It’s been a while.
Time has flown by so quickly. Spring turned into summer and now here we are, nearly three months later, at the midway point for the year, the twins growing practically overnight.
I don’t even know where to start, so I’m just going to start somewhere in the middle, even though we’re still at the very beginning.
Three months. How? Where did the time go? One day the twins were so tiny I thought they would break when I held them, and then I blinked and now they’re huge. They won’t listen to me when I tell them to stop growing so fast. As much as I love seeing them hit new milestones and see their personalities developing – G, so chill and easy; M, so sweet yet full of fire — I hate thinking that they will never be this little again. Can someone invent a machine that will stop time, even for just a little bit? Please?
It probably goes without saying that a lot has happened these past few months. I feel like we have been through every trial and tribulation when it comes to parenting – from blood test scares (everything turned out okay) to feeding issues (still working on this) to skin ailments. I’ve had a bout of mastitis and a case of the baby blues. It never ends. There have been a million doctor’s appointments, a few excursions, and plenty of trips to Starbucks. Our families have come and gone — my mom was the last to leave two days ago — and Sly has returned to work. Now it’s just us, our own, our new family of six.
A lot of people have asked me what it’s like having twins. If we’re getting any sleep. How we’re managing. If we’re out of survival mode yet. Since these are our first children, we don’t know any different. Some days, everything runs smoothly and we feel like the best parents in the world. Like we are superparents who can do anything, sleep be damned! Like we could have 10 more kids, no problem. Like if we had only one kid we’d be coasting through life because raising two hasn’t been as hard as we were led to believe. Other days, we feel like failures. We can deal with sleep deprivation and we can deal with raising two children, but the combination of the two can sometimes be maddening. Some days I dream about what it must be like to have one kid, how much easier it would be having only one kid to breastfeed, only one kid to carry around or strap into a car seat, only one kid crying for my attention. On one particularly hard day, I messaged my friend in tears, “Did you ever feel like you wanted to yell at your kid to stfu? Like really yell at him? Am I losing my mind? Am I the world’s worst mom?” He wrote back, “Welcome to parenthood.”
Being a mom still feels strange, unfamiliar. Like shoes that need to be broken in. The things everyone told us would be hard — sleep deprivation, changing diapers — exist, but they feel relatively easy compared to the guilt and constant worry. I don’t think of myself as a natural-born mom, but I show up every day, grateful that I get the chance, and inspired by the twins to be a better mom than the day before. I’m still learning.
To my surprise, being a mom, something I didn’t necessarily ever envision for myself, has been a lot of fun. It still blows my mind that these are *our* kids that we get to keep forever. I’ll spare all the other eye-rolling clichés about it being “magical” or how it’s “the greatest job in the world,” or that we feel “#soblessed/over the moon/smitten/love at first sight”. What we feel is lucky. Challenged. Sometimes frustrated. (Sometimes a lot frustrated.) In awe. Inspired.So full of emotions that it feels as if we’ll burst. Our hearts and our lives glimmer just a bit brighter. Even on the hard days. Especially on the hard days. Had I known then how much I would enjoy being a mom, I might have had kids sooner. Maybe…
The twins have just now started smiling and interacting with us, and I live for those moments. It makes everything worth it and washes away any self-doubt. We love having twins. I couldn’t imagine not being a twin mom, especially to these two little people. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
There’s so much I want to write about, which is how I guess mommy blogs begin. Will this become a mommy blog? Maybe. Will I ever write about the Olympics? Probably. I just hope to keep writing in this space because I enjoy it. It may be months between posts and my posts might be all over the place — Olympics one day, a five-year-old travelogue another day, and likely a whole lot of motherhood stuff in-between. And as cliché as it may be, I still want to write about our babymoon, our baby shower, and our birth story. But mostly, I want to write about and document our lives, as I have been doing since the beginning, at more regular intervals.
Hopefully, another three months won’t pass before I write here again but sometimes when I find myself with a span of time longer than 15 minutes, I have to choose between sleeping, taking a shower, eating, reading, watching the Bachelorette, playing with the kitties, or writing.
Instead, I usually choose cuddle time with the twins.
Everything else can wait.
