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Archive for October, 2008

These are a Few of my Favorite Things…

Posted in Just for Fun, temporary single parenthood, The Sunny Side of Parenting, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 30, 2008 | 2 Comments »

I’m not admitting to anything, but it may have transpired that around my 120th straight hour of solo twin wrangling, when I started to feel overwhelmed and isolated on my little island, I may have turned to an old friend, Julie Andrews, for a bit of guidance. Without further ado, here are a few of my favorite things….

Paul Newman in his early twenties……Hot Hot Hot. Joanne Woodward and Orson Welles are fab too.

Green tea + Lychee + Ginsing = Delicious

Gosh I love Edna St. Vincent Millay. Favorite Poet. Lulu’s middle name is Millay, after her. Love all her poems, but she’s most famous for a few lines out of First Fig:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–
It gives a lovely light!

Dragonfruit! Mmmmmm

God bless vacuuming robots

God bless Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. His version of “I Put a Spell on You” is sublime. And insane. Lately I’ve been groovin out to “He wears a red bandanna, plays a cool piano, in a honky tonk down in Mexico…”

Love converse. Those aren’t mine though, fyi. I own one pair, and Jungledad owns one pair. No, they are not the same color. We’re not that lame.


I could look at it for hours

With a little chinese cabbage, so very very yummy.

This is a cupcake of a book. A big sweet hug. Great recipes, great characters, great advice.

What are your favorite non-baby things? We can’t think about babies all the time ;)

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Drowning My Sorrows in Mini-Snickers

Posted in Woe is Me, tagged , , , , , , , on October 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

I’m on my 50th straight hour of solo twin duty and if it weren’t for the bag and a half of Halloween candy I’ve eaten I’d really have lost my shiz by now. I’m just 2 mini musketeers, 4 mini milky ways, and 7 mini snickers away from my pre-pregnancy weight, I can feel it! I am so going to yoga this Friday and not skipping it like I did last Friday….. and the Friday before that. Who am I kidding? I’ll totally skip it again.

I’ve been banking on the idea that there won’t be many trick-or-treaters in the jungle, and hitting the candy hard, dressed in my exhausted mother of twins costume. This is allegedly Jungledad’s last shift on the Volcano for 3 months. I sure hope so. The girls miss their Daddy like mad. The older they get, and they’re getting up there (8 and a half months!) the more they react to his absence. They love to hear his voice on the phone but of course its not the same. I think little Mumu actually tried to call her Daddy today, and it was so damn cute. She snatched the phone off the couch when I wasn’t looking and crawl-wiggled over to a corner, hid behind a basket of toys, and started dialing. Kind of. She managed to turn on the phone and dial 1. Not bad for 8.5monther.

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When Twin Worship Goes too Far…

Posted in island life, Preemies, NICU, The Joy of Twins, travelling with twins, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on October 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Okay, so living on a remote tropical island where my twins are the only twins I’ve seen means the little ladies get a lot of attention when out in public. That’s fine. Overwhelmingly it is good attention, interspersed with a little weird attention, and every once in a while a bit of bad attention Crazy Train. Whatever, we can all handle that. Sometimes, however, a tricky situation arises when good attention suddenly turns bad- when people you don’t know overstep the line. Do other Moms experience this?

It always happens to me at airports. People get crazy and grabby at airports. This makes me knuckle-cracking nervous and borderline panicky because I never forget for a jungleminute that my twinnies are preemies. Preemies have delicate little systems, delicate little lungs, and as big and strong as they seem to me now at 8 months, I’ll never forget the sight of my 3lb 2oz spider-limbed Lulu, and the fact that they are still at risk until about the age of 2, and all the intensity and preemie complications I felt and witnessed at the NICU. We’ve been lucky as heck, knock on wood, no major respiratory infections, ear infections, etc. I attribute some of it to luck, a lot to breast milk, and even more to hosing down visitors in purell. A few weeks ago I slipped up, relaxed my standards with a visiting friend, and we all ended up with the worst cold in jungle history, the one I’ve been whining about for days on end.

Anyway, so at the airport on Thursday a pair of cute and friendly older Japanese ladies stopped by to see the girls. We don’t speak Japanese and they didn’t speak English, but we pretty much understood eachother. They thought Lulu looks more like me and Mumu looks more like Jungledad, etc. Its was all going well, then the grabbing started. Out of no where they started grabbing hands and faces. Red light flashing! Alarms! Germs everywhere! BeepBeepBeepBeepBeep! Step away from the babies! Of course, there were no alarms. I just froze in fear and didn’t do didley. I wish people wouldn’t touch babies without permission. I hate to be uptight about it but I am.

That incident wasn’t as bad as the last airport incident though. That one really freaked me out. We were flying to New England to visit relatives. It takes many flights and about 36 hours to get to my Mum’s house from here, no joke. Anyway, so we were zombie faced at the San Francisco airport, wandering around with the dread of several more hours in the journey, when we plopped down to have a rest and were immediately pounced upon. Out of no where, a young Korean couple with an expensive video camera dragged their heavy airport chairs across the terminal until they were inches away from us, then stuck the camera in the babies faces and started filming. The twins were still tiny at that point, around 3 months old but still smaller than the average newborn, and I was really freaked out. Way over the line. We moved to different chair but they followed us, kept following us. Due to the language barrier, our words were not understood. We couldn’t shake them until we walked to a airport cafe and sat down in a booth. The whole experience really shook me up. I don’t think that couple meant to bother or upset us, but did they ever. They were so excited to see twins, to film twins, that their enthusiasm seriously clouded their judgement.

Does this stuff happen to other Moms of twins?

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First Word?

Posted in milestones, tagged , , , , , on October 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Jungledad and I disagree on the twins first words in every capacity: whether they were words, whether they were intentional, and whether, if they were intentional, were they used with understanding as to their meaning.

For example, I have cinematic evidence of Mumu saying Mama, but Jungledad disputes she knew what she was saying. If I’m truthful, it could go either way. Its the same for Dadadadada. Intentional? Sure, but does she know what it means? No clue. How do people decide what constitutes the first word?

The only word I’m confident they say intentionally and with full knowledge of its meaning is “hey,” as in “heeeeeeey don’t take that dirty sock away, I’m trying to eat it!

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I Freakin’ Love David Sedaris

Posted in Literary Shout-outs, travelling with twins, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Here’s a Sedaris quote about undecided voters I stole from Perez Hilton. Yea, that’s right, I read Perez Hilton. No remorse.

“I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention? To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it? To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

Especially funny for me because I was flying around on planes yesterday, although nobody offered me anything except syrupy sugar water masquerading as passion fruit juice. Yea I drank it. No remorse. Bit of confusion though- there are thousands of passion fruits falling, rotting in the streets- why not pick some up, squeeze some juice out, and save some corn syrup and pink dye #7 for the next generation? Sigh.

I don’t think I can say I’m jet-lagged because I didn’t technically change time zones, but I’m certainly twin lagged. Twins were due for their 8 month neurological check up, which was scheduled at their birth because of their preemiehood and general itty-bittiness. The doc said they are fine, grand even, which we knew anyway. Wish we didn’t have to lumber around airport terminals all day with screeching, squirming little junglebundles of joy to find that out. No specialists on my island. To make unnecessary visits to specialists, one must hop on a plane to a different island (the fancy island in the chain) then back again to the jungle from whence they came to collapse into bed, grateful the twins are normal but oh so very tired.

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Enough With the Self Pity, Junglemom

Posted in Literary Shout-outs, Woe is Me, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Whenever I’ve had a night like I had last night, or a week like I had last week, when the twins’ massive cold and my massive cold cause us all to be less charming and well-rested than normal, and I start feeling sorry for myself and throwing stones I shouldn’t be throwing at singleton parents when we’re all just trying to get by, I reflect on a crazy Polygamist cult memoir I read, and it helps me put things in perspective.

I came across the book during pregnancy. I was on bed rest, flipping through channels of really bad television when I came across an interview of the author, Irene Spencer. She was speaking about how after she was married off at 16 to a nut job who literally thought he was the messiah, she found herself in some random desert in Mexico, living in a shack with no running water or electricity, no money, making bras out of flour sacks and taking care of 17 children (it may have been more, actually, my memory’s fuzzy from theraflu), most of which were not her own but the offspring of her husband’s other numerous wives. She wanted to split (who wouldn’t!), but everyone kept telling her that this was the way good heaven-bound people lived, and if she bailed on that lifestyle she would be going to hell. So she looked around her and thought to herself, how could hell be any worse than this?

I was riveted. I hobbled out immediately, big belly and all (screw bedrest!) to buy the book. If I’ve inspired anyone out there to do the same, Shattered Dreams is in the Women’s Studies section, fyi, not in non-fiction or biographies (took me way too long to figure that out).

Normally I don’t like to compare myself to others on account of suffering by comparison and the practice usually making me feel crappier, but in Irene’s case I make an exception. I treat her as a motivational tool. If she could survive that, I can survive this. If she could untangle herself from that horrible mess, I can dust the vomit off my shirt, take a deep breath in my gummed up lungs, and carry on.

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What’s it Like to Have Only One Baby?

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 19, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Yesterday Lulu was going to town on her Johnny Jump-Up and I didn’t want to mess with a good thing, so I decided to feed them individually. As I fed Lulu her purple sweet potato (side note- all the root vegetables on this island seem to be purple or hot pink, no joke) I was struck by how insanely easy it was. I could keep up with her hungry little mouth, catch all the gobs of food falling out and put them back in. There was none of the teacup trying to bail out the ocean feeling I usually get when trying to catch the downpour of mushy veggies and stuff them back into two hungry mouths. The latter I always fail at, resulting in copious amounts of goop both on the floor and sliding down the once shiny refrigerator (antagonizing the gnome who lives there until he acts out, see Known Gnomes and Unknown Gnomes).

With one baby, it was smooth sailing. Actually, my husband and I joke about the fact that when we split up while shopping, each taking a twinnie, it feels like a mini vacation. Even when one freaks out (and someone always freaks out) it is comparatively so much easier to calm one baby down than two, especially when the two babies in question love nothing better than whipping themselves up into an absolute frenzy in public places at any given opportunity. Of course, as an added bonus, my husband shopping alone with a baby causes quite a stir around here. Men on this island tend to favor a more detached approach to child rearing until the age in which the child can hold a football, or cage-fight, or both, so the sight of my husband rounding a corner in Home Depot with an infant in his arms inevitably results in gasps and dropped power tools, not to mention outraged cries of “Where is the Mother!?!?! They seem to think that unchaperoned my husband will leave said infant in a bin of nails or scrunched inside a plastic pipe (or whatever else they have at Home Depot, I wouldn’t know) in a moment of distraction.

I digress, but the point is its easier. Much much easier, and I don’t take kindly to people telling me its not. I mean, I don’t pick fights or anything. I don’t walk around saying this shiz to peeps who only have one baby. I never let on that I think they’ve got it made in the freakin shade. I only rant about it on my blog, cause the blog is called “Jungletwins,” for chissakes so ya know I’m talkin twins here. And jungle. And all things pertaining.

Soon after the twins were born my mother came to visit/help out, and she was extremely helpful, but she also spent a lot of time trying to convince me that several parents of single babies had it harder than us. I don’t really remember her argument for this because she may as well have been speaking Klingon to me in my breast feeding around the clock 2 preemies who refuse to latch or nap state. I, in return, spent a lot of time making faces of a can you believe this shiz she’s obviously been eating fermented coconut nature to my husband when she wasn’t looking.

Now I wouldn’t trade my twinnies for anything. They are the cats meow, the applesauce to my pork chop, and I love them so so much. I’m just saying that Twin Mommies deserve medals and ribbons and shiny engraved silver cups, and ponies and ski lodges and beach houses, and huge disposable incomes and since no one is giving us any of these things, we deserve at a bare minimum, the right to whine.

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Is McCain Hiding Something with all that Scribbling?

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 18, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Okay normally I don’t get all blogopolitic, but I have bee in my bonnet. A Republican bee. I will preface this by saying I am not normally prone to conspiracy theory or reading too much into things. Maybe being up all night for a week straight with the twins and their cold has driven me to this, but I think there’s more to McCain’s crazy scribbling during the final debate than meets the eye. Had he written a few notes here and there, a bullet point or two, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. The man was writing a goddam novel, a manuscript, a screenplay. I wanted to say Dude, this is being recorded. You can watch it later. You don’t have to record every word. Then I thought, hmmm, maybe he does have to keep writing, not because he’ll forget, but because his hand shakes when idle. I have no proof of this, but all that scribbling got we wondering. A lot of elderly people (and let’s face it, he is elderly) have hands that shake. I don’t know why, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t think we’re talking Parkinson’s here, just run of the mill older person shaky hand. Its the covering up that worries me. I know the McCain campaign goes out of their way to minimize that fact that McCain is old and in poor health, but let’s face it- he is old and in poor health, and this matters a great deal. If they’re covering up the shaky hand, what else are they covering up? Has he had lapses in memory? Does he have arthritis? This is all making me nervous..

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Sex and Ailments

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

Our voices are changing, and it ain’t puberty. Jungledad has developed a deep, gravelly, I’m-the-Sheriff-around-here baritone while my vocal offerings have morphed into a throaty, hard-livin,’ warm-lovin,’ dirty tight t-shirt in a dusty town purr, and all of this would be very, very sexy if we weren’t incredibly ill. We can barely lift our heads much less anything else, and its a real shame all those sexy vocals must go to waste.

It started last week. A visitor brought a nasty ailment of some sort (cold? flu? something) and it latched on to Lulu, then everyone else. The twins do not do illness well. No sir. They scream and scream and scream all night. Did I mention they scream? Well they do. Newborns all over again. Actually, the last 2 nights have been much better than the previous 3, but not good enough to get more than 2 straight hours of uninterrupted sleep. Focusing on the positive (with great effort) Lulu seems to be getting over the hump, thank God, and Mumu is slowly (and extremely loudly) on the mend. Unfortunately, Jungledad and I are only getting worse. Better us then them, absolutely, but geez I’m miserable. The sexy voice thing is great, but we would probably enjoy it more if we didn’t feel like salty razor blades were scraping down our throats. The embarrassing dog-bark coughing and leaky mucus faucets don’t help either. I guess none of us do illness well. Illness isn’t sexy.

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Known Gnomes and Unknown Gnomes

Posted in 1, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 14, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

The Matag Man is here seeing to the gnome situation, and I’m hiding in the living room. I don’t like to disturb people when they’re working, especially where gnomes are involved.

The gnome that he’s here about is particularly disruptive. Around 1am Sunday morning, right around the time Lulu finally went to sleep after screaming bloody murder all night due to the lethal combination of teething and a nasty cold, the gnome started reeking havoc with our refrigerator. Never have I heard such a loud, panic-inducing sound: BANG-BANG! BANGBANGBANGBANG louder and louder until both babies and husband were yelling. That gnome was pissed off, and that big shiny stainless steel long saved up for dream fridge was on the receiving end. Of course the Maytag offices are closed on Sunday. Of course. So we emptied the freezer of all meat and cooked it up in a delicious chili and called Maytag in the morning. Of course they couldn’t come until today, but, miracle of miracles, when we plugged that sucker back in this morning (unlike the previous 20 times we plugged it in) the gnome ceased his hammering. Hmmm. So- when the repair man called back this morning and I told him the dealio (not mentioning the gnome by name, it goes without saying) he did everything in his power to convince me he didn’t need to drive out to my house. I was having none of it. He was all, I won’t know what’s wrong with it until it dies, and I was all- you better darn well try, because I’m not waiting until it dies after the warranty runs out. After a bit more verbal sparring and several mentions of the infant twins and freezer full of baby food, dude man agreed to come out and face the gnome. Actually, he just came out a minute ago with the culprit- a piece of cardboard stuck to the bottom of the fridge that the gnome managed to feed through the fridge fan, hence making that bloody godawful sound. There we have it.

You may wonder why I am so sure a gnome was involved in this caper. Well I’ll tell you. I read an insane article about how everyone in Iceland believes in gnomes. Okay technically I think its elves, but I like gnomes better so for the sake of this blog I’m going to keep saying gnomes. Anyway, whenever there’s trouble on a construction site, equipment breaking and such, no one even has to ask about the cause. Its gnomes. The job boss must then hire a gnome medium to communicate with the little guys and work out differences. Then the job goes along swimmingly. Apparently. Anyway, some researchers wanted to find out just how much of the general Icelandic populace believes in little trolls, so they set up a very sneaky survey. First they’d flat out ask the peeps if they saw little men, and of course the peeps would say, oh no, we’re all educated people, no gnomes here, check Greenland, and things of this nature, so then the researchers would get craftier. They’d ask the peeps to imagine that they were landscaping their yard and there was a particular rock in their yard said to be a favorite haunt of gnomes. Would they move said rock? 9 out of 10 said no! Ha ha. So I’m blaming gnomes for the fridge situation.

Actually its not the refrigerator gnome I’m worried about, nor the Jeep Cherokee gnome who recently f-ed my carburetor. Those are known gnomes, I’ve got my eye on them. Its the known unknown gnomes and unknown unknown gnomes I’m worried about. In the known unknown gnome category are my fears that there is a clothes dryer gnome waiting for the precise moment I start to relax to start a massive lint fire, or the toilet gnome, just waiting until the twins drive me to the brink of insanity to flood my bathroom with poopy water. We don’t want those gnomes. Worse still, the dreaded unknown unknown gnomes just waiting to unleash some unforeseen grievous disaster on my life. Those gnomes are far and away the most dangerous. We really don’t want those gnomes.

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