Babies, Bottles, and Blankets

I have two older children who were 17 and 11 when I was pregnant with the twins.  They were always in school and playing sports so they were hardly home.  There was a certain calmness in the house on a daily basis you could hear the breeze coming through the window or read a book contently and probably finish it if it was that good.  Being pregnant with twins is when little sugar plums dance through your head about how fun it will be to dress them the same or what rhyming names you can name them but nothing absolutely nothing can really prepare you for what is about to happen. 

From one day to the next I was in a clean organized typical world then thrust into baby nation with two new babies which were like my first babies because I had totally forgotten everything from my first two and with all the advances made in the baby world I found I was really an amateur at this.

I think when I had my first kids there was like two choices of bottles and the Playtex nursers with the disposable bags which were the advanced form of bottle at the time.  Now there are about ten types of bottles to chose from and all of them doing something to relieve your baby of some symptom or to prevent some symptom.  Each made you feel guilty not to buy them because what if my babies now develop these symptoms and I could of prevented it by using these bottles.  Some were strait forward and some were contraptions with a few pieces that if not in place may mean that your baby would not be protected from the symptom.  I personally chose glass bottles because of all the drama around plastic and because I am an environmentalist I felt that glass was the best choice.  Good old Evenflo that was the strait forward way to go...for us.

Then the question was well how many do I need?  Really, how many bottles could I really go through in a day four or five each?  Well, by the end of the second month they had taken over their own cabinet and made their own dishwasher load and I say that so you can visualize how many bottles there were but I washed them all by hand what seems like 20 times a day.  It became an issue of survival and preparedness because if the bottles were not ready on demand it was like a natural disaster.

Not to mention how many bottle washer scrubbers I would go through in a month. I had a drawer full because when one broke I had to have another ready for action.


Blankets were also in abundance.  That seemed to be the second favorite gift people loved giving was blankets.  When I first saw how many blankets we had for them with no where to really store them all I immediately thought was who and how can we give some to people who needed them because we couldn't possibly need that many.  I was very wrong.  I ended up needing every one of them and sometimes couldn't wash them fast enough.  As it turned out one of the boys was a throw up baby and he threw up all the time on everything and still does to this day.  I have tried to find out what is wrong with this child but it is his way of letting you know a lot of things when he is unhappy.  We have trained him now to make it to the bathroom and it is a much calmer situation now than it was in the beginning.  He's just a throw up king.

The babies.  It was unbelievable to me to see two perfectly formed baby boys laying there in their little fetal positions wondering how in the world they were inside of me!  This is truly a miracle.  Everywhere you turned there was a baby or a baby swing or a baby bed.  The word BABY infiltrated every sentence, discussion, and thought that took place in this family and still does to this day.

God doesn't give us anything we can't handle and everyday since I had them I have truly been amazed at how we as humans are able to adapt and conquer any situation. I can't hear the calming breeze so easy anymore but the life in my house is definitely energizing.