One Year Down

My twins are one.  It was one year ago today that I was wheeled out of a delivery room with two babies, one in each arm, one boy and one girl. It was all a whirlwind of novelty—twins, a boy, finding myself as a mother of 6. As with so many experiences in life, in some ways, that momentous birth feels like it was yesterday, and in other ways it feels like a lifetime ago. The year has surely been a long one, a tough one, an exciting one, a trying one, an amazing one, a frustrating one, a scary one, a happy one, an impossible one, a humbling one—it’s been all those things and more. My husband can assure you, over the course of this year, I have pretty much experienced every nuance of the emotional spectrum we women are capable of.

Today, on my twins’ one year birthday, I can't help but look back, thinking about all the important lessons I’ve learned over the past year. And here they are:

1)   Six is a lot. This probably was obvious to most of you, but in case any of you weren’t sure, six children is a lot of frikkin children. You know you have a lot of children when the post office tells you that if you want to get passports for so many children, you need a private appointment. (Who even knew post offices make appointments? Don’t we just stand on line?) Or when the passport photo booth at CVS runs out of film when you come in with all your kids. You also know you have a lot of kids when on the one or two occasions you decide to drive them all someplace together, you realize a few minutes later in the store that you only see five of them and that you actually left one of the kids inside the car.  Which leads to lesson number 2.

2)   Cars don’t work for a family of 8. I struggled with this early on, as you might recall, even debating the Sprinter at one point. We ended up getting an 8-seater Yukon Denali. The XL (duh). The problem is my twins are out of the infant car seats, and the regular sized car seats—you know the ones they convince you to get that go up to like 80 pounds or some ridiculous weight that no child ever reaches who still belongs in a car seat—take up too much room, so that when both car seats are in the middle bench, the only way to get into the third bench is to dive from the middle row or dive from the trunk. That’s fine for my five year old Lily, but my 11-year-old Gabby does not appreciate that form of entering a car. And I can’t say I blame her. I don’t think families of 8 were meant to actually go anywhere together in a car.

But I’m not done with lesson number 2. A car for a family of eight is not an easy car to park. Again, this was probably obvious to most of you. Forget parallel parking this boat—where I use my rear-camera as much as possible and then often roll down my window and stick my head out as far as possible a la Ace Ventura, then stop just short of screaming “in case you’re behind me, please get out of my way, because I actually can’t see anything.” That’s not even what I’m talking about though. I’m talking about parking it in a New York City garage.

When I come into the city, I circle around for a spot on the street for about one minute (my husband circles for an hour), then I give up and head to the nearest lot. The minute they see me entering the parking lot, the crew all start waving their hands, in the motions of no, looking at me like I am trying to land a plane in their garage. Then the manager comes over, and says something like “I have no room for a car like this.” “Please, I will only be an hour or two,” I beg. “OK, but what are you going to give me?” He says. What does he mean? I’m thinking. “How much is it?“ I ask. He names some ridiculous number for which I almost could have taken a plane, and then adds, “but I take care of you, if you take care of me.” This is all sounding obscene, I know, but I’ve realized cars like mine are a whole other side business in parking garages. And I guess when I stop and think about it, I am a garage slut. I will pay anything to park.

3)   Moving is not easy with six kids. I guess my lessons are starting to have a common theme. We always move out of the city for the summer, but this year, our summer is slightly extended, as we’ve begun an apartment renovation, so that hopefully our six in the city can continue to squeeze in the city for many more years to come. So we actually had to move out of our apartment in May. The last time I had moved was eight years ago, or four kids ago. The owner of the first moving company who came to give me an estimate just kept shaking his head and staring at his notes, saying “don’t think I ever moved anyone with six kids before.” Really?” I asked as if six was the most normal number in the world. “That’s weird.” (We didn’t hire him.)

4)   Do not commute four children to school in New York City while based with twins in Long Island. This lesson is obviously not applicable to many people, but it is one we certainly learned the hard way. We thought commuting the girls for 19 days would be no biggie, but leaving at 6:30 am, returning at 6:30 pm, waiting around in various Starbucks and friends apartments until all four girls were done with after school activities during the four rainiest weeks New York City experienced this year was not as easy as I thought it would be. At least that part’s over for now, we’re settled here and school life is on hold till September. I was originally hoping to be back in my apartment for the Jewish holidays, but as this is my first experience with New York City construction, I am now hoping to be back for the Christian holidays.

5)   Boys are very different than girls. I know, obvious, but I grew up in a house of four sisters, no brothers. For the past ten years, I have had only daughters. Of course I have my father and my husband—it’s not like I’ve had no exposure to the male gender, but Barry is an entirely different species from his twin sister, Eliana. Let’s start with size—he looks like her older brother. People always stop me and ask me how many months apart they are. But forget looks.

She is the exact replica of the first four babies we made—sweet, easy, good sleeper, delicate, you put her down in her crib, she lies down, takes her burp cloth (that’s what my babies like to hold), puts her thumb in her mouth and goes to sleep. Barry? I try placing him down, but within seconds, like a jack-in-the-box, he jerks himself up, throws his burp cloths out of the crib and bashes his head against the crib until he tires himself out and then passes out.

She wakes up with a wet diaper, but all is perfectly contained inside her diaper. Barry? He has officially never come down in the morning in his pajama pants. He wakes up with a bigger pile of you know what in his diaper than you find in a horse stable. Most mornings I need to bathe him. I know what you’re thinking, but no, he’s already in size 6 diapers, Huggies, Pampers, Huggies overnights, I’ve tried it all. I’m about to order 7’s and from there we might need to consider Depends.

Eating habits? With her delicate fingers, Eliana places one piece of food in her mouth after the other, at a normal, healthy pace. Barry? Words like guzzle and shove are what come to mind. Problem is his hands are so fat, that so much food gets trapped between his fingers which he can’t even get to. We had a one year birthday party for them on Sunday and I gave them each a cupcake. It was the first time I handed them each a whole piece of food to handle themselves. It was like watching two different animals. She pecked at it like a little bird. He took an initial hesitant bite to check it out then picked it up and shoved the whole thing in his mouth like a lion seizing its prey. At one point he even tried to grab some of hers off her high chair.

Barry and Eliana—or Barriana as one of my friends likes to call them—are the example of nature versus nurture. I can vouch for the fact that they’ve been exposed to the same things in utero and out of utero, but their bodies, mannerisms, interests, strengths and personalities are so stereotypically textbook boy and girl. He is always sweating and itching. Her skin is as smooth as butter. She loves her tea set. He only wants to play with trucks. He is about to walk, she is about to be trampled on. Only difference I wouldn’t mind seeing reversed is that she is bald as a bat, and he has more hair than any of my other girls had at 2. Oh well. Hers will hopefully grow, and his can be cut.

6)   The shock has not worn off. As I think about the last thing I’ve learned this year, it is that at some point every single day I am still struck by the fact that there are two, that these two babies were both somehow conceived, developed, born, and are now celebrating the completion of their first year of life. Every morning when I open their door and look at two cribs, each with a baby sitting and waiting for me to get them, I hear those words flash through my head that I heard at my first sonogram—“I think there are two.” 

There is something indescribable about twins—watching the two of them eat side by side, watching the two of them play together and grab each other’s toys, watching them sit together in the back of my bike, listening to them babbling with each other on the monitor, watching them on the swings together. It was a hard year for sure, and I can only imagine how much strength and patience Rob and I are going to need for the next many years, but as this first birthday of theirs comes to a close, I can't help but feel what Frank Sinatra said so simply in his famous song, “It was a very good year.”

Happy birthday Barry and Ellie!