Ode to Mothers of Twins

Mother of Twins Prayer
author anonymous

There’s two to wash,
There’s two to dry;
There’s two who argue,
There’s two who cry.
One’s in the mud,
Having a ball;
The other holds a crayon…
Another marked wall.
Some days seem endless,
My patience grows thin.
Why did God choose me
To be a mother of twins?
The answer comes clear-
At the end of the day,
As I tuck them in bed
And to myself I say…
There’s two to kiss,
There’s two to hug;
And best of all,
Thank You, God, for two to love.

We had my nephew Luke here today who is two days older than Becca. We've had him many of days but today both Luke and Becca decided it was a crabby day. Boy I have no idea how mothers of twins keep their sanity .... or maybe they just don't. I found myself trying to hold both of them in ways that would keep pacifiers in their mouths, feeding both of them at the same time and wondering how I was going to scratch my itchy nose, and relishing in the excuse that I had to do the dishes when they were both screaming together on the floor. And yet, throughout the day I found myself kissing them every time I picked them up, melting when they smiled, and taking pictures of the tear free moments as excellent memories of the day.

Jonathan, Jonathan, Jonathan

To keep Jon from the classic middle child being ignored syndrome I thought I'd post today all about Jon.
We were up at the Lake today visiting friends and they commented on Jon, "He is just so adorable, ... although he has that look like he might be one who gets into trouble." I started immediately laughing, for that is Jon to the T! He is so sweet and cute and loves to snuggle with me and a lot of the day I just can't get enough of him, but he also gets into sooo much trouble and many times a day I just need him to stop and be still for 2 minutes.
*He adores his little sister and looks for her every morning. He loves to have her sit in the swing so he can push her HIGH! He has observed that she likes to put things in her mouth so he is always happy to pick up things and put them in her mouth for her. :)
*He loves cars and trains. Recently I picked up some new wooden train and train track pieces to add to our collection. They are currently set up on the table in the boys room and Jon is having a blast playing with them for hours each day. In fact, he loves then so much that he simply couldn't fall asleep the first few days because it was too much fun to look at them through his crib bars. So taking a trick we learned from Michael and the drum set he shared a bedroom with one week on vacation, we have started putting the trains "to bed" before night time and nap time. He says good night to them and then we cover them with a blanket. Then we can put Jon in his bed and cover him with his blanket.
*If anyone with a baby would like to know what they need to do to child proof their home we are ready to rent out Jonathan. He has an amazing knack for finding everything he is not suppose to in a room. His favorite thing to do right now is to plug and unplug things in the surge protector we use for our computers. He will also find scissors, press buttons on my phone, dump things out of boxes, empty cupboards, climb up onto tables, and the list goes on and on. The good news is he has started responding to our "go to timeout" by sauntering to a chair in the dining room and climbing up on his own, all with an expert fake cry.
*Jon is developing a great sense of humor. Like Michael he knows the way things are suppose to go, but unlike Michael he likes to do them in a completely opposite way. This leads to many funny predicaments and he is ready to laugh at them harder than anyone. Tonight he decided that stacking cups normally was getting a bit boring, so he covered himself with a blanket, fumbled his way back to the table where he had set up the cups, reached out his hand, only to grab open air. With a sheepish grin he pulled the blanket off his face and laughed along with our reactions.

Jumping :)

I now have pictures of all three kiddos in the door jumper! They are all so adorable and look how much alike they look too. (Oh, and all these pictures were taken at about 5 months of age. Can you tell which one is Michael? If you guessed the complete chunk of a boy you were right!)







Becca had a blast. She was jumping like a pro and squealing in delight. Of course, as soon as I got the video camera out she hung dramatically and whined, but I'm sure there will be more chances to come. :)

One Two Bee

In the past month, Jon has gotten into counting. Especially when we would look at a book, he would want to count anything in the pictures: the flower, the clouds, the people, the trains, you name it. Then he ventured out on his own to count things, saying, "one, two, bee, one, two, bee, ..." as he pointed to each thing. For those of you who are teachers, let me tell you that he had great one-to-one correspondence, pointing to one object for each number he counted - way beyond some of my students when I was teaching. (proud Mommy moment.)

Well that has all evolved now. For a while whenever he saw more than one of anything he would scream, "one-two-bee!" So it became a phrase that meant more than one. Too cute, I know. Well now he is back to counting but the phrase has stuck so instead of showing off his advanced counting correspondence he is now back to just cute toddler counting: for each object he points to he says, "onetwobee." So tonight when he counted four cars in the box he exclaimed: "onetwobee, onetwobee, onetwobee, onetwobee!"

Not to be outdone by her brothers

With a birthday and losing a tooth to follow, Becca is having no trouble keeping up with her brothers. She is learning to do new things everyday it seems. This past week she has gotten tons better at sitting up. In fact she was sitting so well yesterday that I left her to run into the kitchen for something. Unfortunately she chose that moment to fall forward (the only direction where the bobby pillow wasn't there to soften her fall) and plant face first into the hard wood floor. She came up screaming but seemed no worse for the wear after some cuddle time with Mom.


Next Becca chose this week to work on her razzing skills. She is quite the pro now and can spray not only herself but everyone who comes close to admire the new skill. This of course only magnifies the drooling troubles we've had so she is going through many outfits each day. Good thing her wardrobe can keep up!

And finally, we actually got her to roll over on camera this past weekend. At first, she was so good at rolling when no one was looking that I even suspected that her brothers were actually the ones rolling her. Then she let us in on the secret but failed to preform on camera - until now that it. So for all to enjoy, may I present Becca the roller:

The tooth fairy's visit

A few mornings ago, Michael bit into a bagel and announced that his tooth hurt. Upon closer inspection, it was found to be loose - quite loose actually. I tried to talk to Michael about how all the teeth in his mouth were baby teeth and that they get loose and fall out to make room for big teeth that will grow in. He began to freak out! Poor Michael who likes to be prepared for everything was caught completely off guard. But who knew we'd have to prep him for loosing teeth while he was still 4 years old. My recollection is that a few kids loose teeth at 5, but most start at 6 or 7. However, here we found ourselves a full month before his 5th birthday. So I continued to talk calmly about the whole process and luckily when I got to the part about the tooth fairy he remembered a story he had read at Grandpa's about a bunny putting her tooth under her pillow for the tooth fairy. With that small thought to latch on to, everything started to seem ok to him. He then wanted to know all the whys, so we talked about how teeth have roots and that the roots of the baby teeth get old and and start to dissolve until the tooth falls out. So every time he would wiggle his tooth and it would move more he's announce, "Mom, it's losing more roots!"

The tooth has fallen out now - in fact it fell out at Jon's party - and Michael received a quarter from the tooth fairy. Now he can't decide whether to put it in the change jar that we are filling as "Chucky Cheese money" or to spend it on something more immediate. And to make the decision even more fun, he has a second loose tooth he plans to put under his pillow soon.

Tim and I just look at each other and think that we weren't expecting to be playing this parenting roll quite so soon!

Happy Birthday Jon!

Today Jon is two years old. We tried to sing "Happy Birthday" to him this morning and he just screamed "NO" and ran away. Apparently even at two getting older can be a bit scary. We actually had a party for him on Sunday with family. It was a joint birthday party for Jon and my dad and we had a blast!

Last week Michael had talked me into party blowers for the great event. I thought Jon would get a kick out of them since they had Lightning McQueen on them, but I'm not sure he even noticed that - he was having too much fun blowing them.


We had delicious brownies and ice cream that were a big hit!





And then Jon got to open his presents. He was a bit overwhelmed as we took each present away after he opened it and Michael kept bringing him more presents to open. I think he would have rather got one or two presents and been allowed to play with them right away. lol Oh well, I'm sure big brother Michael will teach Jon about the importance of having lots of presents by next year. :)


Here are a few of his favorite presents:
My dad made him a wooden school bus full of little people.


And we found a toy lawn mower at a garage sale this summer. We couldn't get the bubble blower in it to work, but Jon had a blast pushing it around the yard. I think he was entertained by it for about an hour after the party.


We even got Michael a present for the day so they could have matching sun glasses.


Happy Birthday Jonathan!!