Georgia Makes Her Own Way

Today I think Georgia officially became a toddler. She ventured out entirely on her own for some long distances, occasionally even forgetting to hold her arms up in the air for balance. I don't think crawling will ever feel the same.

Ce n'est pas un poop.

Mommy's French turns out to be godawful, Mama's hand gestures only get you so far, and apparently Parisian restaurants do not look on starving screaming babies as even moderately charmante. Just run around this sensible-but-so-interesting, ancienne-meets-nouvelle, well-planned courtyard that makes us all look brilliant, and let's not talk to anyone. Next time we go on vacation, in ten years, you can do the communicating. Start studying.


Paris video (mostly Odessa learning to walk all alone!!!, and the sisters learning to play together in Gaelle's apartment caring more about not being in the @#$%^ stroller than about being in Paree) coming soon.

Trouble walks

No present is as much fun as [shredding, eating, spitting out in slimy gobs] the paper it comes in, and no toy is as entertaining as tearing the child locks off the cabinets and digging into the tupperware. Oh children, you're so retro and you don't even know it's hip!

Spring photos: here.

Not snow white after all?

It's oatmeal... it's sawdust... it's poop... No, it's the Monkey's first freckle ever! (On her ankle. It's right there, yes you can see it! Oh, come on.)

See photos from January '09.

Teef

This machine eats cheerios.

Time capsule/blogging backward

Dear world, it turns out it's way more fun to hang out with the babies than to blab/blog about them. Sorry, fans of the twins and their daily foibles! Call us and we'll bring them over instead.

Meanwhile, the entire contents of Staci's camera (which is a little time capsule of the last 4 months) are here. It's summertime in the camera! Which it is not in the real world. Pink cheeks and grumpy munchkins sweating in bear suits is where we're at right now.

Indoors, the babies are standing up a lot, hanging onto the fence of the baby jail that now takes up half of the living room. Odessa likes to let go and practice surfing the living room floor. Jojo is a boinger -- she hangs a sock out of her mouth, pounds the keyboard of the music table and jounces from the knees and head-bangs. As frequent diners-out in Little Italy della Bronx, they eat crusts of bread, because they have teeth. Teeth! Georgia is breaking out her first upper tooth, and Odessa has four big massive choppers on top. And they sit in highchairs and stuff. And throw things.

The doctor reports that they're "normal" and "seem smart." (I would put it the other way around -- they seem normal, but we're not through with them yet; and they are smart, so smart! It's all framing. It's probably because they read and eat many fine books. How many books do they eat? You be the judge: Odessa weighs 18lbs 2oz and is 28" tall. Georgia weighs 16lbs 11oz, and is 29.5" tall. Not noted by the doctor: Georgia eats like she's practicing for a pie contest, whereas Odessa clamps her lips together and shakes her head No way, I'm not eating that!!! So no one should worry about which little Cinderella is deprived and starving, and which one is overfed.)

xo
Mommy

Here's some catch-up video...

From Staci's Time Capsule Videos

We have tooth.

Odessa has a tooth. Yes, not the beginnings of a tooth, but a tooth that's in and biting. Took about 3 weeks to come in. Just the one. It's... I don't know. Cute! Very square, as they often are. Tiny and porcelain-looking, when we're allowed to see it.

Everyone is playing together now. We steal toys out of hands, pacifiers out of mouths. Sometimes, when it's done to us, we complain, but mostly we just find something else to grab and chew. Apples are especially delicious, when there's a bite out of them and we can lick the white part. They bounce nicely and make a loud thump.

We have nice grins. Georgia's is, as always, pure flirty sugar. Odessa's has gone from the excited gaping maw to a big wide smile that seems positively joyful. We laugh at each other and smash our hands up and down when we see each other. Or the cat. Animal sounds are funny. Life is pretty fun. Also, all the grown-ups we know are pregnant, which seems very promising.

Whole Tiny People

The babies are short wobbly people! They don't have language yet, but they study the things around them (using their tactile little monkey tongues as much as anything else) and they look to see how other people are responding to them. Their eyes are really lit up and attentive and much more advanced than their hands. They get a little shy now around people. Odessa even cries when something scary happens (although I did trip over the stroller and face-plant in the babies' laps last week, and all I got was shocked stares, and, from Georgia, the special are-you-kidding-me-with-this? eyebrows.)

Milestones show up every day. The bouchkies had their first East Village garden klezmer show the other night, with the magic of tight quarters, mosquitos, dim lights and razor-witted, love-laced songs, and reunions with all the friends who had heard about them but not yet pinched their pajamaed tushies. They wear shoes now. They're outgrowing the co-sleeper, and we fight with ourselves over whether it's okay to keep moving them into the bed, and for how long? They still don't like rice cereal, but it doesn't seem important enough to force them. They only have one cat now. They didn't watch the first presidential debate. Lots of stuff...

I don't know why the babies must be called bouchkies, but bouchkies they clearly are. I googled it, thinking it might be an inherited word and not just a mishmosh of the kutchky and buba and kush-kush my cousins and I were called. And look what turned up: "Buchky is a Georgian toast (Republic of, not State of), sort of pronounced "butch-kee," that means when you tap glasses it's like the leaves of a bush all coming together." That's so lovely! If it's true. And it has Georgia and everything.

Hey babies: speaking of Georgia, do we need to talk about Georgia, the place, not in the south? The question of whether we had it in mind when we named our Georgia has finally left your Mommy with Georgia of Eastern Europe in mind. And now the war. What a strange sweet mix of sounds -- it looks in transliteration like Scandanavian and maybe Arabic, and Latin, some Slavic ones. Will your names draw you to it?

New photos are here.

Late Summer

Dear Babies,

Summer is winding down and the ceiling fan is still hanging half-installed. Your mama goes back to work in a week and a half, and it seems like there are no Bronx childcare slots for babies till next September. The living room is a parking lot for the jumperoo and its many sisters: a swing, a rocker, two bouncers, an exersaucer, three strollers, many car seats for various reasons. Babies, you still have cats, in spite of your mommies' dogged efforts to find them homes where they'll score at least a little human attention and won't send Mommy on frantic searches for the inhaler. SNL is still in reruns, but we're waiting so hard to see the [Tina Fey cameo] mock of Sarah Palin and (minus the outrage) of Michelle Obama. You only have one Obama t-shirt between the two of you, but someone wears it at least every other day. Not because, as they say, "we've drunk the Obama kool-aid," but because we're even more terrified of a McCain world now that he's McCain-Palin. (When you're old enough to read this, will people be as grateful for the Anne Kilkenny letter as we are now?)

You're growing like weeds, and constantly seem just ready to do something new: talk, crawl, eat... We've moved on to a whole new size of clothing, and are ready to pass off a whole crate of hand-me-downs already -- you're bigger than other kids, how crazy! And you do bigger baby things, like crying to keep yourselves awake instead of going to bed; screaming, shaking and gasping until finally, miserably, you pass out. Like going from your big open-mouthed grins to laughing heh-heh-heh-heh-heh when Mommy's being so so funny or holding you up in the air. Like you can reach all the stuff on the jumperoo and the exersaucer, which you couldn't do two weeks ago.

You went to Wave Hill, touched and smelled all kinds of summer flowers, sat your naked tushies in the grass, and fell asleep in the shadows of leaves. You had a house-sit staycation in Chelsea, very glam, and saw lots of your downtown grown-up admirers. Later you came back down to fall asleep on the benches of a great Indian restaurant, among mosquitos from the balcony and coos from your cousine Jessica, and from Bruce and Alfonso who helped you get born.

You went for your vaccinations and the doctor didn't make Jojo get the one that made her so sick last time. We tried to start you on rice cereal but you puked it up like crazy and cried for milk, so jeez, okay, we'll try again in a little while. You drool buckets and it seems like you're teething -- got some sharp ones under those gums -- but nothing yet. You talk to each other sometimes now, which is most exciting of all, to see each of you find your first friend.

New things now: yesterday we went and worked on your Mommy papers, and ate great bagels and you got to play with all the slightly bigger kids, and then you went to Brooklyn in the middle of Hurricane Gustav... and today we went to visit my Nana in Woodlawn, where we sat under the magnolia tree that she makes grow into so much shade, and told her all about you.

Photos of some of all that are here.

The Pill's Progress

More new pix are here.

When you are an only child, a mishmosh and a Gemini, and not a blond & blue eyed Aries twin (began your mother's somber tale) the world tends to feel like it has a very sharp and special kind of teeth. The world says: A baby? A joy. Two babies? Triple happiness.

But you are not so concerned with your own bliss. You look into your babies' perfect, silent faces, which look like wizened, grown-up faces of people who are silent because it's judicious; who could talk if they liked. You look at gas pain that tightens the lips and clenches the eyelids. You see the eye-widened gaze at rustling leaves and flashing lights. When you push the stroller too fast, you see fawnlike panic. Eventually they giggle at you -- and also at anyone else. You stare and stare, waiting for some sign of recognition that you, and not the subway token clerk, you and not the take-out man, you and not the super, the neighbor, the babysitter, or the lady in the elevator, are the mother of these babies. And you think, GODAMMIT! Why won't you talk to me?! How else, when you make googly eyes at everything that moves, can I notice that it's me you love?

It's only a question, I'm told, that a Gemini lonely would ask. And maybe even then only if they were the workaday stiff who just put in family appearances in on mornings and weekends. Apparently you're just supposed to know.


Luckily for us and unluckily for the therapist, Odessa has started to laugh and smile at us more regularly, and in response to happy things. And our Georgia, who has been so pliant and good, has started to complain sometimes when we put her to bed before she's ready. They have opinions at last, so every smile is that much sweeter. We do stand around like collectors waiting for them. Especially the desperate, craven Geminists who turn out to be ruled by their children's rationed affections.

Plus ça change

The babes are changing madly... Stand them in the Jumperoo and they're whole new people with real person faces, cooing strange and beautiful whale noises at anyone who'll listen: plastic roos, spinning gears, clacky beads, singing frogs. Lots of photos here and hopefully more to come -- including the video of Odessa finding her feet -- from Bethany.

The constant attention of many cooing aunts, uncles, grown cousins and baby cousin, all gathered at Myrtle Beach, seems to have the babies growing and waking faster than ever.
They're getting Habits now. Odessa is no longer willing to go out to dinner no matter what's on the menu. She wants to walk around, and better yet, to just leave out of the restaurant. (If you try to come back in, the lip starts to quiver and curl and you're in trouble all over again.) Georgia, if you lean her back, slams herself forward in a sit-up... a trick she first unveiled for Great Grandma Dot. And she seems to have learned how to eat. Amazing!

The beach itself may have been incidental -- who knows what a baby takes in, when so little of it is remembered? But they looked devilishly cute in their stripey kits... which are more for the mothers, as we found out when we dipped everyone in the ocean. Really, the baby bathing suit is not the issue. Naked would be fine. The bigger problem is the sopping gelatinous diaper mess. (Although plastic diapers, grossly, don't seem so wet once the outside dries off. Chh! Feh.)

The funny part is that, the more conscious the bubelehs get, the more they look alike... till finally we took a picture and found, for a second, that we almost couldn't tell the difference.

P.S. What's with all the French? Don't know. Staci thinks all dogs are boys and all cats are girls. Maybe all babies are French. They certainly wear a lot of very daring horizontal stripes.

At Swim, Two Pupchiks

The kids had their first dip this weekend in the Roe-Jan swimming hole in Milan. It was hot hot hot and the babies were surprisingly willing to be dipped in cool water (although today Odessa cried about what was coming when we ran the water for her bath. Anticipation has arrived!*)

As we swished the babies around, a pickup full of 14 kids and 3 dogs arrived, all of whom started swimming a bit up the stream, which meant we were in the wrong spot... so we went back the next day with friends, neighbors and faraway visitors to the nice deep currenty part where they'd been. 24 years it took me to figure out where that swimming hole was. And the babies? Less than 4 months, the smarties.

So it looks like the baby-blob days are over. The kids are watching things that move (like the ceiling fan), talking to bears, giggling at each other and barking to let us know whenever the plinking musical mobile needs to be rewound.

More photos of the babies waking up are here...

*Aaaaaahahaha

The grins are in

The books and the bad, bad internet said the babies should've been smiling a a few weeks ago, but they weren't. It wasn't clear if they didn't like us, were already doing the teenage sulk or thought they were supposed to be posing for some grim daguerreotype portrait, but their range of emotion was limited: sleeping was as close as we got to "happy," when chomping on a nipple they showed a sort of relief, and on the other end of the spectrum was hellacious screaming associated with stinging, bilious spit-up. Being a baby has looked like a huge ordeal.

But all that is suddenly over now. They're smiling like champs. Odessa is still a little coy with the grins, doesn't want to give 'em out too easy. Georgia cheeses from ear to ear whether it was funny or not, and the other day she said "ha!" Odessa is saying more serious things like "ah, hmm, er," and little throat vibrations.

Here are photos from the smiling, and from the heat wave that happened at the same time... (Steel yourself, Bethany!)

And bébés, listen: just don't do anything new and exciting this week while you're away, okay? Don't go any further than "ha!" -- save your first multisyllabic laughs and muttering for when you get home...

xo

Mommy

How they grow

Georgia is up to 8lbs 3oz. Odessa is almost 9lbs (8'13, but she squirmed on the scale.) They feel more different than that... although they both feature that same squishy delishusness. Two babies!

More photos are here.

Things that matter, things that don't.

Things that matter:

Georgia weighs seven pounds, and Odessa weighs almost EIGHT.

They're growing faster than zucchini in July, but more delicious (and unlike zucchini, we don't wonder what in the name of Britney we're going to do with that much baby.)

They eat four thousand times a day. They no longer sleep for more than an hour or two at a time. When they wake up crying, they wake up the other one too. Also, we've taken to calling them "that one" and "the other one." We're tired.

(Photo: Odessa at Odessa (the diner) with Aunties Lorna and Mary Ann)

Things that don't:

Everyone is very concerned with whether the babies are boys or girls. Staci has taken the brunt of it... She got yelled at by a lady who thought we were creating traumatic confusion for them by not draping them in pink. Another person was upset because they were wearing blue (which is mostly all there is besides pink) but then realized that there was a pink blanket in the stroller and calmed right down.

It boiled over this weekend. Previously, an old queen had called to congratulate and inquire about gender, but was adorably addled and ended up asking "what's their sexuality?" Which seems no weirder or more intrusive than the demand to know what bits the babies are sporting Down There. I said "they're queer, haha!" and we shared a little guffaw.

But then this weekend at Bob Kohler's memorial, we were loitering by the pop'ems when Penny Arcade asked the boys-or-girls question, and I had just had enough and reverted to "they're queer!" Penny freaked out.

- How do you know?! Did you do The Test? The Test that the whole country is hoping for, so they can abort the gay babeeees!!?!

- No, I'm pretty sure it's nurture.

- I thought we were about freeeedommm!

Flotilla was nearby, and whispered to her "No, it's good -- then they'll be on our side!"

(Photo: Baby O with Aunty LaurieWen at Bob's memorial.)

Later, during her eulogizing of Bob, she performance arted us in retort. Penny repeated the conversation we'd had 20 minutes earlier, but shriekier, even more accusing, over twanging guitars. I'm not sure how it was related to the eulogy...

Anyway, turns out that babies' gender coding is a topic that seems to strip onlookers of all decorum and erase strangers' sense of boundaries between themselves and our family. No such thing as just letting the babies be -- people want you to graffiti their grown-up identity onto them right now. And if they think you've written it wrong, you're in for an all-out intervention. Yikes! I was thinking I just wanted the babies to experience the exciting breadth of the world, but now I've gone all protectionist. Kindly step away from the babies.

Zeroeth birthday.

This weekend, May 3rd or May 4th depending whether you heed doctors in Boston or New York, was the babies' zeroeth birthday. Their 40th week since hatching as little twin pre-zygotes. Their due date. We took them out for crepes. All the Brooklyn aunties came...

Georgia wakes up

Baby Geo played with something for the first time a few days ago (no idea when, time is a delicious marshmallow.) Seems simple, but given that the kids hadn't done much till then except lie around and eat, it's huge. Thanks to Uncle Nikita and Cousin Nikki for the toy that sparked the big awakening!

Odessa's First Graduation

Both Odessa and Georgia are really putting on the pounds. Well, one pound anyway. But when you only have 5lbs, one makes a major difference. Born at 4lbs 10oz, Odessa weighed in at 5lbs 9oz on April 24th, one month after birth. This means that she has graduated from her Preemie wardrobe to actual newborn attire. (Although to be honest, some of those are still a bit big on her.)

Georgia (pictured here wearing the cupcake) while still sporting the preemie threads, weighed in at 5lbs on April 24th. This up a pound and a half from her birth weight. She'll get to those newborn clothes before you know it.

Both girls are eating really well, although still have some trouble keeping it down. Both are getting much more alert, looking around and checking out their surroundings. Georgia is particularly observant and wide eyed. And Odessa is very vocal, grunting so much, she is about to start making words out of it.

Growth spurt

The babies are growing and their public is demanding new stats:
Georgia: 4lbs 7oz, 18 inches
Odessa: 4lbs 13 oz, 18 inches (maybe more)

In other news, they've recently been to the doctor... a lot. They're stars of the waiting room. They pee on the nurses. They give the old ladies naches. All in the line of duty.

And they made their first trip to a bar. Okay, it was during the day, people! They were with their Nana! Don't panic.