Twin Fight Club

Several days ago, I left the boys to play in the living room as I picked up some of the clutter around the house.  Carrying objects from one place to another, I flitted in and out of the room, never leaving the boys alone for more than a few minutes.  Before I got more than two steps out of the room, on my last pass, I heard a yowl and came rushing back in.

Hen-bug was beating Ty-baby over the head with a book.  To be precise, he was beating him over the head with a copy of The Giving Tree.  Ty-baby, not to be outdone, had shoved the spine of On The Day You Were Born, a truly lovely book, directly into Hen-bug's face. 

This is what caused the yowl.

The boys have always hit each other, but the more mobile they get, the more damage they're able to inflict.  Now, granted, they're not usually angry at each other.  However, when they've decided that they've had enough...that's it.

The most recent development has gotten to be too much.  Ty-baby has started pulling hair. Hard.  The only redeeming feature of this is that, after a few times of knowing what to look for, you can see it coming.  Ty-baby rests his hand gently on Hen-bug's head, but the give-away is his face, with the lips tucked together and a look of steely determination in his eyes.

And then....action and reaction.

Thankfully, there is no retailation possible because Hen-bug does not seem to have learned how to pull hair.  Also, as opposed to Ty-baby who remembers offenses and stores them up for slightly later retribution, Hen-bug only does things by the moment.  By the time he recovers, the incident has been forgotten.

At this point, both G. and I have said "no baby" to Ty over and over and over again, but nothing after the incident ever works.  Our only chance lies in stopping it before it happens.  The minute that either sees Ty-baby's angry face and the hand reach, we hiss:  "stttttsttttt"

We sound like something out of the Dog Whisperer, but for now, it appears to be working.  Ty-baby stops what he's doing and looks at us.  We then swoop down and remove him from his brother.  About 15 minutes or so is all it takes until they're ready to play together again.

Swim Club

The first rule of swim club is that you do not talk about swim club.  The second rule of swim club is that you do NOT talk about swim club.

I signed the boys up for swim lessons at the area YMCA about two months ago, partially because I wanted to get them acclimated to the water before we headed to my parents' Florida home for Christmas and partially because I just wanted to spend time with the boys doing something unrelated to either poo or food.

G greeted the news of swim club with resignation when it was first proposed and growing concern as it neared.  Although he wasn't thrilled about putting on a swim-suit, he worried more about finding himself the sole male in the middle of a group of women splashing around with babies.  He didn't want to be the odd-man out but, more than that, he didn't want to be perceived as doing something so....unmanly.  Although G does and enjoys doing things that he considers to be unmanly all the time (cooking new dishes, watching the Food Network, being obsessed with cleanliness), he doesn't like them brought to the attention of the general population.

Although I try to give all of this its due, after all, G was brought up as the fourth of four highly-competitive, teasing brothers, I ultimately don't give it much emphasis.  In other words, I didn't believe that it should keep us from swim club.  I took my own fears about showing up in a bathing suit a little more seriously, but utimately felt that it wouldn't be a big deal as I really don't care that much and everyone else would be in swimsuits, too.

We arrived at the YMCA and immediately separated as I took the boys into the ladies room to get ready.  This took some time.  Because most of the other women only had one baby, we were the last to get to the pool.  As I walked over to the baby swim area, pushing the stroller in my decidedly un-flattering Land's End still-maternity swimsuit, something immediately struck me, something that I had been too busy to notice in the women's room.

Out of the twelve people with babies in the water, eleven, including George, were men.  George looked decidedly comfortable.  There was only one other woman.  Don't get me wrong, the mothers were there.  They were just on the sidelines, wearing appropriate fall garb or designer tracksuits.

I had no clue that this was going to happen.  Not that it would have changed anything if I did, but nothing makes me feel more unglamorous and clunky than being in the presence of women who are, if not completely glamorous, at least wearing clothes.  Who would have thought it?  Clearly, nobody was telling.

Things got a little bit better once I handed a baby to George and climbed into the water.  The boys both behaved wonderfully, with Henry splashing all the time and Tyler paying more attention to the people around him than to the fact that he was in the water.  A nice woman, with the cutest one year old baby girl, even took pictures and promised to burn them onto a CD-ROM for us.

We're definately going back.  After all, as I'm increasingly coming to realize, parenting twins means that nobody gets to ever sit on the sidelines.  However, I may buy a new bathing suit.

State Fair

I believe in trial by fire.

We got the boy's helmets on Thursday and, since they were supposed to be wearing them 23 hours a day by Saturday, that's what they wore to our state's fair. 

Now, I've never been to any other State Fairs, so I don't exactly know how this one stacks up to the State Fair competition.  But it's huge.  It stretches for probably several square miles; at least, that's how it felt when pushing 50 pounds of baby plus husband's jacket plus husband's bottled waters plus husband's guide to State Fair.  And carrying an enormous diaper bag.

We went in the morning at exactly the same time as the big State football game, so the State Fair was relatively empty.  Except for the pig races.  I don't know whether it's because the pig races were one of the few free things at the State Fair, but they packed them in pretty tight. 

Honestly, though, I never knew that pigs could run so damn fast; I barely had time to blink before they had finished and were wolfing down their cheese doodle incentives.  I would have loved a cheese doodle, but I doubt that I could have beat even the slowest one of those pigs. It shouldn't be the tortoise and the hare.  It should be the tortoise and the pig.

In addition to the pig races, we took the babies on the merry-go-round.  It was a classic new-parent moment.  I balanced Hen on a bobbing horse, trying not to fall on my ass, while G nominally watched Ty and took pictures.  After Hen's turn, we switched places.  I got the distinct feeling that all the parents with older kids (and no cameras) were looking at us going, "awwwww....newbies."

However, the looks we got on the carousel were nothing compared to those we got when folks spotted those helmets.  Some people just stared and others, this being the South, just asked us straight up: "why are they wearing those funny hats?"  I much preferred the questions, because they gave me a chance to explain.  I had the following conversation several times before I learned to refine my explanation.

When asked, I tried to tell the truth:  "They have something called positional plagiocephaly, which causes the facial asymetry that the helmets are designed to correct."

To which my seat-mate would respond, "so, you're protecting their brains."

"Um no.  Not really.  They have a flat spot...."

"My cousin's baby had one of them.  The brain was just poking up from the top of her head. She wore a helmet.  Just like your babies.  To protect her brain."

"Well, no, their brains are fine."

"Oh, that's good.  Sweet little babies.  Bless their hearts."

At this point, the pigs would race around the track, one of the babies would decide to be hungry, or G would return with the bar-b-que.

All told, we did have a good time at the fair and I think that the helmets turned out just fine.  That's boats (on Hen) on the left and night sky (on Ty) on the right.

Attack of the Clones

Reading Cecily's post about  ER premiere made me thankful that my television tendancies veer more towards the melodramatic than the dramatic.  Mainly, I'm glad I didn't see the show because sometimes I think that I'm more affected by the circumstances surrounding the birth of the boys than the infertility which preceeded it.  Because male factor infertility lead us to IVF, my experience was subtly different.  I never felt complete failure in my body until the life-shriveling five weeks on bed-rest and the delivery under general anethesia resulted in paralysis.  Having been failed by my body, it was an uphill battle not to fail or feel like I would fail my two tiny twin boys. 

Given all of this, the ER premiere saw me in front of the television watching America's Next Top Model on Tivo, instead.  Even though Tyra Banks' sympathetic oozing as the hopeful models recited their tragic life stories made me a bit queasy and the self-congratulatory tone of the show drove me crazy -- a photo shoot on model stereotypes is billed as "controversial" and "ground-breaking" -- I'm hopelessly hooked. 

Oh.  Did I mention that these young women are judged solely on whether they met society's harsh measure of physical beauty?  No?  Well, there's that, too.

If I had daughters, I wouldn't let any of them touch it with a ten foot pole.

Nevertheless....I remain, hooked.

This season, however, my interest was peaked because two of the hopefuls happened to be identical tall, skinny twins.  Despite belonging to the twin group, the only identical twins I know are my own two boys.  I didn't believe that IVF could result in identical twins, but identical twinning occurs more often in IVF, particularly with ICSI, than among the general population.  Although I have only limited experience with identical twins, I've encountered my fair share of stereotypes, many of which I was interested to see played out on America's Next Top Model.

Some of these stereotypes played off of the fact that since "identical" twins share the same genetic makeup, they are thought to be identical people.  I was delighted to point out this misconception to a writing student who equated identical twins with Dolly the sheep. I can't recall how many times I've been asked whether I can tell the difference between Hen and Ty.  Even now, when they're seven months old!  Before they were born, I did think that I would have to resort to a string or fingernail polish to differentiate the boys.  By the time we brought Hen and Ty home from the NICU, however, we had no need of any external identification system - although that didn't stop us from leaving the hospital bracelet on for a while, just in case.

It's obvious how intrigued but unsettled the America's Next Top Model folks were when confronted with two, eerily similar-looking, people.  And, in their defense, it was funny when the two women awkwardly took the exact same pose when prompted.  However, when confronted with such similarity, in definance of the idea that human beings could be clones, America's Next Top Model struggles to find difference.  I just wish that the difference could be a little, well, different. "Ohhhh...you're the atheletic one," Tyra cooes to one of the future models, while simultaneously earmarking the other as more "girlie." 

Gand I always seem to be involved in the dance of difference between the boys, struggling to bear witness to their now-emerging personalities without comparing or pigeon-holing them into one set identity or another.  We try really hard to avoid saying "Tyler's sitting, but Henry's not" or "Henry seems to be a more finicky eater than Tyler."  We try just to make the statement and leave off the comparison.  However, I think that it's going to be hard.  If you have two of anything, it's difficult not to compare them to each other.  Apples...oranges....whatever.  But I don't think that it would be accurate or fair to the boys, regardless of what happens on America's Next Top Model.