Eating Fun

Breakfast

Recently I diced some pre-cut watermelon chunks for the “fruit” portion of the girls’ daily fruit and cereal breakfast. It took some coaxing but I finally got Monkey to eat a piece. But she vehemently refused another bite and wouldn’t have anything else I offered her. I glanced over at Turtle, who had a mouthful of watermelon and another handful ready to stuff in the second there was any space. But Turtle will eat anything as long as she can feed it to herself. So I popped a piece in my mouth to check it out, and I nearly puked. I took one whiff of the rest of the watermelon, gagged, and threw the whole container in the garbage. Then I sent myself to the corner to write lines: I will not feed my children rotten fruit for breakfast. I will not feed my children rotten fruit for breakfast. I will not feed my children rotten fruit for breakfast. . . .


Snacks

The other day Turtle was playing by the window and I saw her pick something up from the sill and put something in her mouth. “Turtle?” I said, walking over to her. She looked up at me and smiled. Her little snack had slipped out of her mouth – a common problem she has when feeding herself - and was resting on her chin. I picked it off her face and put it in the palm of my hand. It was wet and gooey so I can’t be sure, but I think it was a dead spider.

How We Got Here

I had trouble getting pregnant. It took 25 months, to be exact. By that time I was shooting myself up with Gonal F, a “super ovulation” drug. I had to go to the doctor’s office every other day for blood tests and exams, to make sure the nightly injections into my belly weren’t causing more than the normal amount of havoc. We knew the chance of twins increased pretty significantly once we graduated to Gonal F. But I didn’t care. I was so desperate by then it didn’t matter what eventually came out of by body, as long as it was tiny and cuddly and wore a diaper.

The Gonal F and accompanying insemination did the trick. A positive home pregnancy test, followed by two separate positive blood tests at the doctor’s office, confirmed we’d finally made a baby.

We went in for a sonogram when I was six weeks pregnant. It’s standard procedure in my doctor’s office to have sonograms early and often when you’re on the fertility juice.

The nurse slid the ultrasound wand right up to my uterus. I immediately saw two big dark sacs on the screen. It was completely quiet for about ten seconds. Then the nurse said, very slowly, “I see two . . .”

“So do I!” I said.

“So do I!” said my husband, N.

And so there were two. Two little girls – Turtle and Monkey – born October 22, 2007. Now, ten months later, we have rearranged our lives to make room for our wonderful, beautiful, perfect daughters. But as a person with deeply embedded controlling tendencies and a desperate need for order in my world, I am still struggling to adjust to the chaos of having twins. This blog is about that chaos, my flimsy attempts to control it, and the two little babies who really call the shots around here.