the girls and I enjoy their new room. It's almost "done"; I just need to hang their name plaques.
Grandpa and Devon finished putting the crib together on the morning of Carrie and Melina's five-month checkup.
Melina weighed in at 12 lbs. 14 oz. and Carrie at 14 lbs. 2 oz. Not only are they still exactly a pound and four ounces different, but they've each gained exactly eight pounds since birth! Twenty-seven pounds of baby is way too much to sleep in one pack-and-play, so they've been in separate ones since four months when we split them up to help them sleep through the night. Carrie slept on her stomach and Melina on her back, looking like two halves of the same puzzle. Now that their nighttime sleep routines are well established and they both wake up smiling and cooing around 7 am...
... they can do it in the same crib! I was wondering how they would react to bedsharing again after a month alone. Last night I transferred them both asleep to separate sides of the crib so they could each have their space. An hour later, they had scooted to the middle and were spooning away just like they used to do when they were three days old.
I love the way the room turned out. Mommy and Grammy did the decorating.
It's a good mix of old and new. The new Summer Garden quilt (a special Christmas gift from Grammy and Grandpa) hangs over the old desk that Craig had in his childhood bedroom.
The artsy bug mobile from Devon's baby room is over the pooh pack-and-play with a new pink minkie sheet.
The new cutesy bug plaques match the old changing table with the moss green pad.
"Wow, it looks like we're finally ready to bring the babies home from the hospital!" I quipped to my mom.
The move really interfered with my nesting; I didn't want to fix and then dismantle a room in Lexington. Either way it wouldn't have mattered. New babies don't need monogrammed bedding and a color scheme; they need their parents close by. Carrie and Melina were always either in our room or right outside it.
Now they need a room for their clothes and toys as much as for their crib. Carrie's already in the second outfit of the day. She's developed a habit of grabbing onto anything I'm doing while I'm nursing her, and I was eating crackers spread with Nutella. Since I eat about half my daily calories while sitting with a baby and a Boppy curled around me, I'm not sure what to do about this. Nursing twins is giving me the metabolism and the concave backside of an eleven-year-old boy.
Today us girls are camped out on the floor sorting the laundry.
Away go the kitchen towels, the bibs, and the burp cloths. Devon's clothes go on his bed to put away later; that's how I caught him doing the sleep crawl with Poohbear and Christmasbear tagging along. There's also a small pile of clothes they've already outgrown that I will put into their closet bins with a nostalgic sniff. It still amazes me that people that tiny can actually outgrow things.
I start laying out clothes and soon the floor around the three of us is tiled in pairs of outfits. Most of Carrie and Melina's clothes are hand-me-downs from friends and older cousins. Dressing them in matchy-matchy is cute but expensive, so their matching outfits are usually gifts from friends and family. The rest of the time they wear outfits that complement each other in color and style that I cobble together from what they inherit.
Every few minutes I get up and file the finished sets away in their dresser drawers so that each morning I can grab two coordinating outfits without rooting around for a matching sweater or pair of pants.
I wish my own clothes were as organized. My personal sense of style is suffering right now. I moved from a cold climate to a warmer one where my favorite long sleeves and sweaters are out of place, and I've gained and lost forty pounds twice in the last two years. My weather appropriate clothes come in three different styles: saggy, baggy, or two sizes too big. My shirts start the day large and keep growing as I lift them up periodically to nurse. When I go out, I finish every outfit with a pair of Barney-purple Crocs I bought for $10 at the outlet.
The old wives' tale says that girls steal their mothers' beauty during pregnancy. I had a few people nod sagely and tell me that when I told them I was carrying two girls. They must have thought I looked TERRIBLE at the time. The expression makes no sense to me at all considering my situation. If both of the twins got their irresistible cuteness and universal appeal by taking it away from me, then I must have been indescribably hot to begin with. Really, I wasn't. They're so much cuter than I ever was that it's the highest flattery for me when people see them and compliment their sweetness.
I think fellow twin parent William Shakespeare felt this way, too, which is weird because he was the original deadbeat Dad. He, like me, had three kids in two years (Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith), but then left his family to live and work in London. His Sonnet #2 describes the way parental pride displaces personal pride. I've "translated" his original words below because I get my jollies out of using my otherwise fallow English degree to absorb something more cerebral than Moo, Baa, LaLaLa.
When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
When you're five months postpartum and you feel like a deflated sack of skin,
and you shake your head in the mirror and sigh "I'll never be a size two again!"
even though you were only a size two for, like, ten minutes in the fifth grade...
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
When you sidle up to your husband in the pew in church in the middle of the first song and he says "Did you go check on the kids? Where were you? I looked all over!" and you're horrified because you were sitting two rows back in plain sight the whole time and you wonder if having three kids in two years has aged you past all recognition...
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
You'll push your girls in a cart around Target and know that the hushed whispers that always seem to be behind you are about them, beaming so animatedly in their brown polka-dotted pants and pink cardigans and the hairbows with little musical notes...
So precious!
Sweet!
How Lovely!
You'll gaze into their faces with the wide set eyes you know are yours and the curved cleft chins that are your husband's, and you'll see that children are a much more flattering mirror than the one above the sink at home.
Then you'll suck in your stomach and smile.
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