House of Twins

On a whim, I took the girls for a trot round the block yesterday (no buggies, no reins, no safety net) and we ambled past the local (state - no private schools for us!) primary school. I decided that then was as good a time as any to pop in and ask about admissions (never too early eh?) and we duly entered the building.

I had a chat with the receptionist, who was fascinated by the girls and asked if I was their mum. My face must have given away the 'Whaaaaat' I was thinking inside (and struggling not to express) because she qualified her question by saying that she thought I might be their Nanny. No, not the grandparent kind (that really would be new face cream and botox time), the Mary Poppins kind.

Now, I've had this before from a few people. They look at the girls, look at me and ask if I'm really the Mum or the Nanny. Do they ask because the girls look so different to me? I'm genuinely curious.

A few kind-hearted friends (and dh and my Mum) reckon it's because I either look too young, too well-dressed (which I certainly wasn't yesterday, rocking the hoodie, jeans, Converse and Croydon facelift look ) or too sane (the irony!) and self-assured to be a mum of twins.

What is it about me that gives off the Nanny vibe?

Controversial confession time: a singleton is significantly easier than twins to look after. I’m so used to dealing with the needs of one child and immediately going to sort out the other one that it felt odd to only have to deal with R. In fact, on auto pilot I got two clean nappies out before R went up for her nap and wondered why I had one left over. I even found there were - fleeting – periods of time where I didn’t actually have very much to do. That was odd. I’m used to being constantly on the go when I’m with the girls. Even if one is occupied the other one generally wants or needs something from me.

I’ll qualify this a bit. A single baby or toddler is easier than baby or toddler twins. However, I reckon that a toddler AND a baby is harder than looking after twins. At least twins are at roughly the same developmental stages as each other. I had lunch on my own the other day and sat near a lady who was with a four year old and a (roughly) six month old baby. The boy was happily plucking his food off the conveyor belt (Yo Sushi, in case you were wondering) and chatting away to his mum but the baby was screaming the place down. The mum looked over at me and apologised. I told her not to worry, explained that I had two children of my own and offered my help, which she politely refused.

I can’t imagine what it must be like to look after children who have such wildly different needs. They probably look at me and wonder how I cope with twins! I guess the grass is always greener.

R has been ill this week (a throat infection and cough, for which she has been given antibiotics) and was therefore unable to attend nursery on Tuesday and today. G has been fine and it seemed silly to keep her away from nursery when she was perfectly well so the girls have been apart from each other for two days this week. This is the first significant time they have been separated from each other since birth. Actually, since the egg split. So, ever. They’ve spent an hour or two away from each other e.g. if one has been to the doctor and the other hasn’t but this was concentrated solo time.

I stayed at home on Tuesday to look after R and dh looked after her today. The first thing I noticed was that she is much quieter than G. In fact, she has periods of time where she doesn’t speak AT ALL. I think we live in a noisy house so it’s clearly G that’s the cause of 95% of it – I’m responsible for the other 5%! Also, R is much better at entertaining herself than her sister. She quite happily sat and did puzzles on her own for a while and only called me over when she wanted me to join in with an activity or read her a book. G tends to need more attention – if I had a pound for every time she trotted over to me, raised her arms in the air and said ‘Up please!’ in a week (actually, in a day) I wouldn’t need to work any more.

I was really concerned that G would feel quite lost at nursery without R and instructed her carers to make lots of fuss of her. I’m pleased to report that she was absolutely fine and didn’t even ask for her sister or get upset. Apparently, when the girls started back in June, they would look out for each other but now they play pretty much independently of each other for the majority of the time and therefore G didn’t feel the loss as keenly as she might have done a few months ago.

R absolutely LOVED the one to one time that dh and I had with her. I copped the slightly duller day as I took R to the doctors and sorted out her antibiotics, etc., but it was lovely to spend time doing R things, like playing with duplo and reading. Dh took her to Bluewater this afternoon for a walk round the shops and a spot of tea and she absolutely loved it. He took the buggy with him but she didn’t need to use it. He even moved her car seat onto the front passenger seat of the car so that she could ride shotgun. R was absolutely enthralled by the panoramic view that the front seat provided her with.

Anyway, R and G coped perfectly well without each other for two days, although they squealed with excitement when they were reunited. I think this bodes well. Although I like the ‘twin thing’ I’m keen for them to become individuals. My biggest fear (apart from involvement in drugs) is that they will be the old lady twins you see on TV programmes – never married, living together, dressing the same, finishing each others’ sentences – and that genuinely freaks me out. I think R and G are going to be ok, with and without each other.

In the latest of our weekend excursions, following on from a trip to Tower Bridge, a long walk along the river and lunch at Nando's last weekend, today we did something a bit different.

We did this: http://www.discoverdogs.org.uk/

It was the eqivalent of the chocolate factory for the girls...but with dogs. Hundreds of them. Dogs willing to be patted, stroked, petted and squealed and shouted at. Dog owners dying to show off their beloved pets. At one point I ended up holding a rat on a lead dog with a hairless body but a hairy face. Interesting. Velvety. Warm.

The girls were completely unfazed by the dogs on display, from Miniature Schnauzers to Irish Wolfhounds. Some of the dogs were three or four times their size and they could have ridden them round Earl's Court (in fact I probably could have ridden one or two of the breeds) but every single one was greeted with total and utter joy.

We tried to take lots of pictures but the girls were so excited that they couldn't stay still for a second and consequently we have lots of blurry shots and only a few decent ones. Here's one of the best:

We played a game of 'Fantasy dog owner' and dh decided that he would like a beagle. I'm sticking with my long held favourite, the black labrador. In fact, I was so so taken with one of the labs that I almost tried to smuggle him out of the exhibition. It was only when I realised that we were standing at the Guide Dogs for the Blind area and that the labs' owner clearly needed him a million more times than I did, that I reconsidered...

Dh bought the girls a little toy black labrador each, to add to their collection of Marleys, Gromits and other assorted doggy toys. I was quite jealous.

I'm fairly sure that I patted Richard Hammond at the Miniature Daschund stand. Small, dark, overeager and hairy? Can't be two of them, surely?

We also went to Pizza Express for lunch and the girls devoured a margherita pizza, dough balls, salad and a chocolate sundae each. They pushed away the Bambichinno (cup of frothy milk) when it arrived, clearly stuffed.

Factor in two tube rides and two train journeys and it was a very full day. The girls were so tired when we got home that we put them to bed half and hour earlier than normal.

Next week we're going to see the lights on Oxford Street and Regent's Street. Can't wait!

Dh is working late so I did bathtime on my own tonight. This is a fairly normal occurrence and I must have done hundreds of solo bathtimes since the girls were born. Tonight, the girls were in the mood for extra mischief...

About halfway through the usual 'splashing and hairwashing' procedure, I noticed that there wasn't a single towel in the bathroom. Not one. Dh had been on one of his 'wash everything that moves in the house' trips and most of out towels were draped over radiators drying out. I remembered that there was a spare clean and dry towel in our bedroom. I weighed up the odds and went for the 20 second dash option.

As I ran along the landing, I head R and G squal with laughter. Then I heard splashing. Lots and lots of spashing accompanied by squeals of mischevious laughter. Then I head the thud of water hitting the bathmat.

I ran back in to the bathroom and nearly slipped on the standing water that had been mysteriously decanted from the bath. In 20 seconds, with the cunning use of a number of plastic cups, the girls had decided that it would be a wizard wheeze to indulge in a very scientific 'let's see how much water we can throw on to the bathroom floor before Mummy comes back' experiment.

To say I exploded was an understatement. There was water everywhere. The floor was slippery. The bathmat was sopping wet. The pack of opened nappies on the floor was soggy. The changing mat was now a water slide.

When I stopped ranting, I realised that R and G were both completely silent. I lifted G out of the bath and dried her off. I told G to stand next to me while I repeated the exercise with R. As I was drying R, G caught her eye, they both looked at me and cackled quietly to each other with little grins on their faces.

It was hard to be angry any more. In fact, I wanted to laugh. After all, it was only water and was easy to clean up. Plus they had clearly had such a brilliant time that I felt bad for getting so annoyed with them. I gathered my thoughts, popped my metaphorical Mummy hat on (it's a fez in case you were wondering) and told them to apologise to me. They duly leaned over and give me big kisses. Monkeys! They can be so lovely one minute and absolute s**s the next.

20 seconds! What would they have achieved in a minute? A re-enactment of The Poseidon Adventure?

Hasn't the weather been awful recently? Cats, dogs and elephants down here. Gone (for a few months) are the days when I could put the girls in the buggy after tea and take them to the park for a roam around, getting home in time for bathtime at 6.15pm. Now, it gets dark at 4pm and the weather is so awful that it takes an age to get us all ready to leave the house.

I get terribly cabin-feverish if I'm in the house for more than a day at a time. I planned for today to be a lazy pyjama day as I was working at home and dh was around for most of the day but I got struck with an attack of the guilts at around 2pm, went for a shower and got dressed. I decided that the girls and I had to get out of the house for a little while.

We didn't have anything very exciting in for tea so we popped to the local M&S Simply Food (I say popped, it took about 20 minutes to persuade the girls to put their tights, boots, jumpers and coats on. As for strapping them into the buggy...) to get some treats. I picked up all the usual stuff: bread, milk, salad bits and in a moment of madness, decided that the girls should have cake for afters.

Not just cake. Oh no. Chocolate cake. With chocolate frosting and chocolate buttons. Yummmmmmmy.

The girls don't have things like cake and chocolate very often because I am a deeply cruel mother who only allows them to eat food that has been cooked by angels with gold-star hygiene certificates and water that has been purified in bubbling springs and drunk by gods but I thought they should have a treat.

They ate two (small) slices each and I may have had a bit myself and demanded MORE! MORE! I allowed them a piece more each and told them there was no more. G pointed to the kitchen worktop where approximately two-thirds of the cake was sitting, taunting us and wailed MOOOOOORE CAAAAKE PLEEEEEEEEASE. I hastily rushed over, stuffed some frosting in my mouth, put the cake back in its box and hid it in a cupboard. R knew I was pulling a fast one and joined in the yelling. I had to distract them with Teletubbies.

Considering they eat cake roughly every six months, I was impressed at how quickly they a. learnt what it was called and b. developed a taste for it. I think it's a girl thing. Eating healthily is all well and good but on rainy cold winter days, nothing beats chocolate cake.

Idioglossia: Idioglossia refers to an idiosyncratic language, one invented and spoken by only one or a very few people. Most often, idioglossia refers to the "private languages" of young children, especially twins. It is also known as cryptophasia, and commonly referred to as twin talk or twin speech.

R and G's 'normal' speech has come on leaps and bounds in the last few months and we have got to the point where we can have short conversations with them. However, there are times when they babble at each other in a language that we can't understand.

If we had one child and they were only hearing our (mostly adult) conversations, their speech would be more advanced. As they spend all their time together and are at the same stage in their development, they tend to learn from, and copy each other. Therefore, if one of them decides to adopt a particular way of saying a word e.g. 'Dee-da' instead of 'water', the other one will copy it and they start to believe that they are saying it correctly. Undoing this is actually more difficult than one might think. 'Water' is an everyday, many times a day word and we say it to them repeatedly. Yet they insist on referring it to as 'dee-da'.

The situation is probably compounded by the fact that they attend nursery three days a week, where they are surrounded by young children at a range of speech levels, from babies cooing and babbling to pre-schoolers having full-blown conversations. The cacophony of noise must be terribly confusing.

We've always made a point of taking to the girls in 'adult' voices. I'm not one for baby talk. Dh is much quieter than I am and speaks quite softly. I'm generally much louder and have a harsher tone to my voice. My point is, we speak to the girls pretty much constantly - sometimes I feel like I'm providing the girls with a running commentary on their lives - so I don't think there's much more we can do to promote their speech.

G is much better with her speech than R and picks up new words and phrases very quickly. R seems to internalise a lot of information, but will suddenly come out with a new, perfectly formed sentence when the mood takes her.

The key thing seems to be that idioglossia is a phase (isn't everything a phase with children?!) and they will grow out of it.

After an extremely low-key 1st birthday last year, we are really going for it with the girls’ 2nd birthdays in December. We’re having a big celebration at our house – we must be mad! We’ve sent out (actually e-mailed) invites to all and sundry and despite our poor planning in having pre-Christmas babies (thanks to my horrid ex-boss for that comment), quite a few people are coming. Yay! We’re having what is essentially an open house day on 12th December and have told everyone that they can arrive any time from 11am and we’ll keep a steady supply of party food and drinks flowing. The more the merrier, I say.

We thought it might be nice to invite some of the girls’ friends from nursery along, perhaps a couple of close friends each. Dh asked their room leader for a shortlist and after careful deliberation, she came up with 14 names. 14! 8 boys and 6 girls. Apparently R and G are extremely popular (I bet she says that to all the parents) and play with almost everyone at nursery (including the preschoolers and the babies) but the named 14 are their ‘closest’ friends.

Dh and I are deeply smug that the girls are apparently quite popular but equally quite baffled as to where they have acquired their outgoing natures from. I’m pretty vocal now, as an adult, and have a fair few friends but as a child I was pretty quiet and shy. Dh very much keeps to himself and has a small but close circle of friends. We aren’t the sort of people that light up a room. Maybe I do by leaving it...

The girls’ birthday is just the start of nearly a month of celebrations at the HoT. We’re hosting the family Christmas this year and both sets of parents (and extremely chuffed grandparents) and dh’s sister are coming along for the festivities. The notable absentees will be P, our niece (who is sadly visiting her dad) and my sister, who is in South Africa following the England cricket team as part of the Barmy Army.

On the 27th I turn 30 but I’m in denial about that...

It’s a given that when you have children you are no longer the centre of your universe. Suddenly, your needs as a person are superseded your parental responsibilities. Dh and I are pretty good at looking after each other as well as the girls – we eat well, rest as much as we can (ha ha) and keep an eye on each other’s wellbeing.

Sometimes though, your body fights back. Over the last couple of months I’ve been feeling quite tired (with twins, a full-time job and a – limited but important – social life to keep track of, this isn’t a massive surprise) and I have also fainted a couple of times. My concerned GP sent me for some blood tests and surprise surprise: I’m anaemic.

I went back to see my GP on Thursday to talk through the results. My iron stores are extremely low (one grade lower and I’d have to have a blood transfusion) and so I’ve been put on iron tablets and told to eat lots of iron-rich foods – cereals, green leafy veg, fruit juices, etc. Oh and dark chocolate – hurrah! Generally my diet is pretty good. The only things I’ve not really been having are the fruit juices, so I need to remedy that.

I was mildly anaemic when I was pregnant (hardly surprising with two little babies sucking the life out of me) and don’t exactly have fond memories of the effects that the iron tablets had, but you do what the medical professionals tell you do, don’t you? Plus the thought of a transfusion doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. I’m being chased by the blood donor service for a pint of my finest at the moment – I need all the red stuff I can get!

I also got the usual lecture from my lovely (really actually lovely) GP about looking after myself and resting when I can. Bless her, I know she means well but when? How? I have a busy life but wouldn’t have it any other way. I need to keep ‘doing’ things. I’m probably the most uptight and least relaxed person on the planet. Aside from being felled by a stun-gun, I don’t see how I can slow down.

Answers on a postcard.