House of Twins

A proud moment in the life of any parent. Her profound, deeply heartfelt words were:

DONE A POO!

She had.

We're trying to teach the girls to their names. Ambitiously, we're also trying to get them to say each other's names.

Oof and Gway is as far as we've got. Back to the drawing board, methinks...

Our pain in the a** of a landlady has decided that she is 'definitely' selling the house this year, so we're moving out on or around 27th September when our contract is up.

We had already signed our bits of a rental extension and were on the verge of sending it back to the letting agent when dh got a call from our landlady this morning. We had just got used the the idea that we were staying put and were a bit broadsided by her news.

We're actually ok about it, the logistics of moving house with toddlers in tow aside. The house is lovely but it is rapidly becoming too small for the four of us and it would be nice to have a garden for the girls to roam around in.

I wonder what our annoying next door neighbour will make of the news (remember him? The charming fellow who knocked on the wall when Grace cried, imitated her crying and storms out of the house at midnight when he hears the slightest bit of noise). He'll probably whoop with joy and throw a party.

I hope that the new owners of the house have loads of children and a very noisy dog. In fact, I hope the new people turn it into a crack den. Anything that will really wind him up, basically. Then he'll realise that two babies crying really isn't that bad in the scheme of things.

So, dh and I will be househunting. I'll be spending my 'Staycation' next week sorting out the house and purging our stuff - so much for relaxing!

Or they are when we're out or have visitors, anyway. They play nicely together, eat their meals beautifully, behave well (mostly) and everyone comments on how lucky we are and how easy they must be to look after. All of which is true, just not all the time.

For example, in company they will eat their yogurts beautifully with a spoon with barely a smidgeon of mess. At home they start off with good intentions and soon degenerate into putting their hands in the pot to scoop out the contents, smearing the yogurt all over the highchair tray and completing the performance by rubbing their yogurt-smeared hands in their hair.

This is perfectly normal behaviour for toodlers but they make us out to be liars when they behave so well in public!

The girls are extremely sociable and will happily smile, giggle and say 'HIYA' or 'HELLO' at anyone they meet. Long may it last.

However, R seems to have particular favourites. She absolutely adores one of her carers at nursery and breaks into a huge smile, jumps up and down and squeals with excitement whenever she sees her. At their previous nursery R really liked one of the carers in the pre-school room and tried to follow her everywhere.

We visited some friends last Sunday and although the girls have only seen them a handful of times, R absolutely adores both of them. When we pulled up in the car and one of them came out to help us unload, R practically collapsed with excitement. They took us and the girls to their local playground and I thought R was going to burst with happiness as they pushed her on the swing. Dh and I had to manhandle her into the car when we left as she was FURIOUS that we had taken her away from 'her' friends.

There is no 'pattern' to R's favourites - she just seems to 'adopt' certain people. The only similarity is that they are all 'grown ups' rather than children of her own age. She seems to prefer the company of adults and older children (she spends a lot of time in the pre-school room at nursery) to that of her peers.

Trouble is, when we tell people that R really likes them, they assume that we say that to everyone! We actually don't. R likes everyone. There are just a handful of people she like more than the rest.

As lovely as the girls are, they are pretty hard work at the moment - no change there then!

The routine and the 'mechanics' of having toddler twins are working fine but they seem to need to be occupied all the time. The three days a week they do at nursery do an excellent job of wearing them out but the four days they spend at home are exhausting for us!

They will play together nicely when the mood takes them, but R gets very focused on things and if she doesn't get her way, she takes it out on G. R gets in a fearful temper and bites, hits, pulls G's hair or pushes her over for no real reason.

I even had to break one of my 'I won't do that when I have children' rules and started implementing the 'naughty' step a couple of weeks ago. No matter how many times I sat R away from G, got down on her level and explained that what she was doing was naughty, she simply got up, smiled her big toothy smile and went over to G and hit her again. I picked R up, put her on the second stair from the bottom and knelt down in front of her, making sure she stayed in place for a minute.

I'm not sure it made a blind bit of difference but I had to do something to distract R from her actions. Dh and I are going for the consistency approach and dealing with R's misdemeanors (G isn't as 'deliberately' provocative her sister) in the same manner. It's hard though. Dh is naturally a quiet, non-confrontational person and it's tough for him to be stern with R because they are so close.

Hopefully a consistent 'immediate reaction' approach will eventually reap some rewards. For the time being, we have to accept this as yet another detour on the sometimes difficult road that is parenting twins.

G appears to have overcome her temporary fear of the animals in the park and is back to chasing pigeons (and getting annoyed when they won't let her stroke them), waving at squirrels and waving her arms around while she communes with nature.

R is still wary but G is working on that. Whenever an animal gets too close and R shows signs of distress, G grabs her hand and leads her closer to the creature, rather than away from it. I think she's working on the aversion therapy principle! They trot off together, hand in hand, chatting away to each other.

G, generally the gentler of the two, is great at reading R's moods and dealing with them. She knows when to confront her sister and when to leave R to it. They fight (boy do they fight at times!) but when one of them is in genuine distress, the other one will try and help them out. The 'helping' can be a bit heavy-handed sometimes - an intended (we hope) pat on the head becomes a clonk round the ear - but the intent seems to be kind.

Our late afternoon jaunt to the Park was far more enjoyable today and Nature Girl and her slightly nervous sidekick had a great time trying to feed leaves to the pigeons. Note to self: take bread next time!

...like a toddler scorned. Or, at the very least, in a very bad mood. Oh yes, we’ve hit the tantrum stage. 95% of the time R and G are absolutely adorable and lovely. The other 5% is rather interesting...
R has decided that she does NOT like being strapped into things. She has perfected the art of going absolutely rigid and writhing about, roaring at the indignity of it all. We have to wrestle her into the buggy and her car seat every single time. She wants to walk everywhere but that simply isn’t practical when we’re visiting people sixty miles away!
G also has wobblers but they are generally short-lived and she can be distracted out of them fairly easily. R’s tantrums are determined, focussed and prolonged. Only when she decides she has really and truly let us (and everyone in a ten mile radius) know that she is NOT HAPPY, will she calm down.
It is so hard not to laugh at the girls when have a tantrum though. They could win Olympic medals for their faux diving techniques, throwing themselves to the ground, banging the floor with their chubby little fists, red-faced and sobbing in a furious rage about something completely random and trivial such as losing a piece of lego or not getting a yogurt two seconds after they ask for it.
Five minutes later, they are back to their usual, smiley, happy selves.

Just completed a thorough read-through of the girls' nursery settling-in reports, compiled by their keyworker. I won't bore you with the boasty boasty stuff but I am extremely chuffed and now moving even further towards accepting the bizarre idea that I might not be such a rubbish parent after all...

...of course, it may all be down to the nursery and their rather marvellous father...

A few months back I wrote a little bit about the anxiety and mild depression I was experiencing. Then I stopped. Not because I was magically better but because this blog is supposed to be about my girls, not me and it felt terribly self-indulgent to whinge on about my feelings and steal R and G’s limelight.
I have just completed six sessions of counselling and have been taking some ‘happy pills’ to help level my moods out for the last few months. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of it all here but I no longer feel like I’m failing at this parenting lark. I don’t want to leap on a passing train and run away from it all. I don’t have ‘bad’ days or weeks any more. I haven’t threatened to hurl my laptop out of the window for several months now. I can’t remember the last time I sobbed on dh’s shoulder for no apparent reason.
I know that this is partly due to the tablets. I started off on a relatively low dose, which was upped when I hit another low in April and they now seem to be working. I don’t see them as a long-term thing and I don’t want to become dependent on them – my GP has put me on a non-addictive medication - but they seem to have levelled me out and I no longer have extreme moods.
Counselling doesn’t provide answers and it stirs up an awful lot of things you thought you had forgotten about, or attempted to bury. I’m not sure that long-term it will necessarily help but it has been an interesting process to go through.
I’d like to get rid of the tablets but I’m frightened of the void that they may leave. I don’t want to hit the dreaded ‘wall’ again and crash in a heap. I’ll be weaned off them slowly when I feel ready and I don’t think I am quite yet.
The key thing is that I’m happier, therefore everyone else is happier and that’s the most important thing for me at this point.

R and G have developed a fear of the birds in the park. It’s seemingly irrational as to our knowledge they haven’t had a bad experience with them but it is rather odd. Just a couple of months ago G would happily stand in the middle of a flock of birds and commune with nature. R always stood back a little more but tolerated them.

R seemed to be more freaked out by them now than G – I suspect that our nature girl would be fine if R was but she seems to pick up on her sisters’ moods and adopt them as her own. I don’t think it’s a fear that they have picked up from us. I’m not exactly fond of low-flying birds after watching that darned Alfred Hitchcock film but they don’t bother me.

Trouble is that the more the girls protest, the more pigeons they attract. Today I ended up pushing the buggy along with my stomach while two grizzly little girls held clutched on to my hands for dear life, shouting BYE BYE BYE BYE at the small entourage of pigeons that decided to follow us through the flower garden.

Hopefully the aversion therapy approach will work, they will get over this fear and my little nature girls will return.

http://houseoftwins.blog.co.uk/2008/08/01/barbarians-at-the-gate-house-of-twins-un-4530937/

This time last year, we were fretting about our lovely rented house being sold from under us and the uncertainty about the future of my job. At one point I really thought I would be jobless and we would be homeless. The girls were going through a difficult phase where they wouldn’t settle at bedtime and everything felt hopeless and exhausting.

Wind forward a year and we have just agreed to extend our rental contract for another year. I now have a fantastic permanent job and the girls are happily settled in their new nursery just around the corner from home. The girls (mostly) sleep well – there are lapses but it doesn’t feel as awful as it did back then.

Life in the HoT is pretty good at the moment and I’m determined to enjoy it.

Confession time. I am NOT R and G’s primary carer. No, this isn’t a ‘The children have a secret Nanny’ and she writes my blog for me’ confession . Nor is it a ‘I don’t have twins and am actually a novel writer’ admission.
Dh and I actually share equal responsibility for the girls. Let me explain. Dh and I both work full-time. He does shift work, alternating between ‘earlies’ (working in the morning) and ‘lates’(working in the afternoon and evening) with the occasional week of night shifts thrown in for good measure. I have a more conventional 9-5, Monday to Friday job but work at home on Wednesday and Friday. The girls attend nursery on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.
The nature of dh’s work means that he often works at weekends and has rest days during the week. If he has a rest day on a Wednesday or a Friday, I might go into the office for an extra day. If he’s really lucky and his rest days fall on the girls’ nursery days, he drops them off, picks them up and has (much deserved) a day to himself in the middle.
A couple of weekends a month, I do the lions share of the childcare. I don’t mind too much but I always find that Friday and Saturday nights on my own are a bit of a killer. I also dislike Sunday afternoons because the girls are often irritable, I’m knackered from entertaining them for three days and I think we all look forward to nursery and work on Monday!
The division of childcare means that R and G have bonded incredibly well with both of us. I wouldn’t say that they necessarily look to me, as Mummy, for comfort and reassurance, as one might expect. R has phases where only Daddy will do and I don’t get a look in. However, if dh is at work she will happily sit on my lap for kisses and cuddles. G doesn’t mind who she goes to, as long as she receives plenty of attention but she sometimes has ‘moments’ where only Mummy will do, so it all works out fairly equally.
I have noticed that even though dh spends a huge amount of time with the girls and knows their routines, patterns, personalities, idiosyncrasies, illnesses and vital statistics inside-out, I am still treated as the primary carer by most people we come into contact with. Nursery will always phone me up if there’s a problem, even if dh has dropped them off that morning. Doctors tend to address questions about the girls to me rather than him. Back when we used to see health visitors (er, twice I think), dh would ask them a question and they would reply to me.
According to the National Statistics, two thirds of mums do some form of paid work: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1655 so someone is looking after the children while they do it. The childcare may come in a variety of forms: grandparents, friends, extended family, childminders and nurseries but I’m willing to bet that a fair few fathers have a more hands-on role than the stats might suggest.
Dh is around so much during the day that he almost had to take on more of a hands-on role, plus looking after twins is a mammoth job so we have to work as a team. I’m lucky that he wanted to be so involved because I genuinely couldn’t do it all without him. I would be a gibbering wreck.
In the excitement of pregnancy, many expectant fathers make lavish promises about the amount of time they will devote to their children and boast about how involved they intend to be. Some men (and women) find the burden of childcare so stressful that their good intentions turn to dust when the baby arrives. I’m grateful every single day that dh has kept his promises and is such a fantastic joint primary carer. We have good and bad days, but we are a great team.