I Scream...You Scream...They Finally Scream Now, Too

When the girls were 15 months old, they sampled ice cream for the first time. Having had sweets only a couple of times prior to that…and I don’t think ever having had anything very cold…they weren’t big fans.

It did yield one of my favorite pictures, though. I love how Baby A is wincing, and B is squealing for her turn, certainly not knowing what's ahead.

It actually took a couple of months for the girls to warm up to the idea of sweet + cold. It kinda bothered me for a bit, or at least made me wonder if there hadn’t been some type of mix-up somewhere…Mommy and Daddy are both big ice cream aficionados, and the thought of the girls not following in our sugar-and-cream-laden footsteps just didn’t seem right.

I diligently tried them again with ice cream every week or so until…finally…one day it clicked.

Hey, this stuff is good!

My “hard work” has certainly paid off, as these days, I think the girls would eat ice cream three times a day if I’d let them. We don’t actually eat ice cream more than about once a week, but it’s such a nice, fun family treat.

We have a local dairy barn that makes The Best Ice Cream (and to-die-for chocolate chip cookies…but that’s another post). There’s something picturesque about taking the girls out in the country for “real” ice cream…just steps away from the cows in the pasture.

They also sell ice cream from the dairy barn at a little coffee shop on our downtown square. We sometimes get a scoop there to share on a bench in front of the fountain. The girls are all about that…ice cream + a huge fountain + the likelihood of seeing someone walking a dog…a little girl’s dream, for sure!

We more often frequent a little yogurt shop that opened about a year ago. It’s not quite as picturesque, but it’s locally-owned, and the girls feel right at home there.

Over the past couple of months, I finally got brave enough to let them hold their own cups of yogurt…which means I have both my hands to enjoy my own treat! You can see they take their frozen-dessert-eating pretty seriously!

The next frontier? The girls’ first ice cream cone. And I’m gonna gather up the courage to let them do it.

July is National Ice Cream month. It seems un-American not to honor the “holiday” in some meaningful way, right?

[Linking up with Multiples & More's Question of the Week!]

When Does It Get Easier???

I don’t think I’ll ever forget slipping away for a quick lunch with one of my best friends when the girls were about six weeks old. Over chips and dip and salsa I just cried to her…I was really struggling with breastfeeding, and bottle-feeding, and formula, and rice cereal…I remember feeling so helpless, like no one could give me an answer to help me navigate my way.

She listened intently, nodding her head and telling me she understood my frustration. But she didn’t have any answers for me. Maybe because I was so hopeful she’d at least have some suggestions, her “I know you’ll figure it out,” frankly felt a bit unsympathetic.

She moved on to describe a challenge she was facing, whether to let her then-nine-year old son give a Valentine’s Day card to a girl that said, “I like you.”

Her story made me laugh, and got my mind off of my woes for a few minutes, but I couldn’t help feeling it was insignificant to something so critical as providing sustenance to my children.

Several months later, I revisited that lunchtime conversation in my mind (and later laughed about it with my girlfriend). It occurred to me that she may have been ultimately saying something I’m coming to realize myself…

“It doesn’t get easier; it just gets different.”

The first couple of months after the girls were born were hands down the hardest months of my life.

I was trying so hard to figure out so many things, things I had no experience with…and times two, at that. At the time I didn’t personally know anyone who had twins, so I found myself feeling doubly alone [no pun intended].

Things started to level out a bit when the girls were about three months old and started sleeping through the night. That’s definitely when “things got easier”. I’ve since said a hundred times, I can do ANYTHING on a full night’s sleep!!!

Twenty-seven months in, I can say that often, when something gets easier, a new something rears its head as a challenge.

The girls began to take sippy cups = YEA! But they started to walk (also YEA!), but that meant I had two babies running in different directions.

The girls learned to feed themselves = YEA! But that meant I lost control of the spoon and found myself with much more mess to clean.

The girls are talking more and more = YEA! But they’re also challenging their mama’s authority from time to time.

While many things have gotten easier, it seems the challenges are often more complex…leaving me to occasionally think those newborn diaper blow-outs weren’t so bad!

Yes, it’s always something…and my guess is I’ll feel that way for the rest of the girls’ lives to some degree…

…but that’s what keeps me gainfully employed as a parent, and that’s just what I signed up for!

These are a Few of Our Favorite Books...

The Question of the Week on Multiples and More is about your children’s favorite books.

I’ve blogged several times about the evolution of our bookshelf…I’ve learned that what holds the girls’ attention definitely changes over time...and sometimes it takes some experimentation to figure out what volumes to dust off next.

When the girls were infants, for example, they sat through at least a couple of John Grisham books – anything to fill the hours of “awake time” every day.

And then at some point I found myself buying time with Cheerios while the girls sat in their highchairs and I read the likes of Alice in Wonderland.

During the girls’ entire first year, and through the first couple of months of their second year, my reading fell on seemingly deaf ears. I persevered, hoping that hearing my animated voice, at least on some level, was beneficial for the girls.

It was such a feeling of joy when I finally discovered the girls loved picture books, when they were 13 or 14 months old. That was about the time that they really started adding to their vocabulary of baby sign language. And although I wouldn’t call it “reading” per se, they loved to look through books and point out different animals and objects.

Over a period of three or four months, it was so amazing when those picture books very gradually turned into short stories. At last, we were really “reading” again…and this time, the girls actually seemed to be following me…without being tied down and bribed with breakfast cereal!

These days, the girls’ attention spans continue to increase (relatively speaking, and if I time it right!). We still scan through some books quickly, looking at pictures, but more and more they’re content to listen to longer story lines. I’m loving it!

Curious George is a huge favorite with the girls right now. We have two big compilations of adventures, each with eight or 10 stories, and they also have several small board books.

The girls also love Mother Goose rhymes. With very little prompting, they can probably recite 10 or 12 already!

We also enjoy our fair share of alphabet books. I know it’s just memorization at this point, but the girls can name at least five words that start with every letter of the alphabet (although sometimes I have to break into my sing-song animated voice to prompt them, “Big O, little o, what begins with O?” …and they sometimes confuse owls with ostriches, but I think they’ll figure it out in due time).

At bedtime, we have a handful of favorites that we cycle through each week…Guess How Much I Love You, Have You Seen My Purr?, Love Is a Handful of Honey, Bunny’s Noisy Book. There are many nights when the girls seem to love the familiar cadence, knowing every word on the page. Other nights, when they’re a bit more restless, I can challenge them to find something new on every page, and we can usually spot a grasshopper or mushroom or something we haven’t discussed before.

I still have all my books from when I was a child. I’ve shared them only sparingly over the past year, though, since the girls can reach out and touch as quick as lightning strikes.

I am looking forward to sharing more of the same stories my mom read me – especially the Raggedy Ann and Andy series, and the many adventures of Uncle Wiggly, which really stand out in my childhood memory bank.

I’m trying to be patient, though, both for the girls’ attention spans to increase, as well as for those roving hands to stay more securely tucked in their laps.

Date Night Ideas

The first thing that pops into my head at the mention of “date night” is a baby sitter (or house sitter, in our case, after the girlies are in bed), wearing some grown-up clothes (i.e. changing out of my yoga pants), and a nice dinner out.

Sure, that may be an “ideal” date night, but I discovered within the last year that’s not the only way to have one.

Although we didn’t call them such at the time, Hubby and I started having date nights at home back during football season. Whereas we missed most of Alabama’s games in 2009, when the girls were infants, we were more organized this past season. We recorded the games to watch in their entirety after the girls were sleeping soundly upstairs.

Of course that meant I had to limit my online exposure during the day, lest I accidentally see a comment on Facebook that would clue me in to the outcome of the game. Oh, and if you called our house during the day, I would say, “If you know the score of the Alabama game, please don’t say anything – we’re taping it!”…before I even said “hello”.

Anyhoo, for each of the games we taped, I spent the days ahead preparing our game day feast.

Although I generally have a strong aversion to the mere mention of the word “Velveeta” (or more generically, "processed cheese spread"), I put my heebie-jeebies aside and made traditional Rotel dip, served with chips and homemade hot wings, for the season opener, for example.

One game we did a Mexican theme with 9-layer bean dip, black bean chili, and homemade guacamole. One week we opted for a more "sophisticated” menu, featuring stuffed mushrooms and bleu cheese-bacon dip.

We would dress in our crimson finest and [quietly] cheer on the Tide [albeit on a six-hour delay].

Those were fun nights…while we weren’t tailgating on the Quad and cheering on the Tide with 100,000 of our closest friends, we were still doing something we’d always loved to do. We were enjoying one of our long-favorite pastimes, and we were enjoying each other.

And as much fun as we had on those nights, another big part of the fun was the planning and the anticipation of it in the days leading up to our “date”.

I love reading about Megan’s Date Night Challenges. Taking some inspiration from her and a handful of others, here are some more at-home date night ideas that I compiled for our most recent Mothers of Multiples meeting…

• Throwback night…what did you do for fun before kiddos? New Orleans was “our place”…so we might whip up some jambalaya and some bread pudding to a soundtrack of zydeco music, and look through our picture album after dinner

• Make S’mores and set up “camp” on the living room floor.

• Create a picnic on the back porch, complete with a blanket and basket.

• Game night! Up the ante by saying the loser has to give the winner a back massage, or let him/her sleep in the following morning!

• Turn off the TV, put on some music, and linger over a candlelit dinner (even if it’s not fancy). Most of us don’t realize how quickly we have to eat most of our meals while we’re juggling the needs of our kiddos!

• Enjoy breakfast in bed (for supper). You may not be able to swing B-in-B in the mornings, but eggs and bacon and pancakes (and maybe a mimosa) taste pretty good any time of day!

• Rent a movie, pop some buttery popcorn, and indulge in your favorite movie candy.

• Set up a super-duper ice cream sundae station (and don’t forget the whipped cream!).

• Test out some aphrodisiac foods…whether they “work” or not, you can have fun trying them out!

You can even do these on a budget, too. And don’t let a $10 limit cramp your style…let it inspire you to be creative. For me, the planning (and the anticipation) is half the fun!