House of Twins

As the girls approach their second birthdays, I’ve been thinking more and more about their personalities – in particular their differences and similarities. I’ve always tried to avoid overtly pigeonholing them (I’m sure I probably do subconsciously) in terms of ‘Oh G does this and R does that’ but as their carers’ at nursery have said, while they may look identical, their personalities are quite different.

R really likes her gadgets and toys and is a deep thinker with a real mischievous streak and an evil cackle. She styles herself as the ringleader and consequently can be a bit of a bully at times. She’s also extremely bossy (can't think where she gets that from!) and dh is normally the target of her pointing and directing. R is quieter than her sister, unless really annoyed but is very determined and knows her own mind. Woe betide anyone that pushes her to her (very set) limits! She's very poised and graceful (the normal accidents that befall the average toddler seem to bypass her) and always seems to think about ten steps ahead.

G is very kind - more of a people-person than R. She's very sensitive to the feelings of others and is extremely affectionate, with lots of cuddles and kisses for everyone. She can be quite clingy and whingy at times and is prone to exaggeration (one day we will invest in a fainting couch for her swooning moments) and loud tantrums. She loves singing, dancing and chatting and is generally the louder of the two. She's very accident-prone (another trait she shares with me) and always has bruises and cuts. She tends to launch herself at things and hopes for the best - not always with good results!

They have things in common as well though: they adore all animals; they love doing puzzles and reading. They seem to bounce off each other - e.g. G will sing and R will act as her very appreciative audience, clapping and shouting ‘MORE MORE!’ at the end of every song. When one of them is scared of something the other one will lead them by the hand and help them out. G knows when R is in a really bad mood and stays out of her way, or tries to cheer her up with a favourite toy. When G has one of her wobblers, R acts like the older sister with a mildly indulgent ‘Oh dear, look at the toddler being silly’ expression on her face.

It blows my tiny mind that two beings that look so ridiculously similar can approach life in such different ways. How can that possibly work? To try and understand it, I read back over some early blog entries to try and work out whether R and G were born with the personalities they have, or whether we have, to a greater or lesser degree, ‘imposed’ some elements of their personalities on them – nurture rather than nature.

The following extracts are quite enlightening:
27th February 2008 (10 weeks old)
“They are also developing different personalities. G is shaping up to be a little diva, as she kicks off about anything and everything and is a total daddies girl who wants to be cuddled all the time. She loves nothing more than lying on someone’s chest, preferably that of a large male. R is more laid-back and considered and only gets angry if she thinks she is being denied milk. She hates being a baby and wants to be with adults all the time. It will be fascinating to see how they grow and change over time.”

15th March 2008 (3 months old)
“(G) has just come out of a ‘crusty’ phase... made worse by the fact that R looks completely immaculate and G looked like the poor relation in comparison... Someone told me that there are ‘Toy babies’ and ‘People babies’. G is definitely a people baby.... She is much chattier than R. The girls are noticing each other more and more now and G will beam at R and chat away for ages. R looks confused, smiles rather uncertainly occasionally and just stares at this noisy little creature.... I have a theory that while R is more like a singleton baby, G is more like one half of a twin pairing. When they are playing, G looks over at R to see what she is doing. R does her own thing”.

“(R) also has what is known by our friends and family as ‘The Ruthie stare’, where she is so completely and utterly irritated that she fixes us with a cold stare for a few seconds, then looks away and refuses to look back. If she could say ‘WhatEVER’ or ‘Bovvered?’, she would. When she eventually gets what she wants (i.e. milk) we get a smug grin accompanied with a ‘If you listened to me I wouldn’t have to resort to such extreme measures’ look.... R will play with a toy for longer than G... I suspect that R is frustrated with being able to do so little physically... If she’s like this at 3 months, I dread to think what the 13 year old R will be like!”

Scary. We didn’t ‘decide’ to make them how they are. I don’t think we have imposed personality traits on them. They were already there when the girls were born. Nature or nurture? I say nature.

Our new next door neighbours have a seven month old baby boy and since we moved in a month ago (a month! Where does the time go?), we have barely heard him. Occasionally we hear a little sample of his wailing at around 11pm but generally he sounds like a pretty quiet child. Goodness only knows what they make of our two loud marauding monsters...

Anyway, last night he was NOT a happy chappy. Usually he whimpers for a few minutes and settles pretty quickly but this time he wasn’t having a bar of it. Dh and I lay in bed (after double-checking that it wasn’t one of ours making the noises – they are generally much louder) and unlike our old next door neighbour, resisted the urge to knock on the wall, wail like a child or start banging doors and shouting in a right old huff. By the by, since we moved G’s sleeping has improved considerably – coincidence??

Instead we lay there and sent vibes of sympathy to our poor neighbours. In fact, I wanted to knock on their door, give them a big hug and tell them that it would be ok. If I could make the last sentence any less patronising than it sounded, I would. We’ve been there.

When the girls were seven months old I wrote a number of despairing posts about their inability to settle at night. Dh and I reminisced (not exactly fondly) about going between the cots, attempting (and largely failing) to console and settle two incredibly overstimulated little girls. I remembered sitting on the (downstairs) toilet and sobbing uncontrollably after failing to settle them after an hour and a half one evening, during a long succession of bad nights and severely broken sleep. They were screaming upstairs. I was sobbing downstairs and dh was on the late shift. It felt like the end of the world.

Dh and I tried to remember when the girls started sleeping through the night. I remembered the first night that R and G slept from midnight to 6am. I woke up and felt like I had new eyes. Dh remembered when the girls first started sleeping from 8am to 6pm – we used to feed them at 10.30pm and one night he suggested we experiment with not feeding them. I was terrified that we would be punished with a 2am wake-up call but to my complete surprise, they slept through. That was the beginning of the routine that has served us so well.
Nearly two years on - older, wiser, with many more hours of sleep deprivation under our belts and infinitely more smug – dh and I can look back on those days and (mostly) smile on them as distant memories, not to be repeated. Dh joked that it was like having ‘Nam flashbacks: “I LOVE the smell of Sudocrem in the morning”.

We just send lots of empathy and hugs to our next door neighbours. They seem lovely and we’ll offer them help if they need it. Again, I sound desperately patronising but the sentiments are heartfelt.

The girls love nursery rhymes, especially those with actions: e.g ‘Wind the bobbin up, ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’. One of my relatives bought them a CD of good old fashioned nursery rhymes, sung by a woman that sounds like Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins after a good lungful of helium accompanied by what I can only describe as a ‘thoughtful’ string accompaniment that twiddles about in the background.

I had forgotten all about the CD until the Bob the Builder (sorry, Bah-Diddy) single incident at the weekend and decided to pop it on the stereo to see what the girls made of it.

As helium Julie burst into life singing (with lots of over-enthusiastic enunciation) “JACK and JILL went UP the HILL to FETCH a PAIL OF WAAAAAAAAATEEEEERRRRR”, G looked up at the stereo with a confused look on her face, shrugged and sat down to do a puzzle. R, in dh’s arms looked EXTREMELY unimpressed in that way that 15 year old girls do at family weddings when their dad throws himself around the dance floor to Status Quo. R then emitted a loud and extremely fed-up sounding sigh and rolled her eyes so far round that I seriously thought for a moment that she might actually be able to view her own brain.

I persevered for a few more songs in the hope that the girls would get used to it, but no chance. The CD has now been put back in its case and I may use it to torture/embarrass them as they need arises...

I can’t explain it. Sometimes I can write and write and write and other times I can barely bear to open up my laptop. I fear that I’ll never be able to write a single word ever again and that I should give it all up and go and do and do something else, like actually get on with the cross-stitch project I was hoping to finish in time for the girls’ 2nd birthday and now definitely won’t be completed in time. At the moment I definitely have verbal diarrhoea. I need to let it out somewhere, so my blog won’t be disappearing yet.

Sorry if you’re disappointed by that!!

Due to the level of bile directed at me in the last couple of days, I have added a disclaimer to the 'How wide is your buggy' post. I have full moderation rights over the comments submitted to my blog and have chosen to publish them in full when I could have ignored or deleted them.

I have found the personal attacks extremely hurtful. Yes, I put myself 'out there' by writing a blog and therefore open myself up to criticism but I'm always amazed that random people feel that it is their divine right to question and openly attack my parenting abilities and personality. It's not in my nature to go on to other people's blogs and be openly provocative. The post was meant to be both humorous and satirical. Some people 'got it' and others didn't. That's fine. If we all laughed at, or agreed with the same things, life would be very dull. In any case, I can make myself feel bad enough, thanks. I don't need random strangers doing it for me.

I'd just like to remind anyone still reading that I don't get paid to write this. I write in my extremely limited spare time (i.e. when the girls are napping or in bed or when I'm travelling around for my job) and it is a 'release' from being a full-time working mum of twins. My blog is funny. It is sometimes sad and angry. It won't appeal to everyone and I wouldn't expect it to - it's a very niche thing. If you don't like it, go somewhere else.

This morning I wondered whether I should just delete the whole bloody blog and go and do something less boring instead. I'm not going to do that. Instead, I want to draw a line under this and move on. I'm going to get back to writing about R and G.

So, I’ve had a couple of responses to my ‘How wide is your buggy’ post that I put up last night. I’ve published them, so feel free to read and enjoy my severe tellings-off in all their glory. One is from someone I’ve known in real life since we were nine years old. The other is from a ‘hit and run’ poster.

Here’s my response.

The whole entry was meant to be humorous. Yes, it was dripping with sarcasm but if you’ve ever read anything else I’ve written, you’ll know that’s my style. I loathe self-congratulating parents and have enough self-awareness to know that sometimes I overstep the smugness line. I try to self-edit, but sometimes it spills over. I shall try to wear my hair-shirt with pride more often in future.

For the record, I don’t think that parents with single babies are any better or worse than parents of twins, triplets, quads or anything else. I was aiming my post at a VERY specific type of mum – the designer bag toting yummy mummy with perfectly blow-dried hair, and a very expensive lifestyle and attitude to match. They are the ones that do post-partum yoga in the park. The average, normal mum in the street with a buggy should not be offended by my post. If you were, I apologise.

My self-reference to being ‘cleverer (yes, it is in the dictionary. Here’s a link: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cleverer) and more considerate’ was with tongue firmly in cheek. If you had ever read any of my blog entries about my struggles with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem and my constant doubting that I can be a good mother, you would know that I’m probably one of the last people on earth to judge my own parenting abilities against those of others.

I am thankful every single day that I was lucky to have a relatively straightforward pregnancy (extreme exhaustion and sickness for the first 20 weeks and a severe kidney infection that put me in hospital when I was 27 weeks pregnant aside) and I am also grateful that I have my health, my dh is healthy and so are my children. Actually, as I have PCOS and was told a couple of years before I became pregnant that I might not be able to have children at all, do try to forgive me for being a bit pleased about having twins. I would have also been pleased with one baby. Or three. Or more.

I suggest you go back and read the other 293 blog entries to get a much clearer picture of who I am, the perspective I’m writing from and what this blog is actually about. If you don’t like it, don’t read it.

I could carry on but the chip on my shoulder is starting to weigh my arm down, making it difficult to type. (see? That was an attempt at humour!)

Now, I’ve been writing this blog thing for a while now and as the girls approach their 2nd birthday, I’m not quite sure where it’s going. I started writing HoT as therapy when the girls were tiny and it has taken on a bit of a life of its own since.

Due to a number of factors, I’m finding it increasingly hard to find the time to write blog entries. I read somewhere that a blog needs two new entries a week or it starts to feel unloved and I’m finding it hard to live up to that at the moment. I can only write when time and inspiration allows, which is why there may be a gap of two or three weeks between entries and suddenly two or three will appear in rapid succession.

I could write about every cute little thing that the girls do but I’m not terribly comfortable with the ‘my x did the most adorable and funny thing the other day’ style of writing, especially when the anecdote turns out to the nauseating rather than amusing and would in fact only be funny to the parents and perhaps a doting grandparent. I’ve just read the Bah Diddy entry back and think it sails dangerously close to this particular wind but hopefully the stuff about dh will be amusing enough to allow it to stay.

If you look to your left, you’ll see the House of Twins Twitter feed, which I set up to note down the little things that happen that I can’t conjure a blog entry out of. I’ll aim to update that regularly and anyone that reads this can follow that.

There are some big things coming up – the girls’ birthday, Christmas, potty training and all the new things that the terrible twos will bring and the challenges that bringing up identical twins present and I’ll aim to record them all. I just can’t commit to writing thousands of words that about three people (and my Mum) read every month.

Until the next crisis, anyway…

NOTE: the following post is meant to be humorous and satirical. It does NOT reflect my actual feelings towards 98% of mums and only apples to a VERY specific type of 'Yummy Mummy'. Some people have taken it extremely personally when it was not aimed at them. If you are, or have been offended by it, I apologise and advise you not to read my blog in future. I'm not paid to write this, I do it in my extremely limited spare time. If it isn't your thing, go somewhere else...

Dear mothers of tiny singletons,

Well done on your ability to create life. You are only one of billions of woman that has managed this feat in history. Do have a little smile to yourself at how brilliant you are. When you were pregnant, I bet you really enjoyed wearing your burgeoning bump as a medal of your ability to have sex. Did you rub it tenderly every thirty seconds throughout the day? Did you thrust it out at every available opportunity to let the whole world know how clever you are? Did you play classical music to it and read to it?

I bet you had great fun choosing your buggy. Did your partner treat it like buying a new car? Did you go to one of the big baby shows and try out hundreds of different models before selecting the one that best fitted your expensive lifestyle? Cream covers to match your carpets? Adult cup holder for your morning latte? Extra wide wheels for added comfort and manoevreability? Rear facing seat so that you can smile tenderly down at your cherished, protected and never allowed to get grubby or muddy, perfect, angelic baby as you mooch around town waiting for your new chums from the NCT group to join you at the local café?

Well done you. Through the NCT group, you’ve made friends with people like you. You all have the same make of buggy (in different, yet complimentary colours, obviously), you all have the same parenting ideals and you hope you get little Amelie, Olivia, Freddie and Jay into the same school so that you can share school runs.

Isn’t it annoying when, as you are trotting through town discussing the next coffee morning, two abreast, taking up 95% (47.5% each) of the pavement when someone (without a buggy, poor childless woman!) walks towards you in the opposite direction and looks to manoeuvre into the 5% of pavement you have generously donated to the rest of the world? Isn’t it annoying when the poor sad individual without a baby has to leap onto a small wall out of your way so that you don’t run over her foot with your lovely wide buggy? I bet that little tut and sigh you did felt really cathartic.

Well, it may surprise you to learn that the woman that so kindly leapt onto the wall out of your way (because travelling in single file with your buggies would just be silly, wouldn’t it?) has children of her own. Twins, in fact. Her body very cleverly got one egg and divided it into two. Isn’t that amazing? She and her partner chose their buggy to be as practical as possible and chose the narrowest side-by-side on the market. That means that other people (even those with single buggies) can still use the pavement without difficulty.

She may not have her children with her today because they are at nursery while she works but she carries them with her wherever she goes. On the outside, with her winter coat, her laptop bag, handbag and nice shoes she may look like a typical office worker (perhaps like you were once) but she is also a mother. Don’t look at her like she’s something you just scraped off your boots. Sometimes she’s like you – only a bit cleverer and slightly more considerate, of course…

Those elderly ladies with those pesky shopping trollies that aren’t so good at steering? I bet they had babies too, once. The young girls who walk slowly along the pavement, texting and chatting to their gang of friends on their way home from school? They’ll be mums one day. That man in the suit probably wears a baby bjorn at weekends.

Next time you’re having a mummy meet, have a great time and travel to your destination in single file. The rest of the world will thank you for it.

For a couple of weeks now, the girls have been shouting Bah Diddy at frequent intervals. We’re pretty up to speed with most of ‘their’ words for things – ‘Bubbies’ is their word for Teletubbies for example. Until very recently, Humpty Dumpty was ‘Huddy Duddy’. Sadly, ‘Orse is still horse (and ‘ouse = house and ‘at = hat, and so on…) – I spend my days at home shouting HORSE, HOUSE AND HAT, with special emphasis on the H.

However, Bah Diddy baffled us both. It didn’t seem to refer to an object as such, wasn’t a name for someone and wasn’t a ‘doing’ word.

A trip to the supermarket yesterday solved the mystery. As dh and the girls were leaving the shop, they started pointing and shouting BAH DIDDY! BAH DIDDY…

…at a Bob the Builder ride-on machine.

To test the theory, I dug out dh’s CD single of ‘Can we fix it?’ (which, to the uninitiated, is the dance version of the Bob the Builder theme tune) You may be wondering why a grown man, far to old to have enjoyed Bob and his adventures as a child owns the song. HE would tell you that he bought it to keep Westlife off the Christmas no. 1 slot. If I tell you that his Mum bought him a Bob the Builder soft toy for his 22nd (yes, not 2nd – 22nd) birthday, I think you’ll see that there is a slightly different slant on this story.

Anyway, I popped the CD into the stereo (once I’d dusted it off) and pressed play. Cue two VERY excited little girls (and one man old enough to know better), leaping up and down and shouting BAH DIDDY!

Now, the girls are very particular about the television programmes they watch. Teletubbies is a favourite. They will occasionally watch In the Night Garden (erk) and have been known to sit through an episode of Pingu. To my knowledge, they haven’t ever watched Bob the Builder, so how to they know a. What it’s called (sort of) and b. The theme tune?

Dh remembered that when he dropped the girls of at nursery recently, they were dancing to CDs, so I’m guessing that they also have the single – that, or they wheel out the television when the parents aren’t looking (which, bad mummy that I am, wouldn’t blame them for doing for half an hour a day) and allow the children a bit of cbeebies time (I’m not actually suggesting for a second that they do this). Also, their bff at nursery had a Bob the Builder themed birthday party so if he talks about it, the girls will probably pick it up from him.

The next step is to find some episodes on the BBC iplayer or Youtube and see if they’ll actually watch them.

The girls go through phases of intense love and adoration of a particular object.

They are both completely and utterly obsessed with 'My first animal book' and insist that we flick through it at bedtime. Every night. For the last month. We have a whole bookcase full of books to read to them and they always choose the 'AMAL' book.

Although we're heartily sick of the book, their recognition of, and ability to name different animals is now excellent. They also love making the different noises. G is more 'into' this game than R and will happily launch into a session of ribbiting, baa-ing, moo-ing, hissing, roaring, squeaking, honking and buzzing. R amazes us by suddenly and without prompting pointing at and naming an animal we haven't even noticed before - goat is a recent example of this.

They also like sounding out the names of the animals and placing emphasis on certain sections of the word: monKEY, tor-TOISE, etc. Most of the time their little voices sound very sweet and a little lispy. However, G insists on calling a horse an 'ORSE, in true South-East London, knees up mother brown, estuary fashion, no matter how many times I shout HORSE! HORSE!, with special emphasis on the 'aitch' of the H.

It could be worse. At least they haven't started saying 'Innit' at the end of sentences. Yet...

...who refuse to have a vasectomy.

Who stare in horror at their partners as they tell them that they are several days 'late'. Who breathe a sigh of relief at the sight of a negative pregnancy test. Who shudder at the thought of changing a pooey nappy or consoling a crying baby. Who walk out during their partners' pregnancy because it's 'too hard' and then go and get someone else pregnant. Who leave when their child is small because 'they want their life back'. Who cross their legs at the mere mention of the word 'vasectomy'.

Grow up and take responsibility, you spineless bastards.

Having a vasectomy does not make you less of a man. You can still perform just as well as you did before your ability to fertilise an egg was removed. You allow your partner to endure periods, pregnancy and birth. It's only fair that you do your share of the birth control once you decide you're over the baby-making. The pain of a vasectomy is temporary. The respect you'll get from your parter for doing it will be life-long.

Think about it.

Dh had his op on Friday and in doing so we passed the torch of procreation on to our friends. We've done our bit for the continuation of the human race and now it's over to the rest of you.

He's recovering really well. Obviously he has experienced some discomfort over the last couple of days, he hasn't really fancied walking very far and he has to prevent the girls from leaping into his lap but otherwise he's fine. He stopped taking pain relief last night and is now using wine to numb the residual aches...

He has been signed off work for a week (driving jolting trains isn't exactly the best type of recovery plan for sore bits and pieces) but has already got back into the swing of changing nappies and chasing the girls around.

Neither of us experienced a last-minute panic attack. Personally, I feel extremely relieved that we've finished the baby-making part of our lives. We adore R and G and want to focus on them now. The deserve our full attention.

Though the fuzz of analogue television (once you've had digital, it's hard to go back, even temporarily), I watched the BBC programme 'The secret life of twins', shown over two nights last week.

I don't know of anyone that watched the programme and didn't get choked up watching the two little Chinese girls, adopted by Western families and brought up in two completely different countries (America and Norway), briefly reunited at the age of six. Despite spending most of the lives apart, they had an instant bond, shared a number of mannerisms and even started dressing the same after a couple of days together. They didn't speak the same language, yet they soon understood each other. The Chinese authorities did a terrible thing, separating them when they were babies, but the adoptive parents and the girls themselves will clearly make sure that they stay in touch.

I'm a Mum of identical twins and I'm only just getting my head around what it means. R and G are totally normal to us. It's only when I watch programmes such as this that I realise how special they actually are. Apparently, a half of one percent of the world's population is made up of identical twins. That blows my tiny mind.

Other aspects of the programme irritated me though. Once again, the different types of identical twins were not explained. The differences between fraternal and identical twins were touched on briefly but hardly anyone knows or understands the categories of twins. I won't explain them here, but read this if you want to know more: http://community.babycentre.co.uk/journal/georgi22/308855/the_start_of_a_momo_twin_journey

Also, the programme focused far too much on a set of male identical twins who were just the sort of blokes that I can't stand. If they had attended my school, they would have received the beatings they so richly deserved! Yes, aspects of their story were interesting: they were both doctors, both well-travelled and high-achievers. Yet the programme homed in on their ability to argue, mostly over their fitness and weight. They annoyed me almost as much as those dreadful twins on the X-Factor, urgh.

I was pleased that the programme was given a prestigious slot on BB1 at prime time (9pm) and if you didn't see it, I would urge you to seek both parts out on the iplayer. At least the programme makers tried to base the programme on scientific facts - unlike the ITV programme on identical triplets last year ("Oh look! Identical triplets! Don't they look funny?!" ) and the sections on epigenetics were fascinating.

Of course, R and G are fascinating to us because they are ours, and if we didn't find them amazing there would be something wrong with our relationship with them. Just occasionally though it's good to have a reminder of how interesting they must be to everyone else.