New Year's Resolution, 1-20-2012

Way back in my student teaching days the speech therapist at my school did a language evaluation for a third grader. The otherwise bright girl mumbled, mixed her words around, and used strange, seemingly made-up names for commonplace classroom objects and actions. She was observed for a week in clinic and classroom and the therapist documented all of these problems. This cheerful and intelligent little girl was having serious difficulty functioning normally at school. When my friend thought she had a diagnosis, she made a home visit to confirm.

The girl didn't have a speech impediment. She was being raised by her grandmother, who had difficulty communicating because of a stroke suffered when the girl was two. She learned to talk by repeating words she heard from a woman who could barely speak herself. This became apparent when my friend realized over coffee and cookies that the girl and her guardian sounded just like each other.



This stops me in my tracks.



I taught for eight years, and though I did my best for my students I knew that most of their training was going on at home. Many times I left a parent-teacher meeting thinking "Well, that explains a lot!" Most of the time it was for good reason: kind, thoughtful, intelligent parents were successfully raising a wonderful child.

Sometimes not.

Giggling over morning cereal and filling sippy cups is the easy part of parenting. The hard part is that to truly be successful I have to BE the kind of person I want my babies to become. That means getting up in the morning and doing battle with the parts of my personality I'm not happy about.

There are no secrets in a house with small children. If I think my children won't notice my flaws, and by noticing feel comfortable in accepting a lower standard I have modeled for them in my own life, I'm sadly mistaken.

This weekend Craig and I are sitting down and making THE LIST. On it go words that will not be allowed in our house. Some are profane, some are best left to private conversation and not trotted out in public, and some are best left to older people who can judge each situation and use words to help and not harm. However, THE LIST isn't for policing what our kids say. It's for monitoring what WE say.



It's about time. Devon's vocabulary has gone from 10 words to 500 words in three short weeks. He's putting the words into increasingly complex sentences. It's without a doubt the most fun I've had being a parent. It amazes me that I can say "read" once and find him rocking in his chair with book open saying "read...read...read" an hour later.

I have a choice to make. I can be stupid (a word on the list, actually) and think that I can continue to act any way I feel like and raise children that don't have my hangups. Or I can choose to learn my hard lessons quickly and not let any of the foolishness I struggle with become a part of them.

People already say my kids look and act like me. I want that to be a good thing.

I hope it's not too late in the year to make that New Year's resolution.

Only twenty days late is actually doing pretty good for me. All three kids are on a really good schedule, but only just. Bedtime routines are firmly established, but things don't always go according to plan. When I take this picture at 8 pm.,



chances are I'll be taking this one at 11:30,



and, finally, this one at midnight.



Mysteriously, Carrie's and Melina's day schedules have flipped. Melina used to keep me company in the afternoon as Carrie and Devon slept. Now for the past few days Melina has been taking the marathon-style naps of a much older baby



while Carrie and I enjoy floor time, do the afternoon chores, or sit at the kitchen table typing a blog and eating cereal.



I cherish every minute I have alone with Carrie. She doesn't have the high-energy needs of toddler Devon or the "all the world is a stage" personality of Melina. She's the one who could easily get lost in the shuffle of my day, the wheel-that-doesn't-squeak that therefore gets left alone. I have to make an effort each day to notice her, enjoying every minute of her serenely cheerful babyhood.



So I do. That's my other resolution, and I make that promise to all of my babies.

Before we had kids, I admired the attitude of a friend of mine who had one child at the time and now also has three. She said she made up her mind to treat her little boy like he was the only child she would ever have, and to give him all the attention and love that he needed without looking ahead to having more or back to when it was just her and her husband.

I want to do the same. Part of living the very public life of parent of three under two is fielding questions about our intentions:

"Are you done?"

"Did you plan this?"

"You're going to end up like the Duggars, you know!" (Interesting side note: they had their first three on our timeline.)

Most people are nice. Some, quite frankly, aren't.

"You just enjoy making things hard for yourself, don't you!"

"This isn't the 1800's! There are things you can do to prevent that!"

"I know the name of a good bankruptcy lawyer! You're going to need it!"

I love my life with my husband and kids. It's amazing now to think of the time I wasted worrying about waiting too long bringing on infertility (HAH!). God gave us three kids before we even asked for two. How amazing! God knows what we want, but he gives us what we need. At this point, that's enough for us. More children would make for some interesting blog titles (6 in 4? 9 in 6?) but we're too busy loving our children like they're the only ones we're ever going to have.



It's easy for me to move through the day in a putting-out-fires state of mind, especially when a small crisis threatens to destroy the peaceful evening I planned. After an evening like last night when I changed eleven poopy diapers in two hours and gave two emergency baths, it's easy to wonder when I'll ever be able to plan an evening out or have late evening hobby time (if by "hobby time" I mean finally starting the girls' baby books). Then I stop, focus on my kids who need me, and make the decision to participate fully in this time of my life.



This morning Carrie woke up at an early 6:30, and after eating she laid on my chest in a blissful milk coma as I checked facebook and email and enjoyed the rhythm of her breath for two hours as Devon and Melina uncharacteristically slept in.

I have to make enough of those moments. Perfect strangers warn me of that all the time.

"They're so sweet! Enjoy them! They're going to grow up so fast!"

Outfit Lab, 1-14-12

While Devon sleeps (yes, he sleeps like this),



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.

Fussy Morning, 1-6-12

It's Friday morning, and it looks like this post is going to be typed with one hand (like many of my posts these days). I'm dividing my time between composing and holding a very fussy Melina.

Maybe she misses her Grammy and Grandpa, who boarded a plane for home yesterday and won't be back to hold her for several months. If the cascade of drool covering both little fists and running down her shirt is any indication, she's teething. She could even be reacting a little from her five month shots, with so many deadly childhood diseases waging their wars in miniature in order to build up antibodies in her little immune system.

Whatever the cause, if I put her down she's inconsolable. Melina's nasal, operatic scales radiate pure grief, unlike Carrie's drier, throatier mad wail. Since any of my kids crying is nails-down-the-chalkboard on my mommy hormones, Melina has been my morning companion as Carrie bobs her head in the Bumbo. We've made the coffee and oatmeal, shooed the cat off the master bed, and watched Devon play with his new cars on the screened porch.

I really need to get up and do battle with the two textures of childhood: Crunchy and Sticky. Devon enjoyed the chocolate Santa from his Christmas stocking little by little, but the crispy parts unsettled him so he spit them out and flicked them on the floor like peanut shells in a Texas Roadhouse. Then, he learned how to unscrew the cap on his sippy, making a round watermark of apple juice on the floor around his booster seat.



Since I didn't want him to walk on the tile until I could clean up, I relaxed my rules and let him take a toddler snack-catcher cup of goldfish crackers into the living room. I know they're supposed to be for mess-free feeding, but Devon uses his more for entertainment. He shakes it upside down until all the goldfish fall out into his lap, and then beams and picks them up one by one, holding them up to the light to inspect them before crunching down with mouth wide open. Since I was feeding Carrie and Melina their cereal, I shrugged helplessly and watched it happen. The carpet is now spread evenly with a thin layer of artificial cheesy yellow cracker dust. I'm usually a barefoot girl in warm weather, but I've taken to wearing slippers because walking on my own floor makes my feet feel dirty some days.



Toddlers do generate a lot of mess; the five second attention span is probably to blame. Carrie and Melina's socks need sorting after Devon dumped their bin last night. He loves their socks; his favorite thing to do is to pull them off their feet, go to the nearest doorway, and stand in the threshold tossing them up in the air again and again. Every doorway has five or six mismatched socks on the floor, lying there like they're part of the feng shui.



The tree needs to be taken down before one of the kids starts eating needles again. It was a great tree and the kids loved it, but I am so OVER it by now. Worse than that, every time I pass the pen I smell poo and I don't know where it's coming from. I've picked up each of the kids, the cat, and most of the toys to smell them, and I can't figure out what's to blame. That's not a good sign, seeing that yesterday I changed seven poopy diapers.

I better get started, but I look down at Melina and she's sleeping with that newborn open-mouth-breath that puffs on my neck and tickles a bit. If I move her, her face contracts into a grimace and she whines in protest.

"Oh, Melina, it would take a village to raise you," I raise an eyebrow and whisper. It's my favorite saying, the one I repeat to maintain my composure when I start to get tired. Carrie and Devon each have their fussy moments and things that set them off, but if I am ever diagnosed with permanent hearing damage it will be Melina's fault.

Not that she isn't a joy to parent. When I lean over her to pick her up, she arches her back and practically levitates into my hands, squealing with joy that I've finally noticed her. She's starting to stand in her exersaucer for a few minutes a day, bicycling her feet like she's ready to run across the floor. When I carry her around, her hand drifts up and traces my jawline lightly like she's trying to memorize the feel of me.

I suppose it's natural for me to feel most protective of my littlest one, the active but fragile one we almost lost when her heartbeat plummeted during the delivery. I feel like she needs me most of all, and it feels good to be needed even when I'd rather be pushing a mop. Most importantly, Melina reminds me that nothing is more important than sitting down and holding the baby.

Christmas Eve, 12-23-11

These are the photos that make me pity everyone who doesn't have twins.





Even going to the grocery store is a public service these days. The twins are universally cute, smiling, and finally poseable enough to take some really good pictures.



Our house doesn't have a chimney on which to hang our stockings with care, so we make do. Grammy, Grandpa, Mommy, and Daddy have handmade stockings I made years ago, but my kids don't. Even Ally kitty has a stocking with her name on it, but not my kids. In January when all three kids will finally be on an afternoon nap schedule, I'm going to get my act together. I wanted their stockings to all be done for our first Christmas as a family of five, but I spent the three discretionary hours I had last month taking a bath and reading Dare to Discipline.



Our early fears of Devon tipping over the Christmas tree haven't been realized, although he has removed most of the ornaments he can reach. It's pretty much just a lit tree now, a hardy Fraser Fir that sheds needles profusely because it was trucked in from five states away.



Of course, what the area lacks in Christmas Tree Farms it certainly makes up in poinsettias. The one in our entry way is four feet wide. In Lexington I'd spy a nice one and buy it only to have the cold drive home almost kill it. This season I've already bought three and they're all blooming away in the warm weather. When Christmas is over, I'm thinking of planting them outside. Hah!

It's 84 degrees here, and when I complain to my friends about being too hot I get NO sympathy. All our Christmas decorations survived the move, although I spent a month looking for the Caucasian Holy Family. While in high school I received beautiful, fragile, and probably valuable china figurines of Mary, Joseph, and Baby Jesus. Every year when I set them up I marvel at their blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white-skinned perfection, and then wonder why their makers didn't have a creative vision that was, oh, EVEN JUST A BIT MIDDLE EASTERN!!!!! They were a gift from my Grandma Annabelle (yes, as in Carrie Annabelle), the kindest, least prejudiced person, and it was the kind of thing I'd like to pass down someday. I was relieved when Devon came out of the twins' closet one day holding aloft a reindeer tin that contained their intact, bone china selves. Now I need to find an out of reach place where we can safely enjoy their white-as-the-driven-snow radiance.

Our workaday manger scene is getting heavy use these days. It's a Fontanini, a brand I recommend not just because it's reassuringly culturally accurate. The figurines are made out of durable molded plastic, which can be very comforting when Devon rounds the corner with Gaspar in one hand and the camel in the other. Don't worry about the safety of the Baby Jesus; I'm following the Keathley tradition of putting Jesus in the manger for the first time while reading the Luke 2 story on Christmas Eve. Until then, he's enjoying our anticipation from a teacup on a high shelf.



Devon's having fun acting out the Christmas story as Mommy narrates using phrases from the King James. I know that we're all enlightened now and use NASB, NIV, or even the Southern Baptist favorite the Holman Christian Standard, but I prefer to recite the nostalgic words straight from my childhood.

Mommy: Those are the shepherds!

Devon: Sepperds! There! (pointing)

Mommy: They're abiding in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night!

Devon: Seep! (picks up the Lambs to the Slaughter and puts one in his mouth)

Mommy: Lo! An ANGEL OF THE LORD came upon them, and the GLORY OF THE LORD shone around them, and then they were SORE AFRAID!

Devon: (tips over all the shepherds) Oh Noooooooooooooooo!



For weeks Devon would only take the sheep out of the creche; I aptly nicknamed them the Lambs to the Slaughter because their presence protected the peace and tranquility of the rest of the tableau.



No, Ally kitty has not seen his star in the East and come to worship the Baby Jesus. She's always been a little confused by the manger. It started when she was a kitten and we laid towels on the furniture to show here where she could lay so she could shed away on a towel and our couch could be hair-free. Every year we roll out a towel, arrange the creche and figures, and have to shoo Ally away every day or so.



Funny, this year it hasn't been so much of a problem!



Since we barely finished sending the twins' baby announcements out in November, we're probably skipping a picture mailer, but we did take a really nice picture.



For those of you wondering about the unfamiliar person, that's what my brother looks like when he smiles in pictures. Stoic Tim didn't make it this year, thanks to the other new person. He and his girlfriend Bojana Jovanovic were able to come out and spend last weekend with us. Uncle Tim and Auntie Bojana made quite a stir with the small set, taking Devon to Walmart and buying him a dozen balls and a Monster Truck that makes him turn purple and quiver with delight every time you turn it on.







There are many more pictures in this series that didn't make the post. Devon, not one to pass up a chance to perform, thought it was hilarious to lift his shirt and display his "Pufferfish Tummy" every time Daddy set the flash on the tripod and dashed for the picture. Mommy tried to keep him distracted by singing "Father Abraham Had Many Sons", an appropriate song because the "right arm-left arm" motions prevented the tummy shenanigans.



White Christmases, fir trees, chimneys, and reindeer are nice, but they're not spiritually significant. Why did Perry Como have to dream of a "White Christmas"? He lived for years on Jupiter Island, about thirty miles south of Vero Beach.

It's ironic to think that spending our first Christmas in Florida in our shorts and bare feet brings us closer in a way to the very first one. Christians don't know the time of year that Jesus was really born, and the Middle East probably doesn't get many feet of snow and subzero temperatures at any time of year. Baby Jesus came to parents who were hot and tired from travel, surrounded by sand, and far from home, all things we can identify with given our past year.



NOT that I'm comparing us to the Holy Family, but it makes me grateful for their journey and what it means to us. We share their story with our children, mostly too young to understand.

That's okay. There's always next year.

Payback: December 14, 2011

I swear I remember this happening, although it may be one of those early memories that constructed themselves in my young mind because my parents told me about it over and over. When I was eighteen months old (around Devon's age now) my parents took me to Minneapolis for the weekend. I was usually a really good sleeper, but something about the drive from Sioux Falls, the hotel room, or the unfamiliar nighttime routine got me riled.

I started to sob loudly and refused to be consoled. My tired and bewildered parents tried holding me, walking me around, and letting me lay down. Hours ticked by as I wailed out my fury with the range and decibels of an ambulance siren and my parents contemplated staying awake during the morning's conference schedule.

Suddenly, in the middle of the night the room was filled with that thrumming, echoing silence that comes when a crying child has just calmed. My dad, lying still and hoping that I wouldn't start up again, felt me crawl on the bed next to him, bend over him, and stroke his forehead.

"Oh, Daddy, you're so tired. Daddy, you need to sleep. Go to sleep, Daddy," I repeated over and over, my face a picture of patience and concern. As you can imagine, my advice was not well received, seeing that I was the only one preventing just that.

Thankfully, my parents are forgiving people and let the retelling of that embarrassing story at family gatherings be its own punishment. Maybe they also looked forward to the day when I would have my own children: Their antics would surely pay me back for whatever shenanigans I made them endure.

Oh, yeah.

Craig and I looked forward to Thanksgiving week all through October and early November. He finally had a job with "real time off" and we'd be able to take a week long road trip to Tennessee to see his family and celebrate. We knew the first time we'd traveled as a family of five could have difficult moments, but didn't see a reason to put it off. We'd never go anywhere with three kids under two if we didn't open ourselves up to being flexible and having a good time no matter what. Knowing I needed to be prepared for anything, I went to Walmart the day before and spent $200, buying new leak-proof sippies, toddler snack-catcher cups, three kinds of crackers, two kinds of M&M's, and those bottled iced coffees that are so much better than the McDonalds drive thru coffees when you need a quick caffeine boost.

We got off to a slightly late start because Craig was up with an upset stomach the night before. I tried to stay calm during the loading the car phase, anxious to get on the road. I was also mentally mapping every mile of our drive to Atlanta, knowing we'd be on the road late if we didn't make early progress. Carrie and Melina napped in their car seats for the first several hours. Every two to three hours we'd park at a rest stop and spring into action like a pit crew: nursing, changing diapers, and letting Devon walk around and pick up things. Devon, the best toddler traveler, sang songs to himself and pointed raptly at cars. At 5 p.m. we crossed the border into Georgia.





I set cruise control to 70 mph and watched the billboards on Highway 75 whiz by. All advertised strip clubs and crisis pregnancy centers, making me wonder if the two businesses were somehow related. Craig and I smiled at each other, enjoying one of those moments where we feel like we have three happy children largely due to our parenting prowess.

Two hours later I sighed, thinking I'd given birth to the three unhappiest children on the planet. Devon's "intrepid adventurer" mood reached the end of its shelf life and he started banging his head rhythmically on the back of his car seat. Melina jerked awake with one of her trademark full body startles, opened her mouth, and wailed the opening bars of The William Tell Overture. Devon, suddenly interested in this new development, looked around the side of his car seat and his eyes fell on the round, green paci perched temptingly in sleeping Carrie's mouth. "A BALL!" he said wonderingly, and reached over to pull it out. Carrie's cries added the tympani part to Melina's soprano, achieving an effect exclusive to a pair of crying twins. Unsettled by all the noise, instigator Devon then decided to join in.

We tried stopping to nurse, Craig holding each in turn while I tried to use "the universal pacifiers" to get the twins calm again. Devon, upset at not being allowed to get out and run, fussed.

"Devon," I said in the perfectly calm voice that Dr. Dobson recommends for parental discipline. The face of innocence peeped out at me from around the car seat, lips fixed in the pouty smile of a Hummel figurine.

"Give Mommy the paci, honey," I cooed. I took the offered paci in my one free hand. When we were finally able to start up again, I took the driver's seat and sighed, mentally calculating the number of hours it would take to get to Atlanta, still 180 miles away.

"I don't feel so good," said Craig, holding his stomach. "I hope I'm not coming down with something."

The girls started crying again, apparently not impressed by the extra nursing stop as a show of my good faith. Devon fussed and begged for new car toys only to pitch them over his seat and whine for more. Craig grew sicker by the minute, sipping Coke weakly and grimacing. I concentrated on the road and tried to focus on the miles, not the hours, as the evening crept along.

When we finally reached Atlanta, Craig tried to read the map and my copied-from-Yahoo directions as I scanned road signs looking for the corresponding streets. This division of labor that usually serves us well failed miserably. Three lanes of traffic sprouted up on my right. I was unable to dart across all three without killing us, so I couldn't make our exit. Craig mumbled directions I wouldn't have been able to hear over the din even if he had a bullhorn. I got off at the next exit and found a place to ask for directions. Scantily clad women in high heels and drug dealers in hoodies turned to watch our minivan go by, I'm sure thinking we seemed out of place. I stopped at a gas station and was given competent directions by a clean cut Indian gentleman that also seemed out of place in the 'hood. I'm not given to Hallmark Channel flights of fancy, but I'm not sure he wasn't an angel sent to save us from our predicament (cue backlighting).

Fifteen minutes later we were in our hotel room and things were finally peaceful, except for the sound of my three children crying and my husband being violently ill in the bathroom. The room was not the two-room suite I had reserved, so we would all have to quiet down and sleep in the same room. As I rushed around setting up the pack-and-plays and getting out pajamas, I muttered an incoherent monologue as a nightly prayer:

Lord, I didn't think you were given to sarcasm, but when you said in the Bible that women are "the weaker vessels" you couldn't possibly have had this evening in mind. What about Pastor's flowery, feel-good sermon of a few months ago about a woman being like a piece of fine china, delicate because we're set aside for a special purpose? Right now I don't even feel like a piece of earthenware. Try styrofoam! Pish tosh!!!

We expected our first road trip as a family of five to have some awkward moments, but nothing could've prepared us for that first night. It was my payback for that night in Minneapolis when I cried and cried so my parents couldn't get any sleep. I don't think I was truly capable of understanding how awful that night was for them until now. Children do have a way of making you look at your own memories with renewed perspective.

The rest of the trip went remarkably well considering the rough start. We enjoyed a recovery day at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Craig looks peaked in the pictures, but we still had a good time as a family.









My mom and dad arrived to spend the holidays last night. Before the kids and I drove to pick them up in Orlando, I tried to give Devon his second haircut. Devon, suspicious of everything from the plastic drape to the barber shears, refused to let me get anywhere near his head. He craned his neck around, presenting his face instead every time I tried to get a snip of hair. I gave up after fifteen minutes, resigning myself to Devon seeing Grammy and Grandpa for the first time in four months looking like a Hobbit.

I've GOT to cut Devon's hair soon. If it gets any longer, he's going to look like Justin Bieber. I think distracting Devon while I cut his hair is going to be Grandpa's job.

What Devon doesn't know is that Grandpa didn't like having his hair cut either when he was a little boy. I've seen a picture of a tearful two-year-old Jerry getting his first haircut. It took four of his much older brothers and sisters to distract him by talking to him and bouncing him on a bicycle seat.

I think it's time for some payback.

Our First Family Picture, Thanksgiving 2011

Want to see our first family picture?



On Thanksgiving 2010, Devon was eight months old. We spent the holiday in Nashville with Craig's family and took photos together just after dinner. I like to think that sometime that day, perhaps between the stuffing and the pumpkin pie, a few cells split off the tiny embryo I didn't even know I was carrying and Carrie Melina Keathley became Carrie and Melina Keathley.

Of course, that single baby probably wouldn't have been named Carrie OR Melina. I had the name Verity picked out for a girl. We decided that since it meant "truth" it wouldn't work well for a twin. If one girl's name means that she's truthful, does the other one get to be a liar? What if the twin named Verity wasn't particularly truthful? Irony?

On the drive home from Nashville, I felt a twinge of nausea contemplating the turkey and cranberry sandwich my mother-in-law had packed for me. The next clue that I might be pregnant came almost a month later when the belt on the dress I had bought for a Christmas party was mysteriously tighter and I was in a serious romantic relationship with The Gingerbread Man.



Now I'm spending the day with three times as many kids as I thought I had back then. If you've wondered why I haven't posted in a while, it's because sometimes I can either be a parent or write about being a parent. I can't do both at once.

This has been a busy time for me because the girls are starting to take a little cereal twice a day. Like any parenting decision, this one was difficult, particularly because the Breastfeeding Mafia recommends ebf (exclusively breastfed) from birth to at least six months.

I caved at four months. I love nursing, but it was taking over my life. One night I was eating a bowl of Raisin Bran at 9:30 and realized that I had skipped dinner every night that week. What did I do instead? Tandem nurse, and not just at 6 pm, but every hour all day except for a short break in the afternoon. Tandem nursing was closing in on showering, taking care of Devon, eating three meals a day, keeping up with the laundry, and checking in with my patient and neglected husband.



The worst thing about spending so much time on the couch is not the backaches. It's that I had hours a day to surf the Internet with my one free hand and learn about all the things I should be doing for my kids. Making my own vegan organic formula from ingredients I buy from a health food store in New Zealand. Pureeing my own cereal from whole grains I cook myself. Wearing my babies on my body until they're old enough to drive a car.

Oh well. Twice a day the twins get 15 ml. of liquid cereal mixed with formula dropped into their mouths with a supplementing syringe. We'll transition to a spoon as soon as they get a little more practice moving a little squirt of cereal from the front of their mouths to the back. Right now it's cute to watch them stick out their tongues as if for a communion wafer, swallow, smile, and open for more. The cereal comes from a box with a smiling baby on it. The formula comes from a canister. The Breastfeeding Mafia says that you might as well feed the packing materials to the baby for all the nutrition they're getting, but the Mythbusters debunked that suburban legend last year before they turned their attention to sending cannonballs through peaceful Dublin homes.

I feel a little like I've gone over to the dark side, but the girls don't. They take a good morning nap, a good afternoon nap, and still nurse 6-8 times a day. What matters most is that they're much happier now...



...which means Mommy is, too.

The girls enjoy spending time in the "baby gym", which works better than a bouncy seat because they can lay side-by-side, or enjoy some tummy time. Melina just dropped her head, twitched her right leg, and became the first twin with a confirmed front-to-back rollover!



Last Saturday morning, we read in the paper about the Vero Beach Christmas Parade. "How quaint! A small-town parade. Let's go!" we cried, and packed up the kids for a rare evening outing.

As it turns out, five thousand people line Ocean Drive (a stone's throw from the coast) to watch handcrafted floats covered in Christmas lights amble down the street. It was part Main Street Electrical Parade, part Almond Blossom Festival, and the event of Devon's young life. When he was handed a flag by a passing walker, he gripped it firmly and waved it for two hours.

On the way back to the car, we ignored passing strangers who ironically hummed "Everyone Loves A Parade" while watching us file by with the twins in the double stroller and Devon still waving his flag in the single. I heard a voice call after us: "Wow, you guys make THAT look easy!"

It's NOT always easy, as you can imagine, but there are other words I would use to describe it: fun, exciting, rewarding. Of course, it's also time consuming. Why shouldn't it be?

It's the one thing in my life that, more than anything, I want to do well.

And blog about it if I have the time.