Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for November, 2008

I’ve always been a D-list relative. I don’t take it personally, its just the way of things. We’re always coming and going from one continent to the next, so our movements (and ourselves) have become less interesting to others over time. Relatives got used to us being away, so much so that even when we were back, living nearby, they still thought of us as away.

Well, now all that has changed…

In the 3 minutes it took to birth 2 baby girls I jumped to the front of the queue, past the doorman and straight to the VIP section. I have taken my place behind the velvet ropes. Watch out Beyonce. The twins are rock stars, and their distance (5000 miles or so) only adds to their allure. Our continental movements have suddenly become dead interesting to everyone. Our arrival in New England has been talked up, prepared for, celebrated, and white knuckle anticipated for the past 6 months. Furniture has been acquired or re-arranged to suit all our preferences and needs. Our suite has been assembled, our every whim catered to. We can do no wrong. The princesses have made me the Queen of the castle. Simply by being born. Amazing.

Why did no one tell me? Babies mean Power. And lots of, yo.

About these ads

Read Full Post »

“I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.
-Jerry Seinfeld

Oh boy, I accomplished nothing today, maybe less than nothing, and it was sensational. I really wish we’d tried this sooner. I’m not sure I should be writing this, actually, because it may count as something and I’m really hell bent on nothingness today. Well, I certainly never write anything of importance, so I think it still counts as nothing. We’ll go with that. And technically, if we’re going full disclosure, I did bake a lemon bundt cake today, and Jungledad did wash the bedroom ceiling, but that’s all we did so it still counts as nothing.

Its a rebound thing I think. Last month and the first half of this month were completely insane. Shifts up the volcano up the whazoo, DIY projects, flights, illnesses, milestones, and everything in between. We crammed so much in last month we figure we’re good for the next few months, maybe the next few years. Just chillin is beyond awesome. Its foreign and exotic to me, like tofu or speaking Dutch. I plan on doing it until it feels weird. That’s my strategy with most things.

We’re ridiculous people, my husband and me. We just can’t sit still, never have done. We get up in the morning (if we ever go to bed) and set an itinerary of 10,000 things to be accomplished by nightfall. I don’t even know what drives us, I guess its just this overwhelming compulsion to DO. We’re total hypocrites because we get frustrated with the twins for being exactly like us, forgoing sleep in favor of doing. Refusing to sit, always in motion. Always the doing. We can’t just talk about things, we must DO them. Often we do them wrong, or unnecessarily, but this doesn’t dampen our enthusiasm in the least.

Hey, let’s redo the entire house, top to bottom between the hours of 8pm to 5am for 2 months straight. Let’s roast a turkey with all the fixins in August. Lets drive cross country and add loads of crazy time consuming detours so we can stop in towns like “Epiphany” and then find ourselves writing on the chalkboard in the one room schoolhouse where Laura Ingalls Wilder used to teach. Let’s go to Peru and hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Let’s paint the girls room purple. Lets boil strawberry guavas into a syrup, lets hike up the volcano, let’s drive all the way across the island and then back again. Let’s drive across the Atacama desert in Chile until we accidentally cross the Argentinian border and the border guards haul one of us to the interrogation room and offer a cigarette. Let’s bake a key lime pie and pick the limes ourselves. Let’s stay in an old olive mill and drive through Tuscany, eating sheep cheese and drinking Chianti. Let’s go to the Cannes Film festival in our grimy student clothes and make fun of the celebrities. Let’s drive across the French Alps until we have to pull over and barf. Let’s sail to Bimini and meet a 94 year old man who used to fish with Hemingway. Lets move to an island in the middle of the Pacific. Lets have babies. Lets start a blog.

Better yet, let’s do nothing. I like nothing. I could get used to nothing. I could sleep with nothing and feel no guilt. That nothing, its really something, I highly recommend it.


Read Full Post »

This morning I went into the girls room and found poor Mumu using a puffed out pee pee diaper as a pillow. No doubt it was soft and squishy, but standards babygirl! I can’t imagine how this happened. Yea right, I know exactly how it happened. Last night was brutal. I blame the pediatrician.

We went in for the twinnies 9 month checkup, and all was grand. Well, almost grand. Our pediatrician left the island to go live/practice in a fabulous Colorado ski town/resort, but not before she imparted some advice to me in hushed tones behind the baby scale: Get them off this island before they reach school age. She looks to her left and right. Don’t tell anyone I said that. Oh I know, sister. I was the only one over 19 in my OB’s waiting room. The girls will be coming of age elsewhere.

Her replacement is nice, great credentials and all that, but its not the same. Sigh. Anyway, so this was the first time we met the new doc and he was happy with the girls progress but of course he’d never met them at 3lbs, so he can’t really see how far they’ve come. Not holding that against him, just sayin… We were thrilled that they are in a comfortable position on the old growth chart and happily keeping pace with babies 2 months younger. Go superpreemies! But. But we did fess up that Lulu wakes us several times in the night wanting bottles and the doc said that has to stop. You can imagine how well that’s going! So it was hell night, a never ending stream of tears and yelling and 2 little zombie vampire babies trying to suck out the last dredges of our sanity. It was Thriller. Thriller night. But nobody was dancing…

Read Full Post »

I’m reading this book and it’s kind of messing with my head. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. Yea Oprah turned me on to it, I admit it. It’s all kinds of crazy. I love it. Its massively long, 973 pages yo, but so interesting it’s just flying by. I’m on page 433 and I haven’t been bored yet. It takes place in medieval times, normally not my scene, yet I’m totally riveted. There’s monks and priors and bishops and archbishops and earls and lords and masons and squires and knights and outlaws, you name it! I think its so interesting because the story is neither romanticized nor made excessively violent and it just feels so real, like I’m right in the midst of it. Also, I’m right in the midst of organizing the twins baptism, and writing to priests and deacons, and I feel like I’m in the book because a page doesn’t go by without someone writing to a priest or prior or what have you. Loads of religious power struggles and plots and favors and alliances going on there. Like Survivor: Medieval England, the ecclesiastical version.

It reminds me of when I lived on this other island (in the Atlantic and separated only by a small bridge, totally different dealio than here) working on a massive Schooner (this one actually did make a lot of coinage, not for me mind..) and the only place on the island to check email was this restaurant called “The Opera House,” where they had a few old PCs in a back room and Opera blaming at top volume. I’d be writing emails and I’d start to notice that they were way more dramatic than they needed to be, but I couldn’t help myself. It took like 3 visits for me to figure out that it was the Opera music messing with my emotions/writing.

Anyway, like my mind, the girls are everywhere. Crawling, standing, cruising, falling, shrieking. At the end of the day, I am exhausted. So I curl up with a good book :)

Read Full Post »

My little Valentines twinnies are 9 months old today! On this momentous occasion, only one thought comes to mind: Can I trade them in for human babies?

I’m telling you, the sounds coming out of these creatures are not human. They’ve moved past their talking like pirates with emphysema phase (which at least was vaguely human) and into something even more bizarre. And loud. They’ll be doing their cute little baby babble, mmmm, mmmm, da da da da, etc., then all of a sudden erupt into an an indignant bear growl.

They’re acting like bears too. This morning Mumu tried to drag Lulu across the room by her hair. She made it a few feet before I caught up to her, the little grizzly. Lulu is no better. She constantly grabs her hairless sister by the scruff and tries to vault over her head. Also, they both appear to be hunting the cat, constantly stalking it and trying to bite.

Hmm, it appears we are returning to civilization not a day too soon…

Read Full Post »

I am a bad Catholic. I admit it. I haven’t been to church in bloody ages. The nuns who taught me in Catholic school are shaking their collective heads and rosaries in dismay I’m sure. But even bad Catholics want their children to be baptized, or at least this one does.

The problem is this: my whole fam and most of my friends, including the prospective Godparents are a cazillion miles away and won’t be stopping by anytime soon. Baptism on this island would be a lonely, Godparentless affair. So, I came up with the nifty plan of getting the twins baptized at my sister’s church (she’s the only good Catholic left among us) in New England next month when we visit. Great plan, right? Wrong. Apparently this violates cannon law. CANNON LAW! Leave it to me to violate cannon law and not have any fun doing it.

The only loophole in the law is if I somehow convince the Catholic church in the town I live in, a church that doesn’t know me from Eve as I have never shown my face there, to provide the baptism preparatory classes for us, then write a letter on our behalf to the priest at the church in New England giving him permission to baptize the twins. Oh, like within in the next week. Agggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!

Apparently you can’t baptize just anywhere. Parish hopping is not encouraged.

So if there are any Christians out there on better terms with the Big Guy than my slacker self, please say a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers for the jungletwins, we need all the help we can get!

Read Full Post »

All is plumeria and sunshine. Jungledad has time off after all the volcano shifts this month and is minding the twins around the clock, leaving me free as a Na Na. I’ve been reading, sketching, and generally luxuriating. Total bliss. What’s more, no more volcano shifts for at least 3 months- wooohoooo! And a month off! From mid-Dec to mid-Jan we will be living it up in New England. My Mum has already called dibs on the babies, which is awesome because there are two pair of snowshoes, ice skates, and ice augers with our names on them. Yee haw! Plus, as my Mum raised 5 kids and currently runs an early intervention program, we can frolic in the winter wonderland worry free and guilt free. Merry merry Christmas to me ;)

I do have one concern though. That dirty little four letter word. I’m speaking of course, of cold. The girls have never experienced it. They are tropical babies. I’m kind of afraid they’ll wig out big time, like- what is this strange and painful feeling in my extremities? Why on earth are my teeth chattering? Why does the wind feel like icy sand paper instead of flowery scented angel’s kisses? Until I can figure this out, I must scream as loud as I possibly can until my mother’s sanity melts into a puddle and bleeds out her ears.

Hmmmm, so I guess the girls will be staying indoors most of the time, but I don’t think they’ll mind. They’ll be getting an insane amount of attention, and in baby world, there’s nothing better. Not quite so confident about the 3 flights it will take to get to New England, but then, its a small price to pay for a “wicked good” month.

Read Full Post »

I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me. Baby gates are very important. The way Lulu gallops across the room desperately flinging herself and her eager little mouth at any power cord she can find re-enforces this point, as do the stairs and the tipsy round table I knocked over and smashed half the china with (accidentally). Dangerous things must be gated off. I know this, but I hate it, I really do. I hate to see my little baby girls pressed up against a grate like little refugees.

It doesn’t help that its hot in the tropics so I let them just hang in their diapers most of the time, dishevelled from wrestling each other and inevitably crusted somewhere with food I’ve missed, giving me wretched, soul-crushing “how could you” looks (as in how could lock me out of the study where there’s like 50 electronics cords to chew) and they look like they’ve come straight out of National Geographic.

I keep thinking about the Tom Petty song “You Don’t Have to Live Like a Refugee.” Well, apparently for safety’s sake they do.

Read Full Post »

Everyone, especially every Mom, has ways of handling stress; some coping mechanism or vice that gets her by. In my younger non-wife non-mommy days, I tended to favor the vices (the fun ones anyway). Now that I’m a Mom, I favor Mick Jagger. Yes, I realize he himself often qualifies as a vice, but not the way I use him.

Technically I stole the Mick Jagger coping mechanism from someone else. A crewmate. When I was 20 or 21 or so I lived on a schooner off of Long Island. I was a deckhand. It was a passenger schooner, though we didn’t exactly do a blistering trade. Most of the time it was just the Capt, the first mate, and me. It was a pretty intense scene, and with no TV, phone, internet, etc., you tend to do a lot of talking, or piercing eachother’s ears with fish hooks, but that’s another story. Anyway, the first mate told me about a year he spent studying aboard in China. He said he became gravely ill, but still went to class every day because it would be a massive, disastrous insult to not go. He used several sentences and adjectives to describe the severity of his condition, but I’ve forgotten most of them because we drank a lot of whiskey on that boat and weren’t adverse to bumming the occasional dube off the high school population of the nearest harbor. (Ahhh, the sweet vices of yesteryear…) The only thing I remember him saying about the mystery ailment is “I almost died,” which he said multiple times, but then in retrospect he told me several stories where he “almost died,” so who knows.

Anyway, he would listen to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” every day, many times a day, to gather the strength to get up. He claimed the song saved his life. I’ve never looked at that song the same way since. It was like a curtain was pulled back and I could see the awesome power and total genius of Jagger’s masterpiece. I adopted it as my own coping mechanism and have relied on it heavily ever since I had the twins. It just calms me, helps me put things in perspective, gets me pumped up to face whatever life throws at me.

A few months back I was talking to my sister on the phone and she asked if the twins napped and I answered that no they never nap, and she said, “Wow…..I’d be drinking if I were you……a lot.”

Nope, not me. I’ve got Jagger.

What have you got? I’m kind of curious about what other Moms do to feel better, relax, recharge.

Read Full Post »

Before I got married my mother gave me a Heloise book full of excellent advise such as, If you don’t use the good china, the next wife will! Well I’ve nothing to fear on that front. I already accidentally smashed half the good china by stumbling into the wobbly round table it sat on (just unpacked the previous morning), sending it flying. Bye bye special wedding present Crate & Barrel Somoa dinner service. It was kind of a domestic perfect storm that caused the fancy plates disaster. They were balanced a bit precariously, and the table was in a weird place in the center of the room, (must have been moved for some now forgotten reason), and I had just moved into the house and didn’t know the lay of the land, and, most of all, I was stumbling around because it was 4am and the twins were at about -4weeks or less and made me get up +500 times in the night to attempt to nurse them and I was so damn exhausted I just collapsed/smashed into the table and it went down like a pile of very expensive bricks.

The good silverware is gone too. I never even had a chance to break or damage it in some way. The movers on one side or the other stole it. All. So long special wedding present Crate & Barrel Tuscany cutlery. You would think this depresses me, but no no. I see the silver lining. If a home-wrecking 2nd wife ever comes on the scene, the skank’s getting nothing but a box of broken pottery and 4 mismatched forks.

HOW DO LIKE THEM APPLES?

Read Full Post »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.