not quite pushing forty

If you ask N how old he is, he'll usually say "two" and hold up three fingers. If you ask him how old daddy is, he'll say "pushing forty!". I'm not quite there yet myself, and so I get a pass for now, but look what Daddy got Mama for her birthday:

I couldn't have picked out more perfect gift myself, so now I'm feeling a little guilty about teaching the boys to say that...



My, but these boys are little buddies to each other these days. I think we're well past the hardest parts of having twins, and onto really experiencing some of the particular joys of having children that grow up in tandem the way twins do. We certainly aren't exempt from dealing with all the lovely and not-so-lovely two year old behaviors, but they are good together and entertain each other a lot, which helps. Things are SO much easier than last summer, when they'd go in opposite directions all the time, didn't really listen yet, and still had to be lifted in and out of everything. Not only do they not need to be carried much, but most of the time they insist that they want to "do it byself!" anyway. O in particular will sometimes attempt a complete do-over if you insult him by trying to do something for him. Yesterday, I absentmindedly scooped him up and put him in his clip-on dining seat. While I was supervising his brother, he got back out, walked backwards out of the kitchen, walked back over to the seat and climbed in. "Do bySELF!" he said, with a grin. Fine by me - he weighs about 33 pounds.

The boys invent all kinds of games together, much of which I don't even understand.They look out for and support each other, getting concerned for example if one boy gets his snack first.



They eat on the same side of the picnic table, leaving the other side empty.



They paint on the same side of the two-sided easel, leaving the other side blank.





When given the choice of holding each other's hands or a parent's hand, they always choose each other.



They'll play with Playdough for a long time, but only if they're playing together and trading tools back and forth. I've tried to get out the Playdough with each of them alone while the other boy napped on in the past two weeks, and neither boy had much interest even though they love being alone with us sometimes.



They look at bugs together.



They have a friendly hug before heading out for a walk in the rain.



They're not as competative as they used to be (for now, anyway), but they enjoy a good doll stroller race. Although N is always in the lead physically (he's faster), O often shows leadership in other ways, and there isn't a clear "leader and follower" with this pair. O is always the first one up a new slide at playgrounds, and he's a bit braver in new situations in general. On the other hand, N is much chattier with new people and wants to know everyone's name. All day long we hear "Whosatt?" and "Whas datt?" The boys fight some, but not terribly much, and they are clearly disturbed and contrite if they make each other cry.

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They even take turns sitting on brother and being sat upon.

Twins are wonderful, especially when they're two!

I have a bunch more pictures to catch up on, so I'll post again in the next few days. It's feast or famine around here I guess. We're staying home for Memorial Day weekend, and on Tuesday, my mom comes for almost a week. She's coming because Jo*el is having kidney stone surgery on Tuesday. It's outpatient, but will require some recovery time.

We're expecting!

NO, not another baby, at least not a human baby. We're expecting hens! We just put in a permit application (which needed to be signed by our neighbors) to have 6 backyard chickens. There are a few hundred other families in this city that also have chickens, so we’re not all that unusual for doing this, but we do have to follow the rules.

Why would we do such a thing? Well, there are several reasons.

• I (Minke) grew up seeing my grandma’s pet chickens when I lived in the Netherlands as a young child. I really enjoyed helping take care of them and eating their eggs. We think No*ah and Olli*e will enjoy it too.
• Even the best organic farm can’t afford to feed their chickens as well as an individual can on good starter and kitchen scraps. Eggs from home-raised chickens just taste better! They have beautiful orange yolks and are much more flavorful.
• Chickens eat insects, such as ticks and mosquitoes.
• Chickens are pretty easy to care for, and not smelly if the coop is kept clean.
  
• Compost for the garden! We have 4 raised vegetable beds that need lots of compost every year.
• Not counting startup costs, it costs about 50 cents a dozen to raise your own backyard organic eggs, about a 2-dollar savings on every dozen. We think we’ll break even in about a year, since we are starting with chicks. This isn’t our primary motivation, but it doesn’t hurt.
• Full-grown young chickens lay 5-7 eggs a week. If we have 6 hens, that’ll be about 35 eggs a week, hopefully enough to share some with family and neighbors. No mail orders, though!
• Did you know that most of the food you get from the grocery store travels over a thousand miles to get to you (if you live here in MN, anyway)? We want to bring our food sources a little closer to home, so that not all our food has to use a bunch of fossil fuels to get to us. We also have a vegetable garden, shop at farmer’s markets and try to buy locally at co-ops, and this is just one more way to add to the habit.
• In some areas of Minn*eapolis and in other cities, chickens have become a fun way for neighbors and their kids to get to know each other. We’d like to welcome neighbors and their kids by to see our chickens and feed them scraps. The boys have lots of little buddies these days, and it’ll be a nice thing to share with them. We might even have the Sunday School class over sometime.

Here’s what we are doing in particular:

• We will NOT be keeping a rooster. Hens aren’t very noisy, but roosters can be a nuisance and aren’t needed for egg production.
• In case you’re wondering, we will only be using the chickens as pets and for eggs. If we need to get rid of a hen, we will take it elsewhere to be butchered.
• The housing setup for the hens will consist of an outdoor “run” and a “hen house” (where the chickens lay eggs and roost at night) inside the garage. (A coop = a run and a hen house)
• Our “run” will be an enclosed 10x10 dog kennel attached to our garage. The kennel will be within our fenced yard, proving extra protection from possible predators. We are lucky enough to have some granite counter “seconds” in our garage that will make a perfect “concrete floor” when placed upside down on the ground. This will make the run easy to clean thoroughly with a hose. Eventually, we will surround the run with lattice to make it more attractive. You can see the waiting kennel panels below, and that's the garage wall the opening will go into. We'll need to build a roof as well.
  

• Our “hen house” will be inside the garage, and accessible from the run through a framed opening from inside the kennel/run. This will make it easy to feed and water the chickens in the winter without standing outside in the cold. The opening will be lockable, and the chickens will be locked up at night. In winter, the hen house will be surrounded by straw bales for insulation.
• We will probably be getting pullots (hens less than a year old).
• Our hens will not be allowed out of the coop unsupervised. They may walk (supervised) in our fenced backyard for a short time on occasion while we clean the coop, and in winter, we plan to allow them some time to stretch their legs in the garage when it’s too cold for them to go into the run for long. Chickens are not great flyers (most can get about 3 feet high), and we will be getting standard, non-flying breeds and clipping a few feathers if necessary to be on the safe side.

We recently took a field trip to Nicoll*et Island to visit a flock that is kept there and do a little research.

After about a minute of terror, the boys had great fun feeding the chickens the arugala and spinach scraps we brought them. The boys also enjoyed walking in the wild part of the island.

All the Dutch people who attended our wedding might remember that the Nicolle*t Island In*n where you stayed was on the other side of this island. can you believe that this beauty exists just across the river from downtown? I love this city.

Now that we have to signatures we need, we can get started. We need to put up a section of privacy fence for the neighbors, attach the kennel to the garage, put down the granite floor, make an opening into the garage, build the hen house (out of scrap wood), and then put everything together before making a field trip to the Farm Store to get supplies and a few hens, hopefully by the end of June. Ste*ve is graciously helping us, and he and Kat*hy will get first dibs on extra eggs. Anyone else is welcome to come help – you don’t want to be like the friends of the Little Red Hen, after all...

Wish us luck!

P.S. If that was an inadequate "No*ah and Oli*ver fix", my apologies. I'll have a post up in the next few days with more pictures of the boys.

Music Time!

This was taken with my mom's camera a month ago. We have "music time" on a regular basis, and the boys really enjoy it.

so much fun and practically free

I don't think I ever could have predicted how much fun could be had from a $2.68 set of 3 plastic funnels from the hardware store.


The boys like to make bubble volcanoes.




They also like to put the "hats" on me, themselves, and each other and say "happy birthday!"


We've been going to Lake Hi*awatha Park quite a bit since the weather improved. It's just a 15 minute walk from our house. It has a great playground with sections for all ages, a park building with classes and programs, a kiddie pool, and a beach. Two summers ago, I walked wistfully by with my babies, often running the stroller over the grass so the movement would keep my boys asleep. Last summer I anxiously followed my newly mobile boys around on the playground, and now we are all over the park. Someday, we'll probably even use the ball fields for t-ball. I'm sure we'll be at the kiddie pool a lot this summer. The beach has been a big hit lately.












On the way home, we checked out the ants on the sidewalk. No*ah is rather afraid of insects (Me*agan said he climbed into her arms like a monkey and said "let me hold you!" when he saw a bug in the sidewalk the other day), but he was pretty interested from the safety of the stroller. Speaking of strollers, we've been taking the train to church on Sundays. It's about a 35 minutes stroller ride each way, but the boys have done very well so far. They are at a very friendly stage, waving at everyone, and singing the "cleanup song" for people who are raking or picking up leaves. I pack a lunch for the way home and they eat their sanwiches in the stroller so they can go right down for their nap when we get home. It's a little messy, but it works. They also like to look at books while riding along, sometimes trading wordlessly when they've tired of the ones they're holding.


Snacktime on the front steps. The boys like to watch the neighbors.


A moment of affection between brothers.


Aw, shucks, bruddah.

Jo*el and Meag*an took care of the boys for a bit from this past Friday afternoon until Saturday evening. I went to a hermitage an hour a way overnight, mostly to spend a little time in solitude. There are 24 one-room cabin hermitages at Pacem in Ter*ris, all there for silent retreats of up to 8 days. Their mission says "we seek to provide a simple and restful environment where the faithful can repsond to God's call to "Be still and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:11) After 24 hours of prayer, reading, writing, and sleep, I was greatly refreshed and glad to see my family again, though next time, I'd love to stay for two nights. I get a lot out of alone time, and don't get much of it these days. My life is full, busy, rich, fun, and noisy. What a blessing this time was for me!

When I got to the hermitage, I had a meal with the staff at the main house. Of the 12 other guests at the table, 2 others were also mothers of twins! We joked that we didn't need to explain our need for a little quiet and rest. One had 15 month old twins and two other children - I can't imagine what that must be like. At the hermitage, I was able to sleep from about 10:30 until 9 the next morning. I hiked for over an hour in the rain, then came back into my little cabin for some tea just in time to watch the hail come down. I know that sounds awful, but truly, it was perfect.

This is what my cabin looked like:



In addition to what you see here, there is just a simple twin bed (wih no twins in it!) and on the side of the cabin there is a screen porch with an Adirondack chair. When "hermits" leave, they prepare the cabin for the next hermit to benefit from. What a nice idea - that's not something we humans are terribly good at, I think to myself on this Earth Day.

I could've spent the whole time at Pacem just watching the deer and the birds out the big picture window.

Easter

This was No*ah's reaction when we told him his cousin Zo*e had been born. He went and got two of his "babies" and carried them around for a long while. I think that to him, babies are supposed to come in pairs. A couple of times when reading a book about a boy, he's asked "where the brother is".


This is Oliv*er noticing with delight that he gets to eat "brokkwi" for lunch. He so loves it that sometimes he'll pick the cheese off of it before cramming it into his mouth.


No, No*ah isn't terribly ill, he just also enjoys the "green trees".


If you look closely, there is a rather dramatic difference in eating style between our boys.


No*ah does need to put his knee back down where it belongs, but at least most of his breakfast actually made it into his mouth and not onto his lap. He's always been a fastidious eater, also packing away roughly 20 or so percent more food than his brother and still ending up about 4 pounds lighter. I think he just burns more energy.


On Easter, about an hour before we left for Jo*el's parents' house for dinner, No*ah saw the strip of sunlight on the kitchen floor and said "makes a road!" It was, in his eyes, perfect for his little cars.


That attracted Oli*ver, but the road disappeared when he crouched over it with one of his cars.


Both boys found this very confusing...


At Jo*el's suggestion, they both scooted over to the other side and proceeded to drive their cars up and down.


When they got bored of that, they sat in the booster seats that were waiting to be put in the car and demanded supper. All day long they invent games together like this. How do people ever keep singletons with no siblings yet entertained?


Maybe they eventually have to come over and play with their cousins!

This past weekend, Jo*el had some extra time off, so we packed it in as a family. On Saturday, the boys got haircuts (no tears, but only Oli*ver wanted a lollipop), then we went and got our weekly stash of board books from the library, and then we went to Vina in St. Pa*ul to eat. The boys were very good and we all enjoyed it. Going out to eat together isn't something we've done a ton of until recently. It's not always easy, or at least terribly enjoyable, to have a 1:1 ratio in that type of situation, but it is getting so much easier, so it was a nice feeling to just go out to eat like that. We also can't expect them to learn to behave in a restaurant if they never eat in one.

On Easter morning, I took the boys with me to Fa*ith Church, and Jo*el played at Bryn Maw*r Church. Every year, it never fails to amaze me that even as we get all spiffed up for Easter and show up in our finest clothes and freshly scrubbed faces to hear the Good News, the story we hear on Easter is of Christ first revealing his resurrection to a lowly woman, revealing to us most clearly that all are welcome at His table.

We had a very relaxing and delicious meal at Kath*y and Ste*ve's together with Mar*k and Meag*an that evening. We hope you all had as enjoyable and meaningful an Easter together as we did.