated table, and when presented with the cakes, they burst into tears.

Yes, this year was much better. Mima and Papa came down (Michael's parents) and Aunt Terri, Uncle Jim and cousin Katie swung by, too.

Mima and Daddy to all the kids for a walk to the park so that Mama could get some cooking done and do the finishing touches on the cakes.

Noah brought along his new bike with training wheels, that he got from my parents for his birthday. He looked pretty rockin' since his outfit matched the bike so well!

Mama made a big potful of yummy pasta, and when everyone got home, Daddy opened a bottle of wine, and we had at it.

After dinner, it was cake time. Like last year, I decided to make a little cake for each boy, so they could both blow out candles. I have never been very good at cursive writing, but I gave it my best shot.

A while back I bought myself a revolving cake plate to make decorating easier. Noah thought that was pretty darn cool.

Noah, with SO much practice lighting the Hanukkah candles, was allowed to go ahead and light up the birthday candles.

They had been practicing their blowing a lot lately (and couldn't figure out WHY they weren't allowed to blow out the Hanukkah candles), so they were thrilled when each cake was pushed up towards them, all flaming and hot!

Luka did pretty well! Ethan needed a little help from Noah. His blowing aim was not quite up to par yet.

Then, of course it was present time, and the kids just ditched the cakes in favor of ripping open their packages.

They received some cool little toys and clothes from Mima's recent trip to Portugal, some gingerbread cookie decorating kits, a shopping spree at Old Navy ("Babies need a new pair of shoes!"), some new toys, and a nice little investment in their college fund.

A good time was had by all.