Bringing up twin babies is like living in a warzone. You never know what will hit you next, what they will eat next, or when you will ever get a moment to yourself again. You become the family other passengers hope they don’t have to sit next to on the plane. But at the end of the day, when you finally get to take a deep breath, you realise just why your twins are twice as wonderful as anyone else’s babies.
It was a bit of a rough start to 2017 with our one 1-year-old twins. On New Year’s Eve our boy was teething. Both babies have five teeth, going on to number six, although it still feels like someone is teething all the time. I wish they could tell us.
Back to that night when he woke up every hour. At one stage I heard him throw a bottle out of his cot. I slept further and started hearing him throw a lot more bottle. As we have wooden floors, it was quite noisy. Somewhere in my subconscious I couldn’t understand where he found all of them. I only came to my senses a little while later to realise it was the fireworks.
We also didn’t understand why our electrical gate keeps opening by itself. After the costly exercise of replacing the entire motor, we realised they were playing with the remote and must have figured out how satisfying it is to repeatedly push a little blue button.
Someone asked me the other day what my New Year’s Resolutions are. Can survival be one?
These days it’s the norm to wake up at 4am, go through six nappy changes, put the dishwasher on, wash a load of clothes, feed the dog, go for a run with the kids in the pram, serve them breakfast, drink my coffee cold and realise it is only 7am.
It is also completely normal to go the bathroom while one baby tries to climb into the bath or the shower while the second one starts unravelling the toilet roll. And it makes absolutely no sense to them that you would even think about stopping the adventure. It is so nice to see the paper pile up before they have a chance to try and eat it all.
In terms of eating proper food, I’m still not sure how they just know that a slap chip tastes better than a carrot. Or, why mom’s carrot will taste better than theirs. We have to hide our food. We have to prevent them for climbing into the fridge and take sneaky bites of things that I had time to cherish before. Chocolate no longer melts in my mouth. I have to swallow three blocks at once, behind the kitchen door.
The same door is also your enemy later in any given day. So is the table, the chair, the floor and pretty much any other obstacle you haven’t even considered as a danger zone. How will we keep these two safe? We are never sure when to worry most – when you hear a big commotion or when you don’t hear anything when they are not in sight. I’ll tell you when they’re 18.
I also don’t understand why everything they shouldn’t have appeals to them most: dog food, plugs, remotes (they are not satisfied if they know you removed the batteries), the vacuum cleaner, computers, earrings and trying to get inside the washing machine. They are particularly fond of glass bottles, plastic bags and sharp objects.
Then, after a war zone of ducks, tooth brushes and dummies, you finally get them in bed and forget to put on a nappy before one sleeps. It never turns out well but in our defence, it only happened once.
These days we can only laugh at ourselves. For being the people at the airport in the boarding queue that most people silently wish they don’t sit next to, for changing social plans around the sleeping schedule, for thinking you can predict how a day will turn out, and for posting too many pictures of the kids online, even though I thought I would never be one of ‘those’ moms. I can’t seem to stop.
A lot of people ask how you deal with the two at the same time and the answer is really simple. You don’t have time to think about it. You pick them up, feed them, bath them, hug, laugh, play, love and accept daily that you don’t have a clue how to be the perfect parents. You humbly accept that they are the smallest most influential teachers you will ever have.
For everything else, there’s wine. Then you love some more and wish they grow up slower.
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