Top Five

I was asked the other day if the twins are boring me. The basis for the question was that I am posting far less often lately. The twins are far from boring but we have entered basketball season again. This means that I am normally out playing two nights a week and coaching on a third. I could try post twice a week like I did during the summer but I would have to lock myself in a room away from the boys to manage. I am only barely clinging to the pretence that this blog is about them not me. If I did lock myself away to write on the nights that I am home I would never see them. Maybe I could just rename the blog, Diary of a Narcissist??
I decided that I needed to remind myself why I write the blog so I started to write a top five of the things that are great about twins. In no particular order;

1. They will always have a companion. I had a lengthy internal argument about including this one. The reason for the argument is that it is a double edged sword; the counter argument it that they will always find it difficult to establish themselves as an individual. On balance, the fact that they will always have someone to play with outweighs losing the odd clump of hair and an occasional bite-mark. The other night Monkey Boy fell and hurt himself [on my watch again!!]. I was on my way over to pick him up and comfort him when Fat Chops beat me to the punch. It was a proud and heart -warming moment to see one of my sons rub the other on the head and tell him he was ok.

2. Twice the cuddles. On one of my few nights at home last week I found myself sitting and watching Bear in the Big Blue House with the boys. It really is a superior children’s programme. I never find myself plotting the torture and death of Bear the way that I do when watching Barney or Special Agent Oso. Most of the time, the boys will watch TV standing up with their hands leaning on the TV table. Close enough that they can bask in the radiation and too close to see anything except a blur of bright colours. On this evening, they decided that they wanted to be more comfortable so they climbed up on the couch, one on each side of me, and cuddled in. I think I had what alcoholics call a moment of clarity. The tantrums, the demands of a hectic lifestyle, the fighting all melted away and I just enjoyed a brief moment of closeness with my children.

3. Less pregnancy and labour. I can only write this from a male point of view and I fully accept that I will never understand what it is like. I will still argue that if you plan on having more than one child it’s better to have them in litters! I have a theory that, somewhere in amongst the cocktail of hormones that make women emotionally volatile and increasingly flexible, there is some kind of magic potion that limits your memory of pregnancy. It highlights the ever so brief period where you feel good and the only way to describe your appearance is blooming. From my memory, this lasts about five minutes. It is sandwiched between the early horrors [coming to terms with being pregnant, constant nausea, hypersensitivity to smells, tiredness bordering on narcolepsy] and the later horrors [feeling like a beached whale, being too uncomfortable to sleep no matter how you contort yourself and of course the torture of labour and pain of childbirth]. This potion is probably more important to the preservation of the human race than everything except maybe opposable thumbs.

4. The interactions can be hilarious. They love to roll around on our bed, wrestling teddy bears and each other. I’m sure that most children will do fun stuff like this awith their siblings but it just seems funnier when they are atthe same development stage. Looking back through previous posts, very few of the stories would work as well if it was a solo act instead of a duo.

5. They will get more attention. I did a lot of research for this one. I conducted extensive interviews with my wife and, eh, well, I used my own experiences. It is a very small sample group but you can’t convince me if we only had one child instead of the boys, we would be stopped in the supermarket to comment on their cuteness quite as often. Like the first point, this is a double edged sword. Attention is like a drug and no one likes the kid that shows off incessantly to feed his attention habit. We will have to use liberal helpings of slagging and good, old fashioned, Irish begrudgery to keep them grounded!