Christmas 2007

We had a really nice Christmas in Minn*apolis this year. J’s family opens gifts and shares a meal on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve morning, I left the boys with J and went over to his parents' house to do some major cooking. It was very relaxing to spend several hours cooking without interruption. We enjoyed a huge, amazing meal together, and opened gifts for the kids afterwards. J and I spent some time beforehand rehearsing the "giving" part as well as the getting, and they were pretty good about saying thank you.

(I totally stole the picture above from cousin Au*gust's blog) Auntie Mea*gan made the boys beautiful kid-sized aprons. They do a lot of cooking with us, and they're always wanting to wear mine. Here they're unpacking some train table additions.

I was glad that they were so grateful for their wonderful gifts, because they’re capable of being brutally honest by now. The other day, N said, “Oh! We read this book at MOPS!” I said, “You did?”, and he answered, “I didn’t like it then either.” Well….

It was so nice to do everything in one place and not have too much running around. There were four kids under age three, and everyone stayed happy. The meal was amazing. I made three dishes and everyone else brought something, and there were so many delicious dishes on the table that not everyone even got to try them all. Before dinner, we put together some bags of groceries for the food shelf and J said a prayer for all the folks who don’t have enough when we have so much abundance. The boys sat pretty long and happily to eat, though on opposite ends of a table that was as full of people as it could possible be. After dinner, the boys got quite a pile of gifts, and all the gifts were thoughtful and useful. Floor puzzles are very popular right now and they now have 4, and they received some nice train set additions and books. J had to go and play piano at church for the candlelight service at 7:30, and I went home to put a couple of very content, very exhausted boys to bed.

On the way into the house, the three of us stopped and stood in the front yard to look at the just-past-full moon, which had a beautiful ring around it. It was completely silent except for our breathing, there were Christmas lights on all up and down the block, smoke coming out of the chimneys, everything covered with thick, white snow. After I got their pajamas on, we read three nativity story books before bed, and from what he was saying, I think that O seemed to really kind of get it for the first time – at least that Jesus was the Son of God and that he grew up and did amazing things. He said, “That Baby Jesus is gonna get bigger and growed-up and he’s gonna walk on the water and he’s gonna give everybody bread and fishes!”

The next morning, we had a nice breakfast together, and opened a few gifts. J and I didn’t get them much, and besides a few books, the biggest hit was a pair of $3 mini Magna Doodles for in the car. J and I both took boys shopping for each other the week before so that the boys wouldn’t think Christmas was only about getting stuff, and that worked surprisingly well. After breakfast, we played with some of their new toys. They love all their new puzzles, and J and the boys have been putting them together every single day.

Then we took a walk in the neighborhood.

A snow angel:

The boys have been playing "David and Goliath" lately. N pretends to throw a rock at O, and O falls over backward, kind of like the Sunday School version of "Ring Around the Rosy".

Here they are acting out a scene from one of their very favorite books, "A Day On the Farm". O is the pig, and N is scratching his back with a stick. O got tired of this game pretty quickly.

These are real Minnesota boys: they don't seem to mind the cold a bit as long as they're well bundled. That evening, our good friend D came by and we lit the fire and had a nice dinner of leftovers together.

Here they are in their new Christmas pajamas.

Happy New Year!

catch up

Happy New Year!

I'm still catching up on photos, so here are few more from my mom's visit.

The Children's Museum.


What are our favorite animals at the zoo? Elephants? Nope. Monkeys? Nope. Ladybugs!



Putting up the tree.



Making pine cones covered with sunflower seed butter and rolled in birdseed to hang in our front yard tree. Did you know that the origin of Christmas trees had nothing to do with Christmas? People in parts of Europe used to hang pine cones like ours, dried fruit garlands and the like in evergreens just before the winter solstice to help the animals get through the darkest part of winter, kind of like we have birdfeeders today. Maybe next year' we'll do cranberry garlands too. I am always so happy when the days start getting longer again.

mothering in the 21st Century

Anyone who has had kids knows they change just about everything. Sure, we tell ourselves this and that won't change, we'll still be the same people, will still relate just fine to our friends without kids, but in my experience that isn't as true as we might like it to be. Maybe we just need to believe that it's true in order to take the leap. In my 3rd year of being a mom to N and O, I'm much happier about what that looks like than ever before. I've always loved my boys to pieces, but I'm now also more happy with the life that goes along with being their mom. The first year was exhausting and a bit lonely. I didn't have a lot of mom friends yet, and getting out of the house at all was hard, and I was SO tired, mostly due to the insomnia that lasted until the boys were about 20 months old. Our Early Childhood program, getting to know the women from church better, joining a writing group, and some online connections changed all that, and I have lots of friends with kids now, lots of women to see in real life who totally get what it's like. I'm rarely short of an option for a play date or outing. I've found my tribe, and it is such a relief and joy to have a peer group.

I wonder sometimes what my parents' generation makes of the way we do things, with all our classes, and books, and e-mail lists. I think that one of the best things about our very wired generation of parents is the knowledge that we are not alone if we find some things frustrating. We're informed, to be sure, but I will say that all that information can be overwhelming too. The other part of being a mom that's gotten easier for me over the last year of so is just getting it through my head that there's more than one legitimate way to do things, and that whatever answer I find to whatever issue I'm trying to deal with is just the one that happens to be right for me, my child, and my family. At some point, you just have to say, the heck with this or that "system", I need to parent the kid I have and listen to some of my own instincts and common sense. No one book has a perfect system for our particular family - but books can have some great nuggets that expand my toolbox a bit, and that's pretty much how I approach them. There's a lot of peer judgment among today's mother's though, perhaps because finding that "answer" can be such hard-won knowledge. It is sometimes a real blessing to be a mother of twins: the "answer" is rarely the same for both boys, and it's been pretty obvious from the beginning that we can take neither all the credit or all the blame for the wonderful or difficult things they do.

My generation doesn't really have the coffee klatches of previous generations, or the knowledge that many or even most of the moms on the block are home all day too. We are more mobile, and people often only live here for a few years. We are told that if we work, we're letting someone else raise our kids, but that if we don't we're letting our brains rot and setting a poor example for our kids. We are told from the moment we're pregnant that we're not only responsible for our children's basic needs, but also the intricacies of their social and brain development. We aren't just raising kids, we are, as a recent headlines stated "optimizing their development". Playpens and the like are frowned upon - we are expected to have pretty much constant meaningful interaction with our kids, and have lots of books at our disposal telling us exactly which games to play at which month to encourage a specific skill. Our Early Childhood teacher shared a study that showed that stay at home moms in the 70's and full-time working moms in the 90's spent almost the same amount of time daily actually directly interacting with their kids. We're informed, but we're also under a lot of pressure. I have a feeling that the generations before mine were a little better at just letting kids be part of life - being able to say "go play" and getting on with the needs of the household, or an adult conversation. I know that when I was a kid, I was also allowed to roam the neighborhood, something few of today's kids are allowed to do. Today's American kids grow up under an adult microscope, with a whole lot of structured activity or indoor screen time. I suspect that we're losing a lot by not letting kids have that unstructured outdoor time to explore the geography of both the neighborhood and of their own imaginations.

I'd be interested to see how all this works in Holland, or, if you're old enough to be my mother, how it worked for you. Were the early childhood years lonely? Did you obsess over the choices you made like this generation (at least this generation of middle-class mothers) does? Who did you go to when you had questions about discipline, or health, or sleep?

If you're interested in another take on what it's like to be a mom in early 21st century America, you can go here for an article I really enjoyed.

Christmas pictures coming soon.

bellybuttons

I took the boys to the zoo this morning, and we had a really wonderful time. They walked around holding hands, the bathroom breaks were easy, and they were full of smiles. N kept saying, "This is my brother!" to anyone who made eye contact with him. It is amazing how different one week from the next can be at this age. Last week, and the week before that, the boys were quite moody and difficult a lot of the time, though N more than O. Both J and I were kind of pulling our hair out, and it was very nice for us that Omie was around during part of that. This week, they've been just great: really happy, playing well on their own and together, fairly cooperative, excited about Christmas. This week the boys started giving their evaluation of things more regularly, saying things like, "I like the zoo a lot!", or, "I really like this food!" N continues to take me more literally than I intend. I joked that I was unbuttoning his flannel shirt all the way down to his bellybutton, and he backed away and said, "Mama! Don't unbutton my bellybutton! My smoothie will come out and fall aaaaalll over the rug!"


Some people ask if they fight much. About 6 months ago they fought a lot more than they do now. They have a bad day together every now and then, and can occasionally hurt each other's feelings, but they really don't fight much at all. Their tendency to get each other wound up is a MUCH bigger problem than fighting is. N has a tendency to be a bit bossy with O, and we try to help O out by giving him some words he can use to stick up for himself, but often they just work that out best on their own. It takes two to tango, as they say, and I think that O sometimes kind of prefers that N is in charge of some of the decision-making. N seems to care much more about making choices than O does right now. He's more concerned with doing things in the exact way and order he prefers.


Earlier this week, the boys and I went to Tar*get to buy daddy's Christmas present (they picked it out, with a little guidance). Today, Jo*el took N to buy one for me, and O and I played at a coffee shop (note to my Dutch readers: they actually serve mostly coffee in our coffee shops) for a bit. Then we went home, lit a fire, spread a table cloth on the floor, and had a picnic dinner in the living room. (Myra: see how we're putting the keepsake boxes to good use?)

O now has a twice daily appointment with the nebulizer, and we're continuing to see a big difference in him. We have somewhat mixed emotions about this development. When we agreed to this course of treatment, we just hoped that a preventative medication would keep him off the harsher drugs and avoid the visits to Urgent Care and future overnight hospital stays.

Since O was about 15 months old, I’ve had a nagging feeling about his gross motor skills. He walked soon enough, but awkwardly, and his balance wasn’t great even for a toddler, though he could scale playground equipment (and anything else) with an agility and determinedness that scares me even now. His skills seemed so uneven to me. He didn’t really quite run until he was over two, and even then, it seemed to be with great effort at actually lifting all the appropriate limbs in the air at once. He was evaluated for a gross motor delay at 22 months, and he passed, but not by much, and all the things he scores low on were the kinds of things that required sustained stamina to master. I've tried really hard not to worry, and I really don't care all that much if the boys are great at sports, but as I watched O’s uneven skills develop, watched him struggle to run and ask to sit a while as we went for hikes and his brother ran in impatient circles around him, I have continued to worry.

He’s been on the new meds for a little over a month, and the cough that lingered far too long is gone. A few weeks ago, I also started to notice other changes, a lightness in his body that I’ve never seen before. He’s really running, and getting real air underneath him as he moves, his face full of the joy of movement for the first time. He’s got more sustained energy, the kind with stamina and not just physical strength. His newly official diagnosis of asthma has been with him more severely and for longer than we’d known. All those things that worried me are sorting themselves out before our eyes, as air rushes in and comes right back out in the fairly effortless rhythm it ought to be. Asthma can be tough to diagnose in toddlers, and there isn't really anything anyone could have done differently. It makes me sad that he's clearly not been breathing as well as he could for some time now, but mostly, I am happy the kid can finally breathe, and we are still hopeful that he’ll grow out of it yet. J and I are filled with joy when we see him running down the sidewalk neck-and-neck with his brother, and I think I've already got everything I could ever want for Christmas.

fingerlings

Tonight, we ate potatoes, green beans, and salmon for dinner, and as I loaded up everyone's plates, I mentioned that these were "fingerling potatoes". N looked up at me with his big blue eyes wide open and a scared look on his face. He said, "These are somebody's fingers?"

I was able to reassure him, but he insisted on picking off the skins, and he looked nervous again when I referred to them as skins. I talked about different vegetables having skins and said "The skins taste good, and they're healthy". N tried them and said, "Actually*, they taste like very fancy paper!"

O said, "They taste like socks."

*his latest favorite turn of phrase, along with "Oh! But I thought....." and "I never seen that before!"

Omie was here!

As I mentioned earlier, my mom was just here for a nice visit. The week before she came, O said, "Jesus is coming and Omie is coming, but they are not coming together!"



Here she is sharing her cappuccino foam with the boys. I took N to this same coffeeshop a week later, and he said, "I am missing Omie a little bit." I got a steamed almond milk with froth to make him feel better.


The four of us got a Christmas tree that same morning at Mother Ea*rth Gardens, my favorite nursery. It was bitterly cold, but the boys don't seem to mind cold weather much this year, which has been nice.



Eating popcorn while we trim the tree. It's tied to the wall and we have mostly very inexpensive and non-glass ornaments on it this year, but it's been just fine, and after a Christmas in the hospital followed by 2 years of tabletop trees, we love having a real tree again. We even used the fireplace yesterday.



My mom showed up with some Dutch treats. My own Oma sent along a traditional Dutch apron for me and 2 traditional shirts and scarves for the boys. the boys received some very cute Sinterklaas puppets from a family friend, and J received "clog" slippers made out of foam that look just like the real thing from a short distance. Thank you, Maril*ou, Omie and Oma!



Omie also gave the boys the Christmas present from she and Opa. It was nice that they got it closer to Sinterklaas (Dutch St. Nickolas Day) so they won't be as overwhelmed with gifts then. They received two additions to their train table. I found N sleeping in bed with one of them the other day. the next night, I checked on him at about 11PM and found him sleeping inside his toy chest on top of about 10 stuffed animals.





I'm still behind on lots of things after the challenging month we had, so I'll be lucky if we get out a New Year's card this year, but I'm fairly at peace with that. I think this is our year of the simple Christmas, simple as in not spending so much, not saying yes to everything, not rushing around, and not feeling guilty about not running ourselves ragged in order to celebrate the birth of Christ. Quite honestly, so far this Advent season feels much closer to just right than it has in years.

more link love

Well, my goodness, the family and friend blogs are everywhere! My sister-in-law Jenn*fer and and her husband Dav*e have decided to join the party, and you can find the link to the right. They have some terribly cute pictures of a very smiley Zo*e on there.

My mom was just here for a nice visit with her grandsons, and when I get those pictures, I'll write more about that, but here are a few from earlier.

No*ah cutting up a banana and distributing the pieces to his and Ollie's bowls of oatmeal. He can be very precise and meticulous, and lately, a lot of transitions are difficult because of his drive to have things "just so" before he leaves. The good part is, I think he's pretty orderly by nature. Both boys are now in beds, and mostly going to bed and sleeping in them. We still have our moments, though, such as recently, when I heard O yell "I'm cold" on the monitor, and went up to find him completely naked. N can usually be found sleeping in a bed full of trains and books, and when we open the door in the morning, he's often sitting up in bed, leafing through a book with a stack beside him.


The girls are cozy in their garage coop with a heat lamp at night, and I put plastic sheeting on the run to keep out the worst of the wind and snow. They're still laying faithfully during these short days, so we should have eggs through the winter.


N dresses himself. Usually, his underpants actually end up on his bottom, and both boys are getting pretty good at dressing and undressing, but who can blame them if they get creative now and then?


O has an official asthma diagnosis and is now on a preventative medicine twice daily. The good news is that he seems more energetic in a good way. I suspect that he wasn't breathing quite as well as he could even when he wasn't exactly wheezing, because he's running better and is better able to keep up with his brother all of a sudden. We still really hope he outgrows it within a few years.


Look at him blow out that Christmas candle!


Can you tell that their back molars are coming in? I think maybe all four of Ka*thy's grandkids are teething.


More holiday pictures soon, but here the boys are very excited about the lights in the tree in the front yard.

link love

Just a quick post - Emil*y (Jo*el's sister for the few who may not know that) has decided to join the blogosphere to keep us all updated on what three-month-old Aug*ust is up to. You can find the link in the column to the right. I also linked to a few of you who read this and also have blogs. I assume from past interactions and/or comments here that this is OK, but please correct me if it isn't! I generally don't encourage linking to this blog if a blog has a readership that isn't limited to friends and family, so I get it if you have a specific preference.

Anyway, now I feel like some kind of blog matchmaker, but in a good way. I'll post again when I get some decent pics downloaded.

for the Americans

I'm still a Dutch citizen, so I can't vote in U.S. elections, but I'm very interested in politics, and I'm anxiously observing the forming of the presidential slate. I'm trying not to make this blog too much about politics and such since that isn't its purpose and I know our readers are all over the map politically.

Nonetheless, I confess that I fail to see much way to go but up at this point in time, and if you care to know which candidates support your views best, here are a couple of "candidate match" links.

Completely unrelated:

Love is:
Sitting in a toddler bed, holding your sleepy toddler son in your arms as he leans back against you and gets another nebulizer treatment for his wheezing, having him hold one of each of your hands in his smaller ones and occasionally rub it against his cheek, and knowing by the end of the treatment that a hard squeeze means he wants to hear Away In A Manger again. I'm not happy that Oli*ver needs the neb, but I could have sat there another hour, it was so peaceful and sweet.

Even more love is:
Watching your husband bring the wheezy, coughing boy downstairs and settle him half upright on the couch with him, the two of them nestled together, exhausted, because they'll both sleep better that way. Jo*el has always done "night duty" along with me, and in some ways he does it much better because he falls back to sleep so easily whereas I am up if I get up in the night. And he doesn't ever complain, he just does it. I am so completely, utterly grateful for that.

Ollie's doctors are reluctant to give him a final asthma diagnosis at this point, because some kids do still grow out of it before age 3 or 4, but it does seem like he needs breathing treatment with just about every cold now, and he often has croup as well. He'll outgrow the croup, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to spend more time in the ER this winter. At times like this, loving is painful -like your heart really is walking around outside your body, and you just want to gather your child up in your arms, squeeze him to you hard, and have that be enough. But it isn't. I know from my mother's reaction to my complicated pregnancy and my recent illness that this never really changes. I do appreciate this much more now that I've experienced it myself.

odds and ends

I’m so glad we followed this crazy idea we (OK – mostly I) had and got hens. It’s truly been a lot of fun. The girls are pretty mature by now, and done molting, so they’re big and fluffy. They’re also obviously hardy, as they haven’t seemed to think twice about hanging out in the snow. Now that there are no more bugs to eat, they are especially excited to get any kind of treats, especially carrot peelings (and yes, nearby family members, that is a hint!) and leftover noodles, which they seem to think are worms by the way they pin them down as if the “worms” were going to escape. We now get 3 or 4 beautiful eggs a day, and give about 9 or so a week to Ste*ve and Kath*y. The eggs have real flavor, and have the brightest yolks. Jo*el and I were joking that someday, the boy are going to go off to college, and when they receive scrambled eggs in the cafeteria, they’ll think, “What the heck is this?” I have a heat lamp installed for the really cold nights, and lights on a timer to get them to lay during the winter. Yesterday, I went outside to collect eggs and give the girls some fresh water, and on the way there, I sat down on the back step to tie my shoe. The ladies were out enjoying the sunshine, and within moments, I had one on my shoe and another in my lap! They’re such sweet, friendly birds. They seem to think I’m the mama chicken – kind of funny since I’m really the one that steals all their offspring. If I do yard work, they follow me everywhere, but unlike my own children, they neither whine nor argue with me.

I figured out that both boys are getting their back molar teeth. I thought they were done, but I was wrong. No*ah is complaining of a sore mouth, and they also have a lingering cough, so they’ve been quite cranky. We did have a nice trip to the zoo yesterday. We did both big indoor loops and the boys got a ton of much needed running around time. We stopped and looked at the gibbon monkeys for a long time. At one point, N said, “I’m sad, mama.” I asked him why, and he said, “Because for some reason, I don’t have a tail!” Then we went by some hog-like creature they have at the zoo, and a lady came up next to us and said to the man with her, "Holy crap! That thing is butt-ugly!" N repeated very word and she didn't even notice, but thankfully, he seems to have forgotten that fine use of the English language.

We’ve been doing the Tropical Trail loop without the stroller since the boys were about 18 months old, but back then we only did it when it wasn’t crowded at all, and we did have harness backpacks just in case. Now, we go whenever we want, and it works out fine. There are SO many twins and triplets at the zoo—they are everywhere—but always in strollers. Even older three year olds. I can’t imagine driving all the way to the zoo in a car seat, then sticking my kids in a stroller the whole time, then driving back home. My kids would go nuts – they need to move. When the boys were younger, I went and heard a child psychologist speak at my local multiples club. She said that multiples have a tendency to have behavior problems, and outlined her theories as to why this was. Multiples often live in an extremely kid-centered world, spending most of their time in a very baby-proofed house, and miss out on a lot of the basic things of everyday life, like trips to the grocery store, or to get an oil change, and the like, because their parents find it too hard. In missing out on those experiences, they also miss out on learning the resulting behavior expectations. She also said that since twins tend to lean on each other socially, they create a sort of “twin bubble” when they’re going places, which can lead to misbehavior. I can kind of see what she’s talking about there. O is actually pretty shy, but where he’d become kind of shy and compliant in new situations by himself, with his brother he’s kind of oblivious. It goes to show that inhibitions aren’t all bad – they do actually serve a purpose. The speaker suggested that one task for a parent of multiples is to try and make sure to take them to some of the same places you’d sake a singleton or two siblings of different ages, and also to help them be aware of their surroundings when they switch to new environments with different behavior expectations. For me, that means that when we go from the park outside the library to inside the library, I can’t expect it to go well when they’re laughing and chattering on the way in the door, no matter how innocent that looks, because they’ll think they’re still at the park when they get into the library. That’s the “twin bubble” – a lack of awareness of their environment, because they tune into each other instead. To make that kind of transition, I need to sit them on a step for a moment, look them in the eye, and remind them of the rules and of my expectations. It does work, and I’m glad I went to that talk, because thinking about this stuff is very helpful now. That’s also one of the reasons that I’ve always tried to be able to walk with my boys out of the stroller some of the time, even when it’s felt like a lot of nerve-wracking work. And now they can do it!

I don’t really go the multiples club meetings anymore, partly because I get a little tired of hearing how the moms can’t do this or that “because I have twins”, like potty train, let them out of their stroller, or take them to the playground or to a store. Yes, some things are harder logistically, and I’m sure I do things differently because I have twins, but I don’t want that to define me as a parent or us as a family. The thing I wish we could do more of is spend time with them individually. It’s always a choice between time together as a family of four and splitting them up, and with so little time for all of us together, family time usually wins. Next year they’ll be old enough for drop-off classes, though, and then we might have more opportunities for at least me to have some weekly one-on-one time with each boy.

Even though we had a nice time at the zoo, we did spend about a third of our zoo trip in the bathroom. N had an accident because he was scared by the automatic toilet, which flushed as soon as he sat down (so he didn’t really pee). We went back into the brand new, completely automatic-down-to-the-soap, bathroom. After we got N dressed in new pants, we spent a good half hour in there talking about how all the contraptions work, trying out first the faucet, then the soap, then the hand dryers, then checking underneath the sink to see how the bottles of soap screwed in underneath, talking about sensors and the difference between “automatic” and “manual”, and so on, until we got to the toilet, spent a few minutes talking about that, and then N went just fine. And then of course, we did the whole hand washing thing again. Next time I’m remembering the trick of bringing a post-it to put over the sensor, just in case, but at least maybe we’re past that particular fear. Then the whole rest of the time in the zoo, the boys were talking about what happened “automatically”, like the sliding doors, and the door locks when they press the key button on the key fob for our car. N was clearly still thinking about this when we got home, because then he said, “Mama takes care of us automatically.”

We had a very nice Thanksgiving, and everyone managed to eat, including Emi*ly, whose baby slept just long enough for her to finish her place, and Zo*e who ate a three course meal. It was busy, but delicious and fun. I didn’t get the greatest photos, because my camera is acting up and I need to get it fixed. It seems like every time I hear about someone getting their camera fixed it takes weeks and weeks, so I’m thinking that I might live with it through the holidays even though only about a quarter of the pictures are in focus.

Friday, Jo*el informed me that he had arranged a sitter for Saturday night so that we could go to a concert at the Fitz*gerald Theater (the one where Prairie Ho*me Compan*ion is taped). We went to a wonderful concert of Trio Mediæval, a renowned Norwegian choral trio. There were many Minnesotans in Norwegian sweaters there whose surnames probably ended in "seth". We have such a fine choral tradition here in Minnesota, so it was really neat to hear some of the folk music from which that tradition began. I think it was the second concert that Jo*el and I have been to together since the boys arrived. We used to go pretty regularly. I've never found it easy to leave the boys with a sitter, but I'm working on it.

Today both boys took a lousy nap and then got up late, so it was dark by the time we could get outside. We took a drive to see the Christmas lights in the area, which they absolutely loved. They were so excited. I'm going to put some up this year, and we're getting a tree when my mom comes. I think we'll make construction paper ornaments, though, and no presents under the tree until the night before. Age two and impulse control are relative strangers to one another, but Christmas is so much fun when you have little kids!

Here are a couple of old pictures from early October that Mea*gan e-mailed me. I can't believe how much younger O looked just 6 weeks ago!