belgianwaffle

Twins

Today’s news


Posted in: Ireland, Twins

Rang my mother for a chat but she hung up on me to hear Bertie give a funeral oration at CJ‘s obsequies.  She got back to me quickly.  She felt it lacked grandeur as Bertie cannot pronounce his ths (a fatally common Irish failing – do you wonder why I had years of elocution classes?  Wonder no longer).  I am as shocked that he has died as I was the day I heard Margaret Thatcher was deposed.  I thought that he would go on forever.

In other news, the Dutch Mama has sent me an email containing this line:
“Our Austrian friend is coming to visit on Sunday with her twin baby boys…about a month old now and (I’ve been so looking forward to telling you this) sleeping through the night!! “Mr. Waffle says that travel often upsets small children.  Let us hope for the best.

Infrastructure


Posted in: Mr. Waffle, Siblings, Twins

Since my sister moved to India, Mr. Waffle has developed an interest in matters Indian and he keeps plying me with information.  Apparently it takes 8 days to get something by road from Bombay to Calcutta.  This is, as I pointed out to him, 6 days less than the time it takes Aubert to get a buggy from its depot in Brussels to its shop in Brussels.You may rejoice, should you so wish, our swish new buggy has finally arrived.

On the home front


Posted in: Mr. Waffle, Twins

Mr. Waffle is playing a blinder or else he’s putting up a brave front.  It’s hard to tell.  He had 5 consecutive hours of  sleep last night having stashed the boys in strategic locations about the house so that they wouldn’t wake each other up.  I’m not sure that it will be feasible to keep a cot in the kitchen in the medium term, but we can think about that.

Mr. Waffle is much more upset than I am by the fact that our infants continue, at 8 months, to sleep like newborns.  I wasn’t quite sure why that was until he said to me “you made a deal with God, didn’t you, they could wake as often as they liked, provided that they didn’t have CMV” and I realised straight away that he was right.  In fact, I think I promised never to complain about anything ever again, if I remember rightly.  And though I have not, perhaps, held true to that, I think I have become much better at resigning myself to everyday problems that arise.  I may have to cede my place on the “whinge for Ireland” team to a new contestant.   Beth knows what I mean.

Boys, boys, boys


Posted in: Twins

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.

It’s not for ever, which is just as well, really.


Posted in: Twins

Last night

10.00 pm Bed

11.55 pm Plaintive roar from boys’ bedroom. Rise to quell the boys

2.30 am Return to my own bed.

4.00 am Further plaintive roar from boys’ bedroom. Drag myself into their room and begthem on bended knee to go back to sleep.

5.40 am Hand boys over to my husband and collapse into bed.

6.30 am Princess rises, husband abandons faint hope that he had hitherto entertained of getting back to bed.

7.40 am I rise to greet the day.

And that was a pretty good night. We can remember a lot of what happened. Usually it’s just a blur of rising and collapsing.

I bet you wish you were me.


Posted in: Princess, Twins

Last night at about 3 in the morning I was sitting up in bed with both boys.  Michael smiled up at me (he’s a cheerful little boy), vomitted all over me and fell back asleep.  I put him down and turned my attention to Daniel who was grumpy and very warm.  He reacted enthusiastically to this attention and vomitted all over me also.  So, we got up, changed the boys, stripped the bed, rinsed the duvet and pillows and dabbed ineffectually at the mattress, remade the bed, fed Daniel some Calpol and persuaded them to go back to sleep.  Poor Daniel passed a very miserable night and, in consequence, so did we.

This morning, the Princess inspected her sick little brother and announced “I’m sick too”.  “Hmm” I thought.  She took a bucket to bed for her nap in the afternoon “in case I get sick”.  And she did.  To prove me wrong she spent the remainder of the afternoon throwing up into a bucket while watching and rewatching Cinderella on the television.  They have all gone to bed now and the house is festooned with drying bed linen and duvets and it smells of vomit and disinfectant.  It’s delightful here.

Could it get better?  Oh yes, did I mention that Michael is getting his first tooth?