Looky, Daddy!

Betting Odds

It was through sheer luck that I was still around when the twins were born three years ago. For weeks beforehand, their mom had been steadily adding bedding to her side of the bed, trying to find some degree of comfort in a body that was almost as much them as it was her. It started with pillows, then a foam pad, then another pad, then more pillows, then an air mattress, then a sleeping bag, and so on, until the eve of their birth found my wife sleeping on a tower of bedding so high, if she had rolled I would not have survived. It was like sleeping next to a triple-decker sundae topped with a Hummer.

Toward the end, my wife didn't sleep at all. Nights became a form of torture--dark, quiet times (the last ever heard in our house, I hasten to add) that allowed her the hours she needed to focus on exactly how miserable I had made her. To this day I don't know how she resisted tipping herself off her tower of cushions and ending my sorry life. I'm not sure I would have been so strong.

In that same vein, it was through sheer luck that I was still around to see the Lila and Victoria's third birthday a few days ago. The odds were not good. A year ago, just before the girls turned two, a few friends of mine put together a modest betting pool, with each of them choosing a range of dates during which they won if I (a) ran away, (b) was incarcerated, or (c) chained myself to a radiator and set fire to my house. For a while, option b was looking good, and I probably would have done something drastic to make it happen until someone reminded me that being in prison would not significantly increase my chances of using the bathroom alone and unmolested.

To the best of my knowledge, no one put a betting pool together over whether the twins themselves would survive. I'm not sure if that's because no one wanted to be so tacky or if they just didn't think I'd do anything that would actually endanger the lives of my little girls. Like blink.

AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIGH!

AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIGH!

Updated to add:

EEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRG!

Through Screwing Around

The Mom is gone, off on a three-day retreat, to hone her already prodigious editing skills, which I hope will mean that from now on when I ask her to read over something, she'll have graduated from, "It's okay, I guess," to the more confident, "It's okay."

The last activity she partook of before she left was helping me move our couch to our kitchen. Our downstairs has exactly three rooms, placed in a row, like the segments of a caterpillar. All three of the rooms are the same size, which means if the couch fit in the living room, then it will fit in the dining room and in the kitchen, too. The upshot is, when you visit my house, you will either be surprised at the grandness of our kitchen, or the puniness of our living room, depending on your personality. Personally, I am surprised by both.

As for why the couch is in the kitchen, it is because I am through screwing around. Somebody's getting potty trained this week, by God, and I'm purging our living spaces of diapers, pull-ups, and furniture until it happens.

Don't expect regular posts.

The Mom on Going All the Way

I know that most of you come to Looky, Daddy! to read my husband's amusingly snarky takes on life with children. Bless you all for listening to him--it makes my penchant for ignoring him less noticeable.  However, I'm taking over his blog for the next few days to hopefully give a bit of information to twin moms-to-be. If Looky, Daddy! comes up first for a "dad and babysitter sex" search on Google (which had better be a random coincidence), why not try for first on "full-term twin pregnancy"?

A coworker of mine who is pregnant with twins showed visible amazement and relief when I shared with her that Lila and Victoria made their entrance into this world a few hours short of 39 weeks of pregnancy. This was not my first experience with such a reaction of a twin-mom-to-be. Early in a twin pregnancy all one seems to read or hear are stories of weeks of bed rest, premature births, low-birth weight, and weeks in the NICU. Every parent of twins should plan for such things and should realize that if they do occur it's just one of those unpreventable things that often happen with the birth of twins. However, often does not mean always!

So I'm hijacking my husband's blog for a few days to invite all of you twin moms who carried your babies past 36 weeks to tell your story here. Or, if you are not the parent of twins but your cousin's sister's nephew's wife had full-term twins, feel free to share their story for them. I'll go first.

• In my 34th week of pregnancy with the twins, I started doing prenatal yoga.
• At 35 weeks I began to eat ice cream whenever I darn well wanted to.
• My mother-in-law arrived early in week 36, expecting that her three-week trip would give her plenty of time to help out after their birth. (Little did we know that her return plane ticket would force her to leave just 2 days after they were born.)
• By week 37 I was so huge I was begging for a planned c-section and soon.
• I remember playing tag with my older daughter in the snow at the beginning of week 38.

The night before I gave birth was New Year's Eve. We went to an outside event in a neighboring town. I probably walked 3 miles that evening from event to event. We even went to the circus. I rang in the New Year, and at noon the next day my water broke. Seven hours later, I gave birth to Lila at 6 lbs and Victoria at 6 lbs 6 oz. Three days later, we all went home from the hospital together. The Dad tried to stay, but he was forced to come home with us as well.

Now it's your turn. Let those expectant moms of twins know that, on occasion, without any good reason, twin pregnancies aren't any worse (or any better) than singleton pregnancies.

Twins, pt. 9

There should be two couples in a double date. There should be two large pizzas in every delivery order. FBI agents should come in twos, just not to my house. Opposable thumbs should come in twos.  Cats, if they have to come at all, should come in twos. There should be two hemispheres in every brain. Checker pieces should have two sides, and so should the coin they flip before the Superbowl. And there should be two albums inside the sleeves of Exile on Main St.

Babies should still not come in twos. And neither should sinuses, lest they get infected. Like mine.

The High Cost of Twins

Something you almost certainly know is that Manhattan has a Chinatown.

Something that you probably know is that Manhattan's Chinatown contains countless shops that are, to even the most discerning eye, identical.

Something you might not know is that inside each of those identical shops, back behind the porcelain Buddhas and the flat-bottomed spoons and the woks, way back in the back of the store, sits an ancient Chinese woman.

And something you surely do not know is that all of those women are sitting in the back of those stores waiting for just one thing: twins.

We wouldn't have known it either had we not taken the twins to Chinatown last summer to meet some friends. With each shop we passed, more and more of these women, each well over 250 years old, came out of the darkness of their store and surrounded the stroller. It was like the girls were the tasty sweet bean filling of a particularly large and wrinkled Chinese dumpling.

But the reason I mention this is that I was doing a little laptop spring cleaning recently and I came across this little video clip of a particular dollar store we found on our trip to Chinatown:

It's the "plus" that gets you.

Twins, pt. 8

Even more things that should come in twos: Nostrils, front teeth, and Hostess cupcakes should come in twos. Pant legs should come in twos. There should be two handlebars on Snidely Whiplash's mustache and two horns on the devil. The Blues Brothers should come in twos, but neither of them should be John Goodman. Tassled pasties should come in twos and so should DVDs from Netflix so that at least one would actually play in my DVD player, godammit.

Babies should still not come in twos.

Panelaky

It had never occurred to me. I had walked past the building every day on my way to work and yet it had never occurred to me.

It was an old apartment building, probably ten or twelve stories tall. It sat in the midst of a dozen identical communist-era apartment buildings, panelaky the Czechs call them, in a neighborhood on the northern terrace of Usti nad Labem, a town once called the "ashtray of the Czech Republic" by a remarkably accurate guidebook series.

The neighborhood was going through a clean-up, workers on scaffolds scrubbing the sides of the panelaky, ridding them of decades of coal soot and industrial pollutants, restoring the dingy black buildings back to their original dingy gray.

David, a close friend who has become almost like a brother in the fact that I never call him or write him anymore (and whose name I have Anglicized from its original Czech, David), had also walked past the building daily. It had never occurred to him, either.

Yet there we both were, in the middle of the night, racing each other up the exterior scaffolding of that building all the way to the top.

My point is this: In a matter of seconds, two people together can come up with ideas that neither of them would have ever considered separately.

When I stayed home with Kathryn, I suspect I went to the bathroom everyday, maybe even multiple times a day. I have no proof of this, but I'm just a going-to-the-bathroom kind of guy, so I'm pretty confident. Never once did I emerge from the bathroom, drying my hands on a towel, to find Kathryn standing on top of the dining room table, hopping up and down on her little chubby toddler legs.

Guess how many times I've found the twins doing just that. Together, of course.

The Right Tool for the Job

Thank you for your emails, comments, advice, and even phone calls. You will be happy to know that the bird currently eating my liver is a good three sizes smaller that the one munching on it but a few days ago. It is now roughly the size of that muppet on Sesame Street. Just not as cheerful.

Truth be told, the whole situation has been about a tenth of the ordeal that I have been making it out to be. For one thing, The Mom has been here. She took the week off work for Kathryn's winter break and she has had us running hither and yon on so many fun-filled adventures that the babies have been all but begging to be put in their beds by the end of the day.

Also, we have found the right tool. As a guy, I'm a big believer in tools and I firmly believe that the proper device can make almost any situation manageable. For a while, I could not figure out which apparatus rusting away on my neglected basement workbench would help keep these girls in bed. I went through the usual suspects, duct tape, toggle bolts, bungee cords, hook and eye clasps, but all of them either left marks or created what I was told was a "non-nurturing environment." Whatever.

But stay-at-home dads have other tools, too. Tools that aren't made of steel, iron, or shiny silvery tape. Tools that are plush, cute, and snuggle-able. Tools that look like this:

These tools are very sensitive. They get lonely. They need company. They must be held and kept in bed. They can't handle loud noises or jumping. If anything happens that disturbs these highly-specialized tools, then they ask to come sleep with Mom and Dad.

You wouldn't want that, would you? Of course not. Now go to bed, little ones. Go to bed.

Prometheus Bound

If I had known it would be this easy, I would have done it a long time ago. Right after driving over my own skull with a mini-van.

The cribs are gone. The twins are in beds now.

Four years ago, we transitioned Kathryn from a crib to a bed. We did it on her second birthday. It was the kind of smooth, easy change that made The Mom and I think that we were the greatest parents ever and that we should write a book called How to Be Great Like Us (First chapter title: You Can't!). Truth be told, though, it was all Kathryn. To Kathryn, a bed was the same as a crib, just with a better selection of sheets. Kathryn believed she was no more able to get out of her new bed by herself than she could attempt a climb up Mt. Everest's south face. Unless, of course, she had a team of Sherpas and a sheet of Hello Kitty stickers. Hello Kitty makes the impossible fun!

The twins are under no such delusions.

Ever since I chose to stay home with my girls, I've felt more-or-less like Prometheus, who, after performing one incredibly selfless deed for all humanity, has been chained to a rock and had his liver eaten by birds every day since. For me, the only difference each new day brings is the size of the bird. Most days it's a small bird, a hummingbird. It almost tickles. I've even been known to laugh.

This no-crib thing is a big-assed bird.

So, I'm writing this as a kind of preemptive apology. I write when the twins nap. If they don't nap, I don't write. And they're not napping. Oh no. Not when there's paint to peel off the door frame and extension cords to fish out from behind the changing table. So forgive me if, for a while, the occasional few days or more slip by without a post. I'm doing my best. And keep your eyes to the sky for a big-assed bird holding a little bitty, vodka-soaked liver. It's mine.