The aliens: aka tired Jay fights with photobucket.
So just to get the obvious out of the way--I'm tired, I'm stressy, and the Frog has absolutely no concept of what sleep is supposed to be, or that it's a nice and good thing, and that all the cool kids are doing it. I'm feeling frazzled, I'm low on creative brain, which is making me feel even more frazzled, and I'm dog paddling as fast as I can, determined to keep my head above water.
That said? I really need to focus on the positive here, so this is going to be a post where I goo about my kids. And post a lot of pictures. You stand warned.
The aliens are just over six months old.
I know, right? It was just the other day that I was whining and complaining about how I was pregnant, and being pregnant sucks, and all of that assorted nonsense, and now they're not only here, they're actually turning into little people. They come complete with their own personalities and everything, and let me just tell you right now, the whole nature vs nurture thing gets a big nature vote from me, boy howdy, because first of all--they are who they are, and they're both extremely different, and second of all--the Monkey gets way, way too many behavioural and personality traits from me. Sorry for that, kid. Mom, stop laughing, this is not your version of revenge for what I did as a kid.
Before I go on talking about them, I just need to pause for a moment and say that the Academic Husband is the most awesome husband/person/man/father in the history of ever. I could not do this without him, no lie, no exaggeration. He's unbelievable. He's a hands-on dad, he's doing the lions share of the cleaning and housework and all that, and I tell you, I have more admiration than you can imagine for all of you who've either raised kids on your own or been the one who's doing most of it, because I truly could not do this without him as a partner in twin-madness.
He loves those two little people so much that it makes my heart hurt in that perfect this-is-a-good-ow way, and I'm so grateful for both of our sakes that we were able to make these wee aliens together, especially when just over a year ago, we were starting to think that it wasn't going to happen at all.
So! The Aliens!
Meet the Frog:
(Maybe ten minutes old, just after the birth of his sister)
The Frog came into this world with a big head (thanks, kid) and his eyes wide open. He took less than half an hour to show up, from the first push, and came very close to being born on a different day than his sister (he was born at 12:14 am). Which would have been interesting... twins with separate birthdays. He's our zen baby... except when he's not. Which sounds confusing, but it's not really. Unless he's hungry, wet, tired, or wants to be held, he's pretty content to kinda hang out and just chill. If he gets what he wants, peace reigns. If he doesn't? Look out. As ashinae put it after hearing them over the phone, the Monkey has quantity of crying... but the Frog has quality. When he really kicks up a fuss, you can hear him from miles away.
He's a bit of a slow starter, but once he gets going, there's no stopping him. After they were first born, he was the one who had to get a feeding tube put in first, because in the first day or so he dropped half a pound. Not such a big deal when you're a full-term baby with lots of baby fat to draw from, but when you're a month prem and barely weigh five pounds, and you're so skinny that your little knees are all wrinkly with baggy skin, that tends to scare the crap out of the doctors and nurses.
At least a couple of the days we had to spend in the hospital were probably do to his zen, since he figured that since his tummy was getting full without him having to do much of any work at the breast or at the bottle, why on earth would he want to go to any extra effort? He'd just snuggle right in on mama's chest when he was supposed to be nursing with the worlds most content little look on his face. Yes. This is where I am meant to be. Boobs? AWESOME. What, I'm supposed to eat from those? Well that sounds like work, doesn't it? No thank you! Fortunately, his mother is at least as stubborn as he is, and eventually we got him eating enough from the bottle that we could remove the tube, and be on our way home, even though he was still slightly under his birth weight.
Meet the Monkey:
(About ten minutes or so after she was born)
This is our little troublemaker. The whole reason why you have to deliver in an OR if you're having twins is because of Baby B. You never quite know what they're going to do. They can get into a bad position after baby A gets out of the way and they've got some room to move, they can get into trouble if there's placenta trouble, blah blah blah, baby B is the misfit before they even make it out the door. Um. So to speak. And all throughout the pregnancy, baby B was the one giving us static. The one who wouldn't cooperate during the ultrasound, the one who wouldn't let the poor nurses get a good tape when they did my non-stress tests... trouble from in utero. We suspected boy. We should have known better. Who better than a trouble making mommy to know that girls are trouble!
The Frog was born, they took him off to get checked out, and we all braced ourselves for the birth of baby B. We'd been run through all the options--could mean they'd need to give me some 'manual' help (cue mental image of some doctor snapping a glove up to their elbow-uh, NO THANK YOU). Could mean that if everything went to hell, we'd need a C-section. I was very, very determined to avoid this, unless it was necessary for the safety/health of the baby. The doctor started to do an ultrasound to determine her position, stopped, and said 'huh. Baby B is head down, on it's way, um, PUSH, okay?' A contraction and a half later, just seven minutes after the Frog, we had our Monkey.
She continued her reign of trouble by grabbing the doctor's gown as she was trying to hand her off to the pediatrician, and having to have her death grip forcibly removed (which took an amusingly long time) from the gown so she could get checked out. Then she decided to have a bit of trouble breathing, just to keep us all on our toes. A couple of minutes later she was fine, breathing normally, ten grams bigger than her big brother, if a little less wide awake and ready to greet the world.
If the Monkey isn't happy, she lets you know. Immediately. Persistently. Loudly. And she becomes discontent quickly, and often has no intention of having her reasons for discontentment be anything that you can easily discern. Because that would be telling, wouldn't it? She ended up needing to be tube fed as well, although she took to bottle feeding much quicker than her brother did... although she also thought that boobs were the most awesome place in the world, even if eating from them, not so much.
(I might have found it slightly amusing just how difficult a time the nurses had finding hats that would fit them. We ended up with quite a few, since we had to send the original ones home to be washed, and it became the Mission of one of the nurses to find them new hats)
I'll admit to being torn as to whether the happiest day was the day we had them, or the day we finally got to take them home. You all pretty much know just how stressful being in the hospital became (only second to being sent home from the hospital and away from my babies, which outright sucked), so when they were finally strong enough and eating enough that I could take them home, I practically ran out the door.
(Even if we had to pad the heck out of the car seats because they were so wee)
(No, we did not let Snafu eat the baby. He was just tasting him. To see if he was done.)
By the time I got home, I only had to do three weeks solo while the Academic Husband finished up the school year, and then I had him for the whole summer. Please, no one throw anything at me for how freakin' lucky I was to have the other parents home with me for nearly their first three months. But it was AWESOME. Mostly because sleep when the baby sleeps? Does not work with twins. You think they're going to sleep at the same time? AH HA HA HA HA HA no. They are individuals, boy howdy, and that's gonna show up all over the place, including in their sleep schedules. We survived because I stayed up from midnight to six am with them, not even trying to sleep, since they were up every two hours, and then I got to sleep from six am till noon, while the boy was running the show.
(And sometimes there was napping)
(Maybe a lot of napping)
(And some dressing of boy babies in gender 'inappropriate' clothing, perhaps with wee pink flowers on them. It might have been an accident. Maybe. I'm really not sure... the sleep deprivation has removed those memories from my consciousness)
They tell you all sorts of things about babies. They tell you that they cry, that they poop, that they melt your brain and that they melt your heart (oh, HI SAPPY JAY). But they forget to tell you some things. They tell you that they grow quickly, sure. But they don't tell you how quickly. They don't tell you that the onesie that yesterday was two big will today be too small. Way, way too small.
(The Frog. Ready for Muscle Beach. Or possibly a gay bar)
They tell you that they poop, yeah, but they don't tell you that they fart! Okay, maybe that should be obvious, considering, but seriously--the number of times I almost blamed an appalling noise on my father in law, and it turned out to be my not-even-eight-pounds child? How can something that loud come out of something that small? Sadly, the part where they tell you that poop will become all kinds of funny and part of your conversational repertoire? True. I tried. And yet I still tell poop stories. And for that, I apologise.
And some things are always cute.
(Sleeping daddies with their little girls? Cute)
(Babies wearing hats--especially comically big hats? Cute)
(Cats determined to snuggle near babies what smell good? Very cute)
(And come on. Half the reason we have them is so that we can put goofy hats on them. Right?)
(Right?)
(Come on, you know I'm right. Incidentally, all these pictures are of the Frog. I need more silly hat pictures with the Monkey, clearly)
I lucked out big time in that we missed the whole 'colic' thing. Considering that both the AH and I were ridiculously colicky, this might be interpreted as an act of a particularly benevolent God. What we did not get, however, was children who know how to sleep. Particularly the Frog, who seems to think that two hours at a time between being awake and being asleep is FINE! Fine for everyone! Fine for naps, fine for at night time! Why would his mommy need to sleep for longer than that? PLEASE.
Incidentally, if your babies slept through the night, either right away, or, um, ever? Feel free to laugh at me. Just... maybe don't tell me that you're laughing. Although I will take anyone's advice/tips/personal anecdotes about sleep and their babies. 'Cause a) you've gotta laugh, or you're gonna cry, and b) you never know when you might find something that works for you.
(And sometimes they make this face at you, and then you kind of just know that everything maybe is going to be okay, even if they never let you sleep. Hi monkey.)
We got them baptised in September, the same day that I had my whole... gallbladder... thing. I don't remember a lot of it all that clearly, but apparently they had a great day, they were really well behaved, and cute as wee little be-silked bugs. And the Monkey actually was in silk.
(The Monkey)
(The Frog. Their bonnets are made with leftover material and lace from my wedding dress, and my mother in law sewed both gowns and bonnets)
(And my mom crocheted the blankets that they're wrapped in. I'm a spoiled, spoiled girl, and they're spoiled babies.)
It is very difficult to get a full-body shot of babies in baptismal gowns.
(They would far rather eat them than be photographed)
But these should at least give you an idea what they looked like.
The boy is up now, and I finally get to go to sleep (which is good because photobucket is starting to act up and I might have to smite it), so I will leave you with a few pictures of my Frog as a frog, and my Monkey as... well... a chicken. These were gifts from a friend of my sister. She lives in Japan, and has a boy/girl set of twins of her own, and she sent these for my guys, just in time for Halloween.
(A Frog)
(A Monkey-as-a-chicken. And if you can't read the printing on the shirt, it says 'It is lovely this chick'. I did mention that they were bought in Japan, right? Right.)
(The Frog peeks at you!)
(And the Monkey-chicken is tired. And maybe going to eat you. Night, everyone!)
That said? I really need to focus on the positive here, so this is going to be a post where I goo about my kids. And post a lot of pictures. You stand warned.
The aliens are just over six months old.
I know, right? It was just the other day that I was whining and complaining about how I was pregnant, and being pregnant sucks, and all of that assorted nonsense, and now they're not only here, they're actually turning into little people. They come complete with their own personalities and everything, and let me just tell you right now, the whole nature vs nurture thing gets a big nature vote from me, boy howdy, because first of all--they are who they are, and they're both extremely different, and second of all--the Monkey gets way, way too many behavioural and personality traits from me. Sorry for that, kid. Mom, stop laughing, this is not your version of revenge for what I did as a kid.
Before I go on talking about them, I just need to pause for a moment and say that the Academic Husband is the most awesome husband/person/man/father in the history of ever. I could not do this without him, no lie, no exaggeration. He's unbelievable. He's a hands-on dad, he's doing the lions share of the cleaning and housework and all that, and I tell you, I have more admiration than you can imagine for all of you who've either raised kids on your own or been the one who's doing most of it, because I truly could not do this without him as a partner in twin-madness.
He loves those two little people so much that it makes my heart hurt in that perfect this-is-a-good-ow way, and I'm so grateful for both of our sakes that we were able to make these wee aliens together, especially when just over a year ago, we were starting to think that it wasn't going to happen at all.
So! The Aliens!
Meet the Frog:
(Maybe ten minutes old, just after the birth of his sister)
The Frog came into this world with a big head (thanks, kid) and his eyes wide open. He took less than half an hour to show up, from the first push, and came very close to being born on a different day than his sister (he was born at 12:14 am). Which would have been interesting... twins with separate birthdays. He's our zen baby... except when he's not. Which sounds confusing, but it's not really. Unless he's hungry, wet, tired, or wants to be held, he's pretty content to kinda hang out and just chill. If he gets what he wants, peace reigns. If he doesn't? Look out. As ashinae put it after hearing them over the phone, the Monkey has quantity of crying... but the Frog has quality. When he really kicks up a fuss, you can hear him from miles away.
He's a bit of a slow starter, but once he gets going, there's no stopping him. After they were first born, he was the one who had to get a feeding tube put in first, because in the first day or so he dropped half a pound. Not such a big deal when you're a full-term baby with lots of baby fat to draw from, but when you're a month prem and barely weigh five pounds, and you're so skinny that your little knees are all wrinkly with baggy skin, that tends to scare the crap out of the doctors and nurses.
At least a couple of the days we had to spend in the hospital were probably do to his zen, since he figured that since his tummy was getting full without him having to do much of any work at the breast or at the bottle, why on earth would he want to go to any extra effort? He'd just snuggle right in on mama's chest when he was supposed to be nursing with the worlds most content little look on his face. Yes. This is where I am meant to be. Boobs? AWESOME. What, I'm supposed to eat from those? Well that sounds like work, doesn't it? No thank you! Fortunately, his mother is at least as stubborn as he is, and eventually we got him eating enough from the bottle that we could remove the tube, and be on our way home, even though he was still slightly under his birth weight.
Meet the Monkey:
(About ten minutes or so after she was born)
This is our little troublemaker. The whole reason why you have to deliver in an OR if you're having twins is because of Baby B. You never quite know what they're going to do. They can get into a bad position after baby A gets out of the way and they've got some room to move, they can get into trouble if there's placenta trouble, blah blah blah, baby B is the misfit before they even make it out the door. Um. So to speak. And all throughout the pregnancy, baby B was the one giving us static. The one who wouldn't cooperate during the ultrasound, the one who wouldn't let the poor nurses get a good tape when they did my non-stress tests... trouble from in utero. We suspected boy. We should have known better. Who better than a trouble making mommy to know that girls are trouble!
The Frog was born, they took him off to get checked out, and we all braced ourselves for the birth of baby B. We'd been run through all the options--could mean they'd need to give me some 'manual' help (cue mental image of some doctor snapping a glove up to their elbow-uh, NO THANK YOU). Could mean that if everything went to hell, we'd need a C-section. I was very, very determined to avoid this, unless it was necessary for the safety/health of the baby. The doctor started to do an ultrasound to determine her position, stopped, and said 'huh. Baby B is head down, on it's way, um, PUSH, okay?' A contraction and a half later, just seven minutes after the Frog, we had our Monkey.
She continued her reign of trouble by grabbing the doctor's gown as she was trying to hand her off to the pediatrician, and having to have her death grip forcibly removed (which took an amusingly long time) from the gown so she could get checked out. Then she decided to have a bit of trouble breathing, just to keep us all on our toes. A couple of minutes later she was fine, breathing normally, ten grams bigger than her big brother, if a little less wide awake and ready to greet the world.
If the Monkey isn't happy, she lets you know. Immediately. Persistently. Loudly. And she becomes discontent quickly, and often has no intention of having her reasons for discontentment be anything that you can easily discern. Because that would be telling, wouldn't it? She ended up needing to be tube fed as well, although she took to bottle feeding much quicker than her brother did... although she also thought that boobs were the most awesome place in the world, even if eating from them, not so much.
(I might have found it slightly amusing just how difficult a time the nurses had finding hats that would fit them. We ended up with quite a few, since we had to send the original ones home to be washed, and it became the Mission of one of the nurses to find them new hats)
I'll admit to being torn as to whether the happiest day was the day we had them, or the day we finally got to take them home. You all pretty much know just how stressful being in the hospital became (only second to being sent home from the hospital and away from my babies, which outright sucked), so when they were finally strong enough and eating enough that I could take them home, I practically ran out the door.
(Even if we had to pad the heck out of the car seats because they were so wee)
(No, we did not let Snafu eat the baby. He was just tasting him. To see if he was done.)
By the time I got home, I only had to do three weeks solo while the Academic Husband finished up the school year, and then I had him for the whole summer. Please, no one throw anything at me for how freakin' lucky I was to have the other parents home with me for nearly their first three months. But it was AWESOME. Mostly because sleep when the baby sleeps? Does not work with twins. You think they're going to sleep at the same time? AH HA HA HA HA HA no. They are individuals, boy howdy, and that's gonna show up all over the place, including in their sleep schedules. We survived because I stayed up from midnight to six am with them, not even trying to sleep, since they were up every two hours, and then I got to sleep from six am till noon, while the boy was running the show.
(And sometimes there was napping)
(Maybe a lot of napping)
(And some dressing of boy babies in gender 'inappropriate' clothing, perhaps with wee pink flowers on them. It might have been an accident. Maybe. I'm really not sure... the sleep deprivation has removed those memories from my consciousness)
They tell you all sorts of things about babies. They tell you that they cry, that they poop, that they melt your brain and that they melt your heart (oh, HI SAPPY JAY). But they forget to tell you some things. They tell you that they grow quickly, sure. But they don't tell you how quickly. They don't tell you that the onesie that yesterday was two big will today be too small. Way, way too small.
(The Frog. Ready for Muscle Beach. Or possibly a gay bar)
They tell you that they poop, yeah, but they don't tell you that they fart! Okay, maybe that should be obvious, considering, but seriously--the number of times I almost blamed an appalling noise on my father in law, and it turned out to be my not-even-eight-pounds child? How can something that loud come out of something that small? Sadly, the part where they tell you that poop will become all kinds of funny and part of your conversational repertoire? True. I tried. And yet I still tell poop stories. And for that, I apologise.
And some things are always cute.
(Sleeping daddies with their little girls? Cute)
(Babies wearing hats--especially comically big hats? Cute)
(Cats determined to snuggle near babies what smell good? Very cute)
(And come on. Half the reason we have them is so that we can put goofy hats on them. Right?)
(Right?)
(Come on, you know I'm right. Incidentally, all these pictures are of the Frog. I need more silly hat pictures with the Monkey, clearly)
I lucked out big time in that we missed the whole 'colic' thing. Considering that both the AH and I were ridiculously colicky, this might be interpreted as an act of a particularly benevolent God. What we did not get, however, was children who know how to sleep. Particularly the Frog, who seems to think that two hours at a time between being awake and being asleep is FINE! Fine for everyone! Fine for naps, fine for at night time! Why would his mommy need to sleep for longer than that? PLEASE.
Incidentally, if your babies slept through the night, either right away, or, um, ever? Feel free to laugh at me. Just... maybe don't tell me that you're laughing. Although I will take anyone's advice/tips/personal anecdotes about sleep and their babies. 'Cause a) you've gotta laugh, or you're gonna cry, and b) you never know when you might find something that works for you.
(And sometimes they make this face at you, and then you kind of just know that everything maybe is going to be okay, even if they never let you sleep. Hi monkey.)
We got them baptised in September, the same day that I had my whole... gallbladder... thing. I don't remember a lot of it all that clearly, but apparently they had a great day, they were really well behaved, and cute as wee little be-silked bugs. And the Monkey actually was in silk.
(The Monkey)
(The Frog. Their bonnets are made with leftover material and lace from my wedding dress, and my mother in law sewed both gowns and bonnets)
(And my mom crocheted the blankets that they're wrapped in. I'm a spoiled, spoiled girl, and they're spoiled babies.)
It is very difficult to get a full-body shot of babies in baptismal gowns.
(They would far rather eat them than be photographed)
But these should at least give you an idea what they looked like.
The boy is up now, and I finally get to go to sleep (which is good because photobucket is starting to act up and I might have to smite it), so I will leave you with a few pictures of my Frog as a frog, and my Monkey as... well... a chicken. These were gifts from a friend of my sister. She lives in Japan, and has a boy/girl set of twins of her own, and she sent these for my guys, just in time for Halloween.
(A Frog)
(A Monkey-as-a-chicken. And if you can't read the printing on the shirt, it says 'It is lovely this chick'. I did mention that they were bought in Japan, right? Right.)
(The Frog peeks at you!)
(And the Monkey-chicken is tired. And maybe going to eat you. Night, everyone!)