Twin-Celebrity

I have read back through this blog so many times now that I could have read “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It used to be shots of hope, tid bits of reasons to believe that God had arranged something greater than we could see while we were occupied driving to some doctor’s office. Now it serves more like a defibrillator. It is an abrupt reminder to me that Ian and Jeremy were not a foregone conclusion.

We need a reminder sometimes, two months ago especially, before they learned about the connection between nighttime and sleeping. In retrospect, now that they do sleep at night, it seems that the days after the nights were the greater problem. It was as if we forgot what we all learned about all-nighters in college. So there we would be standing with bags under our eyes in the check out line at Ralph’s, when some sweet old well-slept woman would look over from the next line over. At first, she started cooing, so that we heard her before we saw her. I would look away and act like I didn’t feel her breathing down my neck, invading my little irritable bubble of stupor. “Ohh, how sweet” she would say, while I tried to decide weather I could continue withholding eye contact. While I went over in my mind how we got up 15 times last night and wondered what was wrong with them. How they kept crying after we fed them, how they finally went to sleep while the sun was coming up. How Megan and I are too brain dead to smile at each other, how they, maliciously, are sabotaging our marriage. And finally she asks the question: “Twins?” There were so many responses that came to mind! None of them were “yes.” “How old?” “ Two boys?” “ Are they identical?” “Do twins run in your family?” All of which we answered politely wondering how many times we might have to answer them all again before we got to the car, because if I had to hear one more story about someone’s neighbor’s sister-in-law’s friend who had twins I was going to lay down in traffic. Twins are not that rare!

It is no small wonder that more of these well meaning baby-appreciators are not killed every year. Like drinking and driving are hormones and sleep deprivation. The worst part of Twin – Celebrity, is that it is the parents who are miscalibrated. I feel like a lottery winner, irritated that the press wants to interview me. Shouldn’t I be standing on a mountain or something? Proclaiming with a 6 foot Herald Trumpet and banners every middle of the night scream as a miracle? That, before they had names, we thought Jeremy would not survive, and that Ian, if he survived would have cerebral palsy?

So now that we sleep close to 8 hours again, we remember more often. We remember almost every night when we wake them up to feed them at 10, and they are lumpy, sleepy and put their arms around our neck and fall back to sleep. We remember that Jeremy was slowly starving to death, and was just over half of Ian’s size. That Ian’s organs were not going to develop right because Jeremy was pumping all the food for him. And now they are nearly the same size and perfectly healthy.

Now we troll for Twin-Celebrity.