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• Never were there such devoted sisters

  It's official: Clio is crawling. She's been practicing for a few weeks now, but yesterday morning it was like the light went on, and it all came together. Now she's slap-slap-slapping across the floor, going after rubber ducks and stuffed animals and remote controls and trying to follow me into the bathroom in the morning when I'm getting ready for work.   An unexpectedly fun thing about this milestone is the fact that Elsa seems really excited about it. Finally, her l'il buddy can keep up with her, and they can go marauding on all fours together! She has someone to crawl into the clothes hamper with! Someone to pull bottles out of the wine rack with! Someone who can join her in her ongoing quest to eat the cat's food! Parrrr-ty! The sight of them crawling around side by side or one after another is priceless.   Over the past few months they've been interacting with each other steadily more and more. This mainly involves looking at each other and grinning and/or cracking  each other up for no reason that I can discern. Sometimes they'll pass (i.e. steal) a toy back and forth, and other times they'll grab at each other's ears / eyes / mouths / noses / etc. They really seem to enjoy slapping each other on the head or grabbing handfuls of each other's hair. The victim (usually Clio) will often cry, the perpetrator (ahem, Elsa) will continue to giggle and smile with gleeful abandon, and Mommy (yours truly) will say useful things like "gentle! gentle!" and "you have to be nice to your sister!" I think they think that they are being nice, though. For them, to put someone in a headlock or attempt to gouge their eyes out with their index fingers is the highest form of affection.   But they show genuine concern for each other, too. When Elsa cries, Clio often will start looking upset or even cry (sort of fakely) herself. And if Clio is upset, Elsa will come over and investigate. The other day during one of her crawling attempts, Clio bumped her head on the floor and started crying, and Elsa cruised over from clear across the room to make sure everything was OK. And here's another incredibly cute thing: often, while they're sitting side by side in their high chairs, they'll reach over and hold hands -- a beautiful, sticky slimy tangle of fingers and thumbs and pureed vegetables and Gerber Mixed Grain cereal.   They have a relationship, these two. It is fascinating to watch. And at the same time, I'm a little jealous. Is that insane?  I see the intimacy between them -- the secret laughter and unspoken understandings and budding mischief. And as cool as it is, there's a part of me that feels slightly left out. They will (I hope) always love me, but I'll never be a part of their sisterhood. There's a special bond between siblings -- I've always had it with my younger brother -- and I imagine it's that much stronger with twins. They may love me and Alastair to death, but ultimately their loyalties and sympathies will lie more squarely with each other. They will roll their eyes to each other about us. They will have their own inside jokes. They may not be the best of friends, but they will always have a deep, undeniable connection.   I don't begrudge them that closeness. And still, I found myself, the other day, holding the two of them, one under each arm, and saying with a certain desperation, wanting them to hear and understand: hey, remember when we were all together, the three of us? You guys were in my belly, and we were all one? We were a team? Us three girls, sharing the same air and food and blood? Remember?   Posted Oct 24 2007, 09:18 PM by Roper with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: crawling, twins, nostalgia, cheesiness, sisters

• Nine in, nine out

  The girls had their nine-month checkup today, and although the official milestone passed a few weeks ago, they've now been out-of-utero longer than they were in. I don't like to speak for them, but I think it's fair to say that if asked which they prefer, in mom or out of mom, they'd say out. More room to move around, more stuff to hear and see and taste. Mom and Dad are out here, plus cats and dogs and grandparents (in order of fascination). And there are definitely a lot more Cheerios here on the outside. Intact ones, that is.   No groovy musical instruments inside a uterus, either!    Since Alastair is away now -- we sent him off to the continent on Wednesday, where he arrived safely -- our friend Mara came to the doctor's appointment with me. Thank God. I don't know how I would have done it without her. When the girls were teeny tiny and content to sit in their carseats I might have been able to manage a solo doctor's visit (though I never had to), but with one crawling and one getting close, there's no way. Poor Mara got more than she bargained for, too: Not only did the girls get shots (flu vaccine), but they got blood drawn for lead and iron count testing. Ouch.   That is, Clio got blood drawn. The nurse wasn't able to tap a good vein in Elsa, and I had to sit holding her in my lap (Elsa, not the nurse. Settle down.) while the nurse wiggled the needle around inside her skin, looking for an in, and Elsa screamed bloody murder. I managed not to cry myself, but felt pretty damned awful about it. It looked like it was going to be the same for Clio (even louder screaming) but eventually it worked.   I guess babies have pretty small veins, so this is probably not uncommon. Right? Or did we get Jabby The Incompetent Nurse? She's a sweet lady. Every time we're there, she asks us in a low voice if we need formula and somehow manages to score us giant free cases of the stuff. Today she was pushing the free samples of Beech Nut cereal sitting out in a basket at the nurse's station. "Help yourself," she said. "Go ahead. Take a whole bunch. Take as much as you want."   Other than the blood and screaming, it was an excellent visit. The girls got a clean bill of health. Elsa weighed in at a sturdy 18 pounds 12 ounces, putting her in the 47th percentile for weight. She's in the 63rd for height. L'il baby Clio was 16 pounds 9 ounces, only in the 11th for weight and 28th for height, but she totally whooped Elsa in the head circumference category: 43rd percentile for Clio's giant noggin versus 24th for Elsa's. Either that or they were measured by Imprecisey the Other Incompetent Nurse. Because I swear Elsa's head is bigger than Clio's. Not that I put much weight on stats. But it is rather fascinating.   Does this look like a 24th percentile head to you?   Meanwhile, I'm both pleased and terrified to report that Clio is really starting to work the crawling thing. (Just in time for my month alone with them! Whoopie!) Today she several times got up on her hands and knees and started rocking on her own, and once she made a heroic effort to retrieve a pacifier just out of reach by going from a sitting position to a modified all-fours. Tonight she was even getting up onto her feet and hands, downward dog style. But -- this is the cutest thing ever -- sometimes in the midst of all this effort she puts her head down takes a little rest. Becoming mobile is hard work. Especially when you've got a 43rd percentile head on a 11th percentile body.   My head is so freakin' big!   Posted Oct 05 2007, 07:06 PM by Roper with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: crawling, pediatrician, blood tests, giant heads, percentiles, nine-month-old twins

• Wall-to-wall Wonderland

  We spent last weekend visiting the girls' paternal grandparents, who live in the 'burbs outside of New York. It was a delightful visit, with lots of time for the babes to charm the pants off various neighbors and relatives, including their nonagenarian great grandmother and great-great aunt, a first cousin twice removed (or was it a second cousin once removed?), and my uncle and aunt.   Elsa now clearly understands what a camera is for. Clio prefers to keep things candid.   But the best feature of the trip, by far, were the great expanses of nice, soft, wall-to-wall carpet at the grandparents' house and the great-grandmother's apartment. For the weekend, the whole world was the babies' play mat. We could just plop them down on the floor, scatter some toys around, keep an eye on minor hazards like tablecloths and tippy antique plant stands, and they were happy as can be. (And when I say "toys," that includes plastic measuring spoons, rubber spatulas and other cooking utensils, which are easily as fascinating and delicious to the girls as any plush or plastic gizmo.) We didn't have to put down a blanket or lunge to keep small heads from thumping against the hardwood, like at home. (We don't always get there in time.) So, while I'm not generally a fan of the carpeting aesthetic, I have to say: excellent for babies.   Elsa took advantage of the choice floor conditions to work on her crawling, and made some major progress. At her great-grandmother's apartment, she took her first real crawling "steps" -- a good five or six bonafide hands-and-knees strides forward. The goal: the wheel of great-grandma's wheelchair. Fascinating! The girl's going to be a mechanical engineer, and is clearly a genius. She did some more crawling here and there throughout the weekend, although a lot of the time what seems to happen is she'll go for a bit, then bend one leg in and end up back in a seated position, much to her own dismay. Other times she'll crawl a little, then seem to get tired and revert to commando creeping.      The girls were quite smitten with their great-grandmother's singing birthday bear.   Clio, meanwhile, still doesn't seem to have any interest in crawling. We put her on her stomach sometimes, and sometimes she'll hang out there for a little while, or even creep a tiny bit, but then she gets annoyed and wants to sit up, which she still hasn't figured out how to do on her own from lying down. I keep telling myself there's no reason to be concerned; she's just going at her own pace. Maybe she'll be one of these babies who skips crawling all together and goes straight to ballroom dancing.     Grandma and Elsa, overachievers. Note carpet, wooden spoon.    I will hand it to both babies: they managed to co-exist incredibly well with their grandparents' two golden retrievers, one of them a fairly young and boisterous dog, both of them very excited about licking, pawing, and otherwise interacting with the babies. We started by having the babies look at the dogs from behind a safety gate, from a bit of a distance (Clio was, characteristically, a little freaked out by them at first) and then, once they were comfortable with them, let them get to know each other a little better. The dogs were reportedly very sad after we left.      Clio with Aki and her "Abuelito." Abuelito (Grandpa), it should be noted, has not a drop of Latin blood in him; it's just what he wants to be called because he likes the sound of it.      Elsa and her new pal, Niko   One more event that must be mentioned: the feeding of applesauce. I get along very well with my mother-in-law (Hi, mother-in-law!) but we did have a difference of opinion over the matter of applesauce when the girls were first starting to eat solids. I'd heard that it was a good idea to start with vegetables, before fruit, so the babies don't get used to the sweet taste of fruit and then refuse vegetables. Joyce, on the other hand, swore by applesauce for Alastair, and reasoned (quite reasonably) that if you want to get them used to eating real food, you're better off starting with something they'll actually like. Well, I stubbornly stuck to my vegetable guns. But this weekend, the girls had applesauce for the first time, and their grandmother did the honors. They loved it, of course.     Posted Aug 17 2007, 09:32 AM by Roper with | with 12 comment(s) Filed under: applesauce, crawling, twins, babies and dogs living together in harmony, visiting grandparents

• The Great Leaps Forward

  It's funny how babies--ours, anyway--seem to make advances in fits and starts. They'll be hanging out on a little developmental plateau for weeks, not doing anything terribly new or exciting, and then all of a sudden, wham! They're a completely different baby.   Take Elsa. Please! (Thank you very much; I'll be here all week.) All of a sudden, she's a babbler. No longer content to gurgle and goo and squeal (oh boy, can that girl squeal), she's started staging long, loud, monosyllabic filibusters: "Buh buh buh ga bah ah ah bah ga ga guh guh da da ba da ba ga ah guh guh buh buh!" And then there's her special pacifier sound, a funny, nasal little speech she makes when she's in her crib with her pacifier in her mouth, which makes her sound like a cross between Popeye and an old Yiddish man: "Goy goy goy goy goy!"   What's even more impressive, though, is how crazily mobile she has become. In the past week, she's gone from slow, casual creeping to seriously intentional, commando-style scooting and proto-crawling -- always in the direction of electrical cords, naturally. She's also suddenly capable of getting up to a seated position on her own, from her back or stomach or all fours. This means that now, when I put her down in her crib to sleep, whether or not she remains lying down is entirely up to her. I'm not sure how I feel about her having this much free will.   In any case, we've had to make some adjustments. Yesterday, I lowered the mattress in her crib, just to be on the safe side. While she's not pulling up yet, I'd rather not have her first attempts at it land her on the nursery floor. And last weekend I gave in and paid a visit to the Superstore That Must Not Be Named for babyproofing supplies. There is now foam on the corners and edges of the coffee table, and a very nifty plastic cover over the power strip in the living room. (Who knew such things existed!) The other day, Elsa made a beeline for it and I watched, chuckling in evil triumph as she failed utterly in her concerted effort to electrocute herself. And what of Clio, you ask? Has she been sitting silently, stilly by while Elsa bounds ahead with verbal and gross motor skill advances? Well, sort of. She has started babbling a bit more, and last night I heard her try out the Yiddish Popeye pacifier thing. As for movement, she will occasionally push up onto her hands and knees or scoot a little bit when she's on her tummy, but she seems to be doing it more out of a sense of obligation as opposed to any real desire, like Elsa the Exploradora. Mostly, Clio's perfectly content to sit in one place and flap her arms around or play with a toy and grin, twinkly-eyed, at us, or to lie on her back and play with her feet. Cruising across the floor hell-bent on her own destruction just isn't her thing right now. And that's cool. But we are pretty sure that she's about to beat Elsa to a milestone for the first time any day now: those lower incisors are totally ready to pop.   In other news, I'm very happy to report that since my post in which the girls first slept through the night (or most of it, anyway), they have pretty consistently gone from their 10:30 dream feed through until 6 or 6:30 without needing parental intervention. Elsa still wakes up and cries a little around three or four most nights, but gets herself back to sleep after a few minutes. Clio has awoken with teething pain a few times, but some cuddling and a quick hit of Tylenol generally do the trick. Meanwhile, I'm trying to adhere to a strict I-will-not-come-in-and-get-you-before-6-am policy, because as far as I'm concerned, anything before 6 am still counts as the middle of the night -- a value I want very much to instill in my children. The next big step will be to eliminate the 10:30 feeding. Any tips on how and when to do this -- including how to involve majorly painful engorgement -- from those who've been there are most welcome...   Posted Aug 09 2007, 09:19 PM by Roper with | with 5 comment(s) Filed under: teething, crawling, sleeping through the night, babyproofing, dream feed, dropping a feeding

• God help us, they're moving

  This is getting serious. The other day, Elsa and Clio were on the play gym mat / blanket complex we regularly set up for them on the living room floor, while I was in and out of the kitchen, making pureed sweet potatoes. (I've been possessed of late by some kind of evil SuperMom demon who has convinced me that in addition to juggling twins, a part-time job, a marriage, housework, exercise, a social life, a novel in progress and a blog, I should really be making my own baby food, too. Does anyone have any holy water?)   Anyway, I got a little too absorbed in the fun of pureeing (vive la Cuisinart!) and went a little too long without going into the living room to check on the girls. When I finally did (bad mother! bad! bad!) Elsa had crept her way off the play mat and blanket, over the rug and onto the hardwood, and was inches away from the power strip where our stereo components, fan, and Alastair's phone and iPod chargers are plugged in. Her little hand was outstretched, reaching, grabbing, yearning for those delicious plugs and wires. I quickly scooped her up and put her in the Jumparoo and made two mental notes: 1.) Do not leave babies on floor unattended for more than one minute at a time. 2.) Start babyproofing, stat.   This relatively slow creeping is just the beginning, of course. Elsa is going to crawl any day now. She is at the stage where she's getting up on her hands and knees and rocking back and forth. Pretty soon it's going to click: "hey, I can move one hand, then a leg, then...whoah! Power strip, here I come!" Clio is making progress, too, doing more belly-pivoting and shimmying of her own. She can get up into a serious upward dog now, and push a little with her knees on the floor.   When the day comes that they are both crawling, we are -- how do I put this delicately? -- fucked. One baby crawling is tough enough. But two, in different directions? (Because of course they'll go in different directions.) Oy. And yes, I know. Just wait until they're walking. On the upside, I suppose constantly chasing after them could help me lose the last five pregnancy pounds.   I think I've got a decent handle on the basics of babyproofing: cover the outlets, move any small or breakable objects out of reach, babyproof cabinet doors, put up gates as needed, set up the Pack-n-Play for brief periods of containment, consider vacuuming/sweeping more often so babies don't ingest too many dust bunnies. Any other lesser-known tips? Things you didn't think of until disaster (almost) struck?   Posted Jul 22 2007, 10:12 AM by Roper with | with 12 comment(s) Filed under: Baby proofing, crawling, holy water, twins