Boys, boys, boys

Daniel and Michael will be eight months next week and I feel that the time since they were born has flown. I was looking at Daniel this morning and I was just amazed how big he’s got (though he was always big). There he was sitting up, beaming at me saying ba, ba, ba. Michael can’t sit up or say ba, ba, ba but, hey, he has the teeth (ok, half a tooth and a bump on his gum). I feel that I never see the poor mites. Now that I’m back at work, they spend all their time with the childminder or at the creche. On my half days on Wednesday and Friday, I bond with the Princess and they languish in the creche. This works really well for me and her, but I’m not so sure that it’s good for them. When they are a bit bigger, I think I might take them out of the creche for the afternoon occasionally but for the moment, her highness and I really like the current arrangement. Yes, I am heartless, sue me. It seems to me that they used to be more cheerful but maybe, they’re still cheerful most of the time but I just see them most at their worst time of day (in the evening). Or maybe the conjunctivitis and racking coughs they have had continually since I started back at work are upsetting them. I remember when the Princess got conjunctivitis first, I spent hours on the internet looking it up, I rubbed cream on her eyeball (I can’t tell you how much she enjoyed that), I took her to the doctor and I worried. With the boys, I just think, ‘oh, conjunctivitis, it will pass’. Though of course it hasn’t. Hmm. All my children have rotten coughs. It seems to me that the Princess has had a cough since the day she was born (as her Nana says “that child has a terrible chest”), but since starting at the creche, the boys have joined in. Late at night, our flat echoes to the sounds of concerted coughing; it’s positively Dickensian.

The boys are now very conscious of each other. Daniel is much stronger, so whenever Michael starts looking at something, Daniel whips it off him. Michael just stares at the ceiling in saintly resignation. They both love sticking their fingers in each others’ faces. They are not so keen on getting fingers in the eye though (who would be?), so this creates its own problems. The other morning, I had Daniel sitting in the middle of the bed and Michael lying some distance away. I turned my back for ONE SECOND and there was a howl of indignation. Daniel had launched himself across the bed and managed to headbutt Michael. Impressive. They can actually both move about quite a lot now and if you leave them one place, you come back to find that they have worked their way round to the socket in your absence and are trying to work out how to eat it.

They eat everything, except, in the case of Daniel, food. It’s strange because Daniel is so much larger than Michael, you would think that he would be a bigger eater, but he does not like solid food and spits it out in indignation when it is offered; I have no idea how he keeps up his impressive bulk. Michael on the other hand bobs back and forward like an anxious woodpecker when being fed and howls if you are too slow with the next mouthful.

They both adore the Princess. Even though she manhandles them with considerable roughness, they can’t get enough of her. When she is in the room, they will only look at her which makes feeding them difficult, if the Princess refuses to stay in their line of sight. She dances with them (this involves parental support for the lucky boy). She grabs their chubby little arms and waves them around to chuckles of glee on their part. When she plays peekaboo with Daniel in the bath he nearly expires from delight.

Magic.