A beginning

I am a mama to twins. When I'm out in the world with my babies we get a lot of attention. People watch us as we walk by (which I'm sure is partly because of our giant, high-tech stroller). People talk to us in the aisles of the grocery store, often until I politely excuse myself explaining that we have a small window of time when both kids are chilling during this food-getting expedition so I have to move on to the next aisle in the hopes that food on shelves will jog my memory with an idea of something I might like to make for dinner. The things we hear are:

"Twins! How cute!"
"Twins! Boy and girl? You're so lucky! You're all done now" (Ha! Yes, keep reading. . .)
"Twins! Are they identical or fraternal?"
"Twins! I'm a twin/my neighbor had twins/I have twin nieces, etc"
"Twins! Do they run in your family?" (Which I'm convinced is the polite way of asking if we did IVF)
or
"Twins! Did you do IVF?"

By far the most common thing I hear is:
"Boy, you sure have your hands full!"

The last time I heard this was from a jogger who slowed down to say it to me as I sat on a blanket with both kids rolling around, eating grass. For the record, I was not eating any grass.

And yes, that is for sure. We're nine-and-a-half months into this adventure and our hands are definitely full. It is hard. As I write this, one baby is loudly protesting about being put down for a nap. I will not be getting said twin because it is nap time and that needs to be that. Mostly. Except when it's not. I digress.

Twin parenting is hard but I think parenting in general is hard. My husband thinks our friends who became parents before we did were less than truthful about how hard it is but I think it's just impossible to understand how different life will be once kids arrive. Needless to say, our worlds have been rocked by the arrival of these babies. We're tired.

With twins, the parents we met said "The first year is really hard but then it gets easier." So imagine our surprise when, six months into our children's lives, we discovered I was pregnant again! And imagine our. . .there truly are no words for this emotion, when I reclined on the ultrasound couch at ten weeks pregnant to see not one but two babies. Ultrasounds are not easy to read, at least not for me. Throughout my first pregnancy I usually felt like I was looking at the surface of the moon as the tech pointed things out to me. But at this new visit I clearly saw two white circles. I blinked.

"There's only one, right?" I asked

"Actually. . . there are two" said the suddenly-kind ultrasound technician.

Our son and our daughter arrived two months early, in June instead of August. These new babies are due in August which means the absolute biggest age difference between the two sets will be fourteen months. So. Yeah. Um.

Hands full, times two.