almost 20 months twins is a rollercoaster of crazy.

for the last month and a half I feel like this blog has been half abandoned (by yours truly), probably because it has. Between having all of about 20 minutes to myself during the daytime, 4 kids fighting bedtime every night, and needing to sleep/eat/take care of the kids/try to enjoy them while they are young/blah blah blah, writing about anything has really hit the backburner in a way I feared would happen once I had the twins... it just came along a year and a half later than I expected.

The boys are SO mobile and into everything.

CONS: climbing. stealing and (attempting to dismantle) every electronics device under this roof. crying. fighting. crying about the fighting. falling from the climbing and more crying. being sick (as of late) and crying. teething and crying. Not wanting to sit in a chair for meals (Lo), so more falling and more crying. I found myself threatening my 20 month old today to STOP CRYING or I would send him to bed at 5pm because THERE IS SO MUCH CRYING ALL DAY LONG. I cannot stop compulsively eating junk because it is better than screaming at my children to STOP CRYING. Is this phase over yet?!?! Obviously I need to try new tactics because throwing snacks and tv shows at them when I need 10 minutes to prep dinner is obviously not working. Everything gets thrown on the floor, everything gets dumped out of where it belongs. They are searching for anything they can get their grabby little hands on. Opening and shutting doors and drawers and getting hurt. More crying. Half eating food (apples, bananas, veggie straws, cereal) and leaving the remains around the house. Feeling like the only time I have alone has to be spent doing things I cannot do around the babies: prepping food (with sharp knives), laundry (NEVER EVER DONE!! It is maddening!), cleaning (real cleaning, although tidying up I can certainly do around them, it's just not anything that would have been up to my standards 21 months ago. Waking up as early as 5:30 or 6am and not going back to bed. Waking up screaming (Lo) till he wakes everyone up.

PROS: Talking. Communicating. New vocabulary. Hugs. Kisses. More hugs. Snuggles. Singing. Watching Minions (and singing along!). being able to describe to me what is wrong or show me with actions, that part is incredible to me! And now the big kids know they can't get away with being mean to the babies!! ha! Reading books. Lo just started "saying prayers" and although you can't tell what exactly he's saying it definitely starts with "hea-fahh" (Heavenly Father) and he bows his head, closes his eyes and says some jibberish then end with "Jees, Amen!" If I help either twin to say a prayer, usually they both say it at the same time. They both hum/sing "I am a Child of God" (our bedtime song) and let me cuddle them before they fall asleep. They love to hold my hand. Lan loves to help unload the dishwasher and can properly put away pots, pans, silverware and kids dishes (and eagerly does it!!). Lo is the first to run to the broom and sweep for me. Both babies love to play with the pots and pans and pretend they are making food. I will usually let them mix the real stuff with me. Lan is eager to try anything I have on my plate, including salad. Hearing the boys scream and holler for their big brother when he gets home. Saying HELLO?!?! over and over again and pretending anything is a phone. Running toys to the tub for bathtime. wanting a bath every night even though I keep them pretty short. Checking in with me. Lan poking me with his chubby little finger to say "HI" or get my attention. Both boys running over to Kevs and snuggling next to him, after Lo exclaims "A CAT!!" in surprise. Reading books to the boys. Watching them "read" books in their cribs next to night lights (that remind me of all the times I did that after my parents put me to bed, reading in the bathroom or by nightlight after lights out, just so I could eke out a couple of extra chapters before going to bed, a habit that is still with me 20 something years later). Picking them up after nursery or the gym. Seeing them recognize family on facetime or google hangouts. Dancing to Moana's song (you're welcome). Running circles chasing each other around the kitchen. Wrestling each other. When I change one boys diaper on the floor and the other boy comes over and just sits on his face or tries to blow raspberries on his tummy.

Obviously regardless of how long each of those lists are, the pros will always outnumber the cons, as a direct result of the fact that they are our sweet baby boys and we love them to the moon and back.

Some times I think, I don't know if I want to remember the "really hard" stuff that I feel like I am going through right now with the twins. But I think that to ignore the difficult things in life means that I cannot fully enjoy and be grateful for the things that are so good in my life at this time. Everything has it's opposite. And if there's anything I have been learning about gratitude over the last month or so, it is that I want to make sure I always have "Gratitude 2.0", where you choose to give thanks in ALL things. Not just the good things, but the difficult things. So yes, while all those things I listed under cons are hard right now, I am grateful for them. Because we had a solid 3 months of NO SICKNESS from september through november in this family before getting bronchiitus, an ear infection, the croup, and a handful of colds. Now we are back in the upswing (knock on wood) and can eat better and hopefully go a little stretch being a little healthier. Someday the boys will sleep through the night and be going to school all day and not need naps and like I feel with little d I will ache for the days when we used to nap together and he actually enjoyed my company over that of friends. Someday I will have a wonderful little bunch of kitchen helpers and we can all make meals and clean up together. Someday there will be much less crying and hopefully a lot more communication.

But until we make it to that "someday", I will try to take moments to enjoy them while they are little. I certainly feel like a great farce in motherhood is the NEED to take EVERY moment and make it perfect and precious, something I feel like can only be perpetuated when you have one child and no job, or with a nanny (or mutliple nannies!!) because there is going to be conflict and there are a lot of times when I look back on the whole of my day and think, nothing got done today. I feel bad about how I talked to the kids. I feel bad that I didn't get to really connect with _________, etc. But I can always pick out a "good" moment or two and that is what I am really trying to hold onto to take me into the next day. There will always be hard things in my life and while those hard things are children I love dearly, I better take advantage of this "trail" as long as I can, since I know there will be far more difficult trials in my future.

I don't need to be perfect. My kids don't need to be perfect. We are all still figuring stuff out how this is supposed to look and how we are supposed to act and all I can tell them is

Have courage and be kind.

So that's what I have been trying to do. Not always succeeding but trying.

I can do hard things.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger (that was my theme of the first year with the twins!!), although maybe not so melodramatic, since none of this is going to kill me. It has simply been quite time consuming, both mentally and physically.

And tomorrow I will go back to posting adorable pictures of my adorable children.

like when I have breakfast for dinner and we all eat out of the adorable kid plates my neighbor Cristin recommended. Or panda snuggling with panda.

Say what you will about the dangers of co sleeping twins

But I swear these two (even though their cribs are right next to each other!) sleep much better when they are in the same crib. It's almost as if Lan's crying lulls Lo to sleep... ;)

In my defense i always space them just over one baby-width apart... And they usually manage to wiggle closer to each other by the next feeding. 

Seriously the cutest. Having twins is really hard (like REALLY hard) but good grief they are so stinking adorable and having two babies to interact with even at 2 am is awfully fun sometimes!

New Twin Mom essentials in surviving the first 6 weeks and 6 week postpartum update

In addition to looking for blogs that would tell me what I would need to have for twins, I also wanted to know what I would need for those first 6 weeks.

1. My mom. And Drew.

2. Belly Bandit/Mother Tucker/some sort of postpartum belly support

3. Daily treat/Pampering

4. WATERRRRRR

5. Dry shampoo and deodorant.

6. Car Seats you love (to go along with a double stroller you can't live without!)

1. Just kidding, you canNOT have my mom. Or my husband. But having a strong support system is so important to survive newborn twins, especially if you have older kids to care for as well. Asking for help is the best thing I did the last 6 weeks, and that is coming from someone who six weeks ago would have preferred ANYTHING to asking for help, even from her husband or mom!

2. For a week after I had the boys my belly was so huge and tender I didn't want anything touching it. Also my belly bandit couldn't even make it all the way around my belly. I wore it for a whole week and then it was too itchy and stiff for me to want to wear it. I don't know what my deal was but I hated the belly bandit longer than that one week this time around, and went right to the mother tucker, which I pretty much have been living in since week 3. And I do have to say that with my belly being so tender, the belly bandit really helped it feel supported and not as sore, especially my incision.

3. When you are sleep deprived and time deprived AKA your world revolves around two (or four) little beings and you barely have time to use the bathroom on any given day, getting some pampering/spoiling yourself is a MUST. My daily treat(s) was (were) chocolate, cheese, any sort of baked goodie you can imagine. But mostly ay night, after the kids were in bed I would settle in with a coconut greek yogurt and dark chocolate peanut butter granola...Since last week happened (and I discovered I am not a fan of non dairy yogurt), I've been doing green smoothies with nutty granola. De-lish!

4. I keep a (filled) waterbottle in my car, huge cup of ice water in the house downstairs, and the huge hospital big gulp in the boys bedroom because nursing makes you CRAZY hungry all. the. time!! Since there's not enough hours in the day to sit down and eat, drinking water all day long makes me feel better and takes away a tiny bit of the hunger pains.

5. Whoever invented dry shampoo is a genius. Deodorant is a close second, only because my hair usually ends up smelling worse (and takes so much more work to do when I do have to wash it) than my body.

6. I hated our last car seat because they were a pain to get the bases into or out of the car, and an even bigger pain to get the car seat out of the base because it would get stuck and lo and behold our beloved Chicco KEeyfit 30's have the most AMAZING bases that just snap right into the latch and same  with the actual car seats. Totally a game changer if you are like me and get cabin fever from being in the house for too long. Only 17 more days till we get our family car, but who's counting?

Ok, now the postpartum update:
14 pounds to go (the same at this point as I had left to go after little d), but I swear the belly is so much bigger, because my clothes are so much harder to fit and I have never had so many comments from strangers and small children (thank you, primary kids) about looking pregnant. Frustrating to me, because I feel so much better than I actually look, which is probably why I feel so shocked when I do look in the mirror... I am able to do so much and feel so much better than I have in months that to see that belly sitting (not so) pretty right out there, and I can't manage to suck it in or really flex my belly... it is crazy frustrating. I have to keep reminding myself daily of how stretched out my muscles were, and the fact that they carried two babies and I got cut open less than two months ago, and it's a good thing to remind me to be patient with my body. But definitely not easy.

Once again mother tucker wasn't a weight loss regimen... It makes me feel better because my stomach isn't hanging out, and helps cover up my stomach when I'm nursing if I forgot to wear a tank underneath.

Hopefully six weeks of gym time will help me look a little less pregnant and not as needing of the compression tank, since the last time around I stopped using it at three months (but I do have to remind myself that was also after being pregnant with one girl, not two boys).

So having gone through two pregnancies with both belly wrap and compression tank I would still say if you can only afford one the mother tucker tank is the one to get the most bang for your buck.

It was only by the grace of God that I survived today.

I wish I were kidding.

Literally, every. single. time. Drew goes out of town the whole house goes total anarchy on me. The boys have caught onto that faster than I care to admit, and even with my mother in law Darsi here, it was just. The. Worst.

This morning started off (I won't even bother telling you what time, because it will only depress you) with me feeling super bloated and crampy (?? no idea why but it made me furious) and the boys delving into hours upon hours of crying combined with a feeding frenzy. Both boys were extremely unhappy all day today and I could not for the life of me figure out why. I only got a five minute shower in because my mother in law took the big kids outside and the babies were in their sleepers crying (#sorrynotsorry) and only managed to read my scriptures in the five minutes both boys were nursing and content.

Needless to say, the feeding/pooping/crying frenzy didn't stop until 11, when I was finally able to get them both downstairs with me, and I didn't get "breakfast" eaten till noon. Not my favorite way to start the day and it completely threw me off for the whole day.

I am so grateful for the family and friends helping me out today (as I am every day). And sometimes visiting with people I love can be the best kind of help imaginable. I kept my head above water and while I am not happy with the way today went, it is what it is. I didn't get to spend any quality time with little d and I feel like every interaction with him was negative and him being super snarky with me. I spent way more time than I would have liked trying to chill out crazy babies and that made me extremely grumpy.

Thank goodness for little a being completely sweet and oblivious to everything and all I have to do is read her the same book fifty times in a row and she is happy as a clam. My little breath of fresh air. Also having Darsi offer to go out and buy me Graeter's strawberry chocolate chip ice cream at the end of the day for watching the Bachelorette was pretty awesome.

Phew. A long day. Here's to getting out of my bedroom before midday and eating breakfast before lunchtime tomorrow.

One of the first things that I saw in my email today made me laugh because it was a comment from facebook in response to yesterday's blog post where I felt ready to tackle the world with my four kids, about how awesome it was that I had a good handle on things. HA! Today felt like anything but. But that is the way this parenting so many littles thing works... some days you are on top of the world, and then you get a day like today and it is a big fat dose of humble pie. That is real life and that is certainly my life right now, a total out of control roller coaster.

Deep breath.

Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow the boys are one month old!! Eek. And I have our first monthly photo shoot to look forward to... should be interesting!

(A rare and brief moment of calm today with me and baby Lo)