Except you are also probably saying to yourself “Right, like anyone’s waist looks like that after they gave birth to twins.”

They usually only do this when it is the last sound in a word, so stuff becomes stuth, or enough becomes enuth.

It is almost some sort of reversed cockney, but I honestly don’t believe that my five year olds are clever enough to invent their own dialect.

I don’t think they even know what a dialect is. I’m almost certain that they don’t know what Cockney sounds like.

I sort of want to ask their kindergarten teachers if the other kids are doing this too but I don’t want to sound like a lunatic.

I also don’t want to be one of those parents that pester the teachers. I’m sure we will have issues that require me to contact them for a better reason than this.

* * *
The irony is that neither can read or write very well, but they are already using social media of sorts. They are calling it “Chat Room”. The apples don’t fall very far from the tree.

No really, make mine a double.

And if you need one of these you should talk to my friend Kristen.

***

Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.

Sure, all of your children are starting Kindergarten next week, but that is what happens when you have twins. Just wait until they go away to college on the same day. Then you can freak out. For now they are just going to be up the street at a very well regarded school.

You met both of their teachers and they are delightful women. You know that your county has some of the best public schools in the country and your elementary school is one of the best in the county.

I mean, isn’t that why you guys moved into that house in the first place? Because let’s be honest, it wasn’t about the closet space, that is for sure.

Think of all the free time you will have! I know you have been working from home for over a year now, and I know that you have been doing most of your work in the middle of the night since the twins have been home all summer. Aren’t you glad you will be able to work during the day? Think about it – writing with no interruptions. Well, no interruptions except for Twitter and facebook and IMs and phone calls. You might even have time to work out!

Don’t forget about grocery shopping all alone! It will be like a treat after five and a half years of shopping with two little monkeys hanging off of you and begging for a cookie from the bakery. You will be able to shop in half the time. You can even get a cup of coffee from the Starbucks right there in the store. Doesn’t that sound lovely?

This is going to be great. Don’t you worry your pretty little head over it. You will be so busy that you won’t even have a chance to miss them. You won’t even have time to sad that your babies are growing up way too fast, or that you don’t know their new friends, or that you are all done having children and you will never have a sweet little two year old to take a nap with and smell his or her tiny little head.

They aren’t babies anymore. They are ready for this.

This is going to be cake. You will just put them on the bus Tuesday morning and if you feel sad all you have to do is take a shower all by yourself without interruption and you will feel much better about the situation. And 3:30 is going to come a lot earlier than you think – especially now that people are going to think you have enough time to keep your house clean.

I’ve been thinking about it because my blog friend Nora is due to have her twins any minute now.

I am supposed to be giving her advice on children’s books for her blog shower (my vote is for anything written by Mo Willems) but since until they turned two The Goon Squad mostly tried to eat books I don’t have a lot of information on good books for babies.

What I do have is experience with having newborn twins.

I freely admit that the first few months are a blur, but something a father of twins told me when my babies were seven weeks old changed my life.

He said “It gets better at three months.”

I am not going to lie to you, Nora. The first three months with more than one newborn is hard. You won’t sleep. You will think you are going to die. But you won’t die, and at three months it gets easier.

It gets easier again at six months.

Then at some point they start keeping each other occupied and you get to do the dishes, or blog or whatever you do.

And it is good.

And your babies won’t go to preschool alone. They will have each other. The same goes for kindergarten.

If they are freaks like my kids, they will entertain you with the stories of the things they did together while they were in your uterus… like playing tic tac toe or having a dance party.

Okay, that last part is probably just my kids, but still, they will have a special bond. They will not have any concept of personal space with each other and you will be able to spot twins this way on the beach or in the mall even if they aren’t identical.

Other advice – join a twins club, or find other bloggers that are having twins around the same age. They will keep you sane. (I couldn’t have done it without Becky and Bridgette.)

And when you are struggling to get two car carriers out of car, and trying to figure out how the hell you are supposed to grocery shop with two infants and you haven’t slept for more than three hours in a night all week, and someone says to you “Oh, you did it the easy way” you are going to want to tell them to fuck off, but you shouldn’t.

Because they are just jealous.

Not everyone gets to have twins.

It is a challenge and it is a blessing.

Welcome to the club.

ps – And I lied. I do have a picture book that the kids loved. Hug.

They were born almost six weeks early. Ian was only six pounds, eight ounces but next to Claudia he looked huge. She wasn’t even five pounds when she was born. She was so tiny I was afraid to change her diaper. I thought I might break her frail little leg. This picture was taken much closer to their due date.

Growing up, I always thought it was weird when my mom would talk about what she was going X-number of years ago the night before my birthday.

But now I get it.

For example, five years ago, right this minute, I was getting a mag wash to stop the labor.

Obviously, it didn’t work.

It was one of the scariest days of my entire life.

But everything turned out okay. We got lucky, after a very scary week everyone came home healthy.

And now they are ready to go to kindergarten.

And to my friends that are pregnant for the first time, I know it is scary, but it was worth all of it. It was worth spending six weeks in the hospital. It was worth not sleeping for a few months. It is worth the stretch marks.

And hopefully their joy will make it worth throwing a birthday party this weekend where we invited every kid in both of their classes.

((shudder))

ps – Does anybody know where I can get a Bakugan cake?

***

Ian threw up in my bed last night.

Thrice.

Eventually we were on our last set of clean sheets (I won’t even go into what happened in his bed) and he and I came out to the living room and slept on the floor.

I gave up got creative and gave him a bowl to throw up in when it became evident that he wasn’t ever going to make it to the bathroom in time.

To make a long and messy story short, I got about three nonconsecutive hours of sleep last night and odds are pretty good that this whole house smells like puke.

Here comes the strange part. It makes me a little bit nostalgic. Ian had reflux when he was a baby. I forgot that for eight months is was standard procedure to wash my sheets every single day because there was a 99.9% chance that he would ralph in my bed.

As I was throwing a load of soiled bedding into my washing machine in a sleep deprived haze I think I actually smiled.

Last night sucked but it was way easier than having infant twins. Sorry Nora. You will never hear me saying that I want to revisit that time in my life. Having a baby with colic and another baby with reflux was maddening, yet somehow we lived through it and now we have these amazing little people that only vomit when they are sick and only scream all night if I really piss them off. Plus, even though it was a huge pain in the ass, twin babies are very cute and at some point (I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I assure you it was after six weeks and before one year) they were even kind of fun, and at some much later point they started sleeping through the night.

So yeah, being puked on sucks but he also still cuddles up with me when he doesn’t feel well and that won’t last forever either and so for now I am willing to take the trade-off.

You normally only read stuff like this in trashy novels, but this was on CNN.

They didn’t know they were related. They really didn’t know that they were twins.

These two were seperated at birth, adopted by different families and ended up getting married.