Random things I'm loving right now

I hope you're not expecting an explanation (excuse?) for my absence the past couple of months. There isn't one. I was just busy and distracted and feeling a little lazy about writing, I suppose. That's all. I thought I'd come back today and jot down a few things.

I've spent the past several years on a few different message boards, all of which grew out of the wedding forums on theknot.com. I've gotten a lot out of those boards. Some aggravation for sure, but so much more in terms of friendship and knowledge. I've met a pretty good number of the women on my boards, in places as far apart as NYC, Kansas City, Ann Arbor, and Raleigh. Probably other places, if I really sit and think about it. We talked each other through getting married, getting pregnant, having babies, raising kids, and in some cases, ending those marriages. There are things I've told the ladies on the boards that I would never ever blog about, and probably wouldn't tell a lot of my real-life friends. When my babies were born so early, a large group (25 or so) of them get together and sent me a huge box, which contained the only "baby shower" I'll ever have. In return, I shared with them the horrifyingly embarrassing photos of my one-week postpartum miserably exhausted self opening the gifts. I think I got the better end of that deal.

Anyway, the boards lived on MSN Groups, and this past October MSN announced that they were shutting down the boards. There were various archiving schemes, and some of the boards did get archived on other sites. And we migrated to other hosting sites going forward, so it's not like we're not all still able to communicate. But not everything got archived. I went through all my posts on one of the baby-related boards and copied every post I started for the past 3.5 years - since I found out I was pregnant. I have a word doc hundreds of pages long. But I couldn't copy every reply I made in every post, and I know countless little bits of information have been lost. There were milestones and stories about the girls that I probably only posted there, and now I will never read them again. It makes me sad if I think about it too hard, and I am trying not to.

So, I'm trying to keep up this blog going forward. I wish so much I had blogged during my pregnancy and first years with the girls. I wish I had done a handwritten journal, written in the form of letters to my babies. I bought one - the day I found out it was twins, I bought a beautiful journal at Barnes & Noble. But not too long after that, I had a scare and thought I might lose one or both babies, and I couldn't bear to start writing to babies that may or may not ever exist. And then they were OK but I started thinking how can I write one journal for 2 people - who will get to keep it when I die? Will they argue over it? (Yes, really, pregnant women are crazy.) And then it was so late into my pregnancy that it seemed silly to start writing now - if you can't start at the beginning, why bother? I can think of a million reasons now. Not everything has to be perfect to be worthwhile. So, from here on in, I'll try and record more of this life here.

To that end, here are just a few of my favorite things right now about Lilly and Kate.

Lilly:

• Says "Yes ma'am" and I have no idea where she picked that up.
• If you ask her if she wants something, she replies with a jaunty "Sure!" just like her mama
• Loves to ue the word "certainly" as in "I certainly like Cinderella."
• Told me tonight that she liked the bourbon chicken I made for dinner because "It's nice and saucy."
• Tells me "I like to sleep without you mom (she calls me "Mom" lately). And with you. But I like to sleep without you" and then proceeds to climb into my bed every. single. night. sometime in the wee hours.
• Turned to me while eating eggs I had cooked in heart-shaped bread "frames" on Valentine's Day and said "Thank you for making this for me, Mom."
  

Kate

• Has trouble saying "Fl" or "Fr" and "Thr" at the beginning of words, so she plays with her "shrineds," likes pretty "slowers," and loves to "sly" her fairies "shrough" the air. She's also very excited to go to "Slorida" on vacation at the end of this week. I love to try and get her to say any of these words, because she sounds so stinking cute when she says them. I'll be sad when she starts saying them correctly. Last summer she said "corn" with 2 syllables, so it sounded like "Cah-rin" and I miss it every time I hear her say "corn" now.
  
• Loves to tell me what her sister likes. If Lilly is eating something, it's "Mommy, Lilly loves macaroni and cheese!" Or "Lilly likes her Cinderella doll." It's hard to describe, but when she says it, she's so thrilled to make this report that it gives me the giggles.
• Comes into our bed every night, usually a few hours prior to Lilly. I'm always frustrated at the interruption (she often times it 2 minutes before the end of a TV show we're watching on Tivo) but then when she lays down and I snuggle in close and put my cheek against her cheek...I melt.
• Thinks (and well tell you) that anything on TV that isn't one of their familiar Noggin or Disney Channel shows is "inaccrocriate." Apparently she told Grandma this about a commercial the other day and made her turn it off.
  

Both of them have become so lovey with each other. They fight plenty, of course, but they will spontaneously run up to each other and hug and kiss or tell each other "I love you" several times a day. It makes my heart want to burst.

They are exhausting. They don't stop talking from wakeup to bedtime, some days. They don't sleep through the night. They rarely nap more than one hour, and many days not at all lately. They take 30 minutes to get from the livingroom and down the steps into their carseats because they have to examine 20 things and ask me 20 questions on the way. They never seem to eat when I think they are hungry, and then when I think they're not, they ask for snacks all day long. They bite each other. They hit each other. They scream at me. They ignore at least 75 percent of what I say to them.

None of that really matters when I sit down and have a moment to think about the wonders that live inside them. When it's quiet, and they're not climbing on me, I can ponder what an incredible gift these little girls are, and how lucky I am to be their mother. They take everything I ever imagined about having a daughter and magnify it x 1000.