Reflections on Twins After One Year

Ok, so they'll actually be almost 15 months by the time I finish writing this post. Today, after several months of hiatus, I return to this blog. "I'm going to write a post about the boys turning one," I told Ryan. "Great idea!" he replied. I opened up Blogger and voila! I already started writing the post....almost three months ago. I have no recollection of this. Here's what I'd written:

The boys recently turned one year old. No, time hasn't flown by (see my previous blog post with sleep loss calculator). But it's been a great year. Tyler and Owen have evolved from blobs of neediness (Ryan's description of newborns) to little people. They communicate, they laugh, they are mischievous...they are wonderful!

Here are some reflections on our first year with twins.

1) Everything is a phase. A few weeks after Maddy was born I met up with my friend Julie, and I told her that I felt like I'd been hit by a bus because I was so tired. She said, "Everything is a phase, and they change so quickly." Thankfully I had the experience of one baby under my belt before the twins were born because when you're in the thick of babyhood it seems like it will always be so difficult. But it all passes -  breastfeeding two babies, sleepless nights, sicknesses. And thank God for that!

2) Twin moms are in a sisterhood. I've become friends with a few twin moms here in Hong Kong. When you meet another twin mom you immediately bond and share crazy stories. They get you like no one else does.

I recently started a Whatsapp group with two other twin moms. It was my second time starting the same group, with the same group name, with the same icon. I did not remember the first time I did it. "You know, you started this exact same group a few months ago," said my friend. "As another mom of twins, I entirely understand how this happened."

I met a new colleague at work whose twin boys are now 4 years old. "I heard you have twins," she said the first day I met her. "I have twins," she said with a knowing look. And then she proceeded to tell me how crazy she felt those first few months. How one day one of her twins had a diaper explosion, and she locked herself into the bathroom and refused to come out. Her husband said, "Your mother is calling for us to help her, we have to go out there." She cried and shook her head, "No, I can't do it!" I could totally relate.

My neighbor has four-month-old twin boys, and she said, "When I go to my mommy's groups and hear the singleton moms talk about their problems, I just laugh at them."

I'm finishing up the post now, on 21 May.

3) Life at home is chaos. Accept it. Yes, we have routines. Yes, our boys nap well. Yes, they eat well. Life is still chaos. Our most hectic times are 6am-8am on weekend mornings and 5:30-7:30pm in the evening. With three young children, there are always more people wanting attention than hands you have. Sometimes we feel guilty for going to the bathroom for more than five minutes because the other person will be swarmed with children.

We laugh a lot and can't take ourselves too seriously anymore. Now that the boys are cruising and climbing, we've had a few close calls. Just today Owen stood up on the arm of the couch with one leg, had his hands on the side table, and the other foot was dangling over the edge. I had left the room for 15 seconds. Luckily, as our friend and dad of four Blair said of children, "They're really hard to kill."

4) You can raise two people with the same genes in the exact same environment with the same parents, and they'll still turn out differently.  Here's a summary of our little boys in table format, of course.