Mama Mama Quite Contrary

We are!  Jude and Elie turned 3 on March 6th and it was a much anticipated event.  We had cake. We had hats. We had a little party at the Y with all their favorite grown-up friends.  (Let's face it.  These kids don't have friends their age.) Because there was not one thing these kids wanted other than strawberries and blueberries, it was easy to make them happy.  Vivi gave them a bucket and bubbles and I made photo books for each of them.  My little narcissists loved them.  (We'll just keep the fact that I couldn't tell who was who in some of the baby pictures our little secret.)  Of course, you can't turn three and NOT have something fancy to wear.  So Aunt Katie came to the rescue by sending these new swim suits. Mother Nature also celebrated our survival of three years with three kids by sending some beautiful weather our way. So we made like The Brady Bunch and "fixed" our bikes. Hard work isn't really Jude's thing and this is how...

Five years ago today, I became a mother to this little creature: I loved her instantly.   Somehow that peanut turned five. Today, like each day before, I love her even more.   (Even when she decides that the best place to pose for her "5" birthday photo is next to the potty.)

On Sunday, the terrific Turtle twosome turned two and we celebrated by taking a family trip to California! Good Morning Birthday Girls! I'll just borrow my big sister's shoes to get gussied up for my party.  I am two after all. Ellie's pretty impressed with this "birthday" pretzel. Being two means that you get bigger bibs and glass plates (because that's all Aunt Annie had!) Smile everyone and try not to look massively jet-lagged and sleep-deprived! I love that chubby little two-year-old hand that snuck into the picture. That was delicious! Time to open some birthday books that mommy smuggled in her suitcase. Thank goodness Mama forgot to clip my nails. Breakfast for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Off to have more California adventures!

October seemed to come and go in one fell swoop and for the first time in a very long time, I actually know what happened. First it started off with Vivi's fall on the neighbor's porch which led to a very loose tooth.  It only took one day and a bite out of an apple for the tooth to fall out.  From what we can surmise, she swallowed the tooth along with the apple although that didn't stop her from writing a note to the tooth fairy letting her know where she can leave the money.   Here's Vivi in all of her toothless glory and one whole dollar richer: Seems that the same thing happened to her father at about the same age: He only got a nickel. Jude and Ellie are up to their usual antics-- climbing, playing, and learning to talk.  I am convinced that there is nothing better than a child between the age of 12 months and 24 months.  They are so full of curiosity and energy but not yet testing their boundaries.  They also haven't fully grasped the power of...

I've returned from the familial abyss that has claimed my blogging time for the last three weeks. I don't think I've gone so long without writing since I started this blog so to the two or three people who read my ramblings regularly, sorry about that. You see, we've just had quite a bit going on around here. Vivi turned four.   The Turtles are on the cusp of walking and destroying everything in their path. My washer died and flooded part of our basement in the process. Our beloved babysitter is graduating college and leaving us which has me distraught. And my husband and I celebrated five years of mostly marital-bliss. No picture for that.  Go figure... And you thought I was just busy soaking beans and baking bread.

Today my Turtles turned one.  We ate lots of cake.  Life is good.   Very good.

I think most parents would agree that each passing stage of their child's life is bittersweet.  While it is exciting to see how our children change and grow, every new development often reflects a loss of something else.  As my Turtles turn one, I feel this in a very profound way.  In what has been the fastest year of my life, I look toward their birthday with a great sadness that is only mildly offset by relief.  This may be a common feeling for mothers of multiples but it doesn't make it any easier. Jude Bug and Ellie Bean have brought me great joy this past year but I would be dishonest if I didn't acknowledge that the joy was deeply mitigated by the fact that I spent the vast majority of our time purely focused on our survival.  There was never any time to focus on tiny fingers wrapped around my own.  There was hardly a moment when I could marvel at the miracle of two full-term, full-sized babies my husband and I created. ...

It seems we are all getting older around here. Our Labor Day weekend was spent celebrating various milestones, including my birthday and the Turtles' six months of life. With each passing month, time seems to speed up so much so that my birthday came like a hurricane-force wind and knocked me on my extra-cushioned ass. I barely had a chance to catch my breath from the preceding year. Whoooooosh... Now, here I am 33 years old and thinking that this has to be my year of threes: three children (one of whom is three), three major appliances broken in as many months, and three hours of sleep a night. I am just waiting for the genie in a bottle to grant me three wishes. And so we celebrated with at least three types of cake: And then 24 short hours later, the Turtles turned six months old. SIX WHOLE MONTHS! We had some mashed banana, sang some songs, and generally spent the entire day impressed with the fact that we managed to keep our children and ourselves alive and our house intact ...

Sufficient time has passed and I still haven't written the Turtles' birth story. As a conscientious first-time parent, I wrote Vivi's story within a month of her birth and it's still her favorite thing to hear and retell. I am going on 10 weeks with these Turtles and have finally realized if I wait until I feel rested and coherent, it will never happen. So here goes: I was 39 weeks and 3 days pregnant when I had an appointment with S, my midwife. While palpating my abdomen, she said, "You're contracting right now." I couldn't feel it and was relieved for that. I wasn't particularly concerned since I had pretty much concluded that I was going to be the size of a house FOREVER so what's a little contraction here and there? S then asked if she could do an internal exam and found that I was already a centimeter and a half dilated and 80% effaced. She said that she could feel a baby's head and decided to strip my membranes to get thi...