So it has been a while, I know, but it has been a productive while. My wife gave birth to two beautiful baby boys (thought we were having trips, but wound up with twins), and they are now close to ten months old. They are adorable little boys with smiles, and cute drooling, and addictive laughter, but they are two little boys. There are just some things about twins that nothing can prepare you for.
- You can be a second circle master ninja capable of walking across water without even making a ripple, but the sound of your very presence WILL wake up one of the twins, and it will always be the one you are not picking up.
- You may be able to juggle fifteen objects in four different directions simultaneously, but there is no way for a father to simultaneously feed twins.
- When playing with either child, tossing them in the air and catching them eight inches from the ground is a good way to make their mother very, very mad at you.
- Provided you help keep them limber, babies CAN touch the back of their heads with the bottoms of their feet, from any direction. Often they find this immensely hilarious.
- Spinning around with your child in hand till their eyes twitch in their heads, may be funny to you, but the wife hates it when they throw up on her 30 seconds later.
- Projectile vomiting is defined as follows: You child(ren) can and will promptly vomit on you from any location in the house, at any distance, as soon as you change from your ratty yard working clothes into your nice work clothes. This will happen at unexpected times, in unexpected ways. The only time it is a 100% guaranty it will happen is when you have to wear your only suit for some important VIP visit, and you are running late.
- Murphy was invented to explain the phenomena of twin children.
- A 55-gallon drum is not a sufficiently sized container for disposing of a weeks worth of diapers from twins.
- Garbagemen (sorry, sanitation engineers) find a 55-gallon drum full of used diapers disgusting.
- No matter how funny you think it was, that was not a fart. It was the teleportation of one child’s bowel movement to the other child’s diaper.
- Twins will attract every interested party within a 5-mile radius to annoy you with innane comments and stupid questions the moment you step out the door with them for some exercise. (Are they twins? Are they identical? You must have your hands full.)
- Finding time to exercise is nearly impossible when you have twins.
- Hell week at SERE training has nothing compared to caring for newborn twins.
- As soon as you finally get both children to sleep someone will do one of the following: Show up unexpectedly with something that generates loud noises, call the phone from Timbuktu and feel the need to shout at the top of their lungs to be heard, ring the doorbell repeatedly while pounding on the door with enough force to knock an elephant out, fire off a howitzer, decide that now is the time to put together a marching band and practice, discover that holding down the center of the steering wheel will generate a continuous loud noise, generate some other various loud noise that will invariably wake up both children simultaneously.
- The phrase “Your son was misbehaving today” will leave you confused as to which son the spousal unit is talking about.
- Square feet of living area defines the space needed by twins for all of their belongings. This number is relative and will always be at least 1,000 square feet more than what you have.
- As soon as you save up enough money for that vacation to Tahiti, you will find all those things that you’ve wanted for your children on sale at the local WalMart. You will wind up spending your entire vacation fund on said items. (Walk in for milk, walk out with $4500 in baby stuff, and no milk)
In all of this I have made another rather disturbing discovery. There are many pediatricians out there who not only have no idea on how to deal with twins, but will refuse to service a family with twins. Take our recent pediatrician for example. She was a nice lady, deals well with children, but put her in a room with twins and she was almost completely lost. When asking questions about one twin, she would almost always look at the wrong chart and say “Well I don’t see that information in his chart… Are you sure?” Fortunately our new pediatrician only deals with multiple births so things are getting better there. Anyways, I’m always open for additions, advice, or a means to laugh at my own life; so if you have anything more to add feel free to add them to the comments below!
And remember: Those that think they are too small to make a difference, have never spent time in a dark room with a mosquito.
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