Knowing you're done

I am a frequent visitor to a large families discussion board. One of the regular topics on that board is how to know when you are done having kids. Some of the women seem very certain that their families are complete, and some don't seem to think they will ever really feel done. I worried for a long time that I would fall into the latter category. I would look at friends with one or two kids, who seem very content, and wonder what was different about me that made me want more. Even after the twins were born, for a while I just wasn't sure.

Now? I'm sure. And it's not (just) a feeling of being fed up with the repetitive inanity of daily life with small children. The confirming factor for me is how I feel as the twins metamorphose from helpless larvae into little toddling people. When my oldest was a baby, every developmental milestone was poignant for me - although I celebrated his progress, I mourned the loss of his babyhood, the disappearance of my baby. I even anticipated how much more severe that feeling would be when it was my last baby disappearing, but now that the time has come, I am surprised to discover that I am greeting each baby step toward personhood with nothing but happiness, and maybe a little feeling of liberation. I love babies, and I've loved my babies, but I'm happy to be done.

That sigh you just heard was my husband's deep relief.

9 months old

I'm sure some of you already know this story - a couple months before I got pregnant with the twins, my then-4-year-old found my basal thermometer and asked what it was for. I told him it was to help me have a baby, and he said "you're going to have TWO babies, and we will call them Twinser and Twinser." Of course, I told him that usually babies only come one at a time - so imagine our surprise at that first ultrasound when we saw these little monkeys hanging out like a little tadpole gang.

Our little Twinser and Twinser are 9 months old today. It's amazing how fast they change at this age - it seems like they started sitting up one day and the next day they were off like a shot. They crawl in tandem across the living room, then look at each other as if to say, "now......BREAK," then split up and crawl furiously in opposite directions. I haven't caught on to their evil genius yet, and one of them almost always makes it to the dog food before I corral the other one. Boy twin is pulling up on everything (which reminds me, I really have to lower his crib mattress), and girly is setting land speed records for mischevious crawling.

This picture is from tonight. As I tried to wrestle monkey-girl into a diaper, I was distracted for all of 3 seconds and turned my head back to discover her knee-deep in my knitting basket, waving needles and yarn and very, very pleased with herself. Boy took the opportunity to hide behind her and postpone banishment to his crib. Smart babies, and so grown up all of a sudden.

Christmas comes one month late

My husband got his W2 today, so I've spent a fun-filled evening doing our taxes. Man, I love doing taxes. It seems unfair that they only come once a year. I've seriously got a buzz going from the forms and numbers. Whee!

We officially qualify as insane in the eyes of the government - we now have so many dependents that we hardly pay any taxes at all. Seems silly to me, but hey, who am I to argue. I actually recalculated our federal return to see what it would be like if we had one more kid and discovered that if we did, the government would actually pay us. Breeders, unite!

I'm never going to get to sleep, I'm way too excited. I love you, IRS!

Off topic, what's up with the baby channel? I just saw it advertised, and it's an extra $10/month. For programming for babies. I don't even shell out the extra $10/month for HBO except when Sopranos is on. Do babies really need their own channel? I have two of them (babies, that is), and they can spend a really long time being absorbed by things like their own toes or carpet lint. I'm definitely not paying for them to be entertained any time soon, tax return or no tax return.

I'll be staying in for a while...

There is just nothing like motherhood to teach you about the cost of things. Not the financial cost, although that is also brought into sharp relief once you add family members and remove breadwinners, but the fundamental truth that having one thing precludes having something else. You can't be in two places at the same time, and resources are finite. These truths may seem self-evident, but I'm still getting smacked in the face with them over and over.

Take sleep, for example (no! gasps the viewing audience, surely she's not going to talk about sleep!). My babies, you may be shocked to learn, are absolutely abysmal sleepers. I have had a heaping helping of truly good advice, using which I have devised not one but several plans, none of which I have implemented consistently. It is unsurprising to note here that I have always been a really awful dieter (hence the overstuffed upholstery look mentioned in yesterday's post). As with dieting, as soon as I see a glimmer of success I call it a day and am then simply stunned when the progress does not continue after the abandonment of the plan.

Specifically (yes, please, what in the hell are you talking about anyway?), I started putting the twins on a daytime routine a month or so ago, and it was really helping their nighttime sleep. However, putting two babies on a sleep schedule really cramps my not-so-stylish style, so as soon as I got a little bit of sleep, I resumed my regular round of friends and kids' activities and general schedule anarchy. This was (here come the excuses) exacerbated by the holidays, but I know I'd have done it anyway, because that's the self-defeating kind of person I am. So here we are, back where we started, only I'm a little more harried and desperate for a light - hell, from here I can hardly see the tunnel.

The moral of this rambling and oh-god-so-tired post is that I need to sacrifice all external activity to the sleep of the babies. I worked outside the house when my older children were babies, so I didn't really realize how restrictive it is to have to sit home essentially all day so the babies could sleep properly. So, good-bye world. I hope to see you again some day, when the babies and I are all much older and much better rested.