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!
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.
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.) |
| From Staci's Time Capsule Videos |
Babies, there's hope! There was hope before, but it was theoretical. Now you can touch it. We went to flip the levers! There were lots of people, lots of first-time voters (not young) and people like Mommy who hadn't voted in a long long time because there wasn't much to vote for, lots of kids being shown the polls -- Christiane Amanpour said that New York City looked like places she'd covered where the first democratic election was happening, where people were so excited about casting their vote because it feels like it actually matters, and that really is what it felt like.
And you were there, babies. We were too excited to take decent photos but look some up when you come back to read this because it was really something...
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...
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?
Dear Babies,
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.
More new pix are here.
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.
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.)
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.
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!*)
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.
The blog is on summer vacation. No more prose, just Haikus like little tinkling ice cubes. Since twinness is all about squishing in extra things, our ice cubes are actually HaikuPlus, pronounced "ploo", which (obviously!) goes 5,7,7,5. The babies invite you to post your own, especially if you're a supposed blogger who never actually posts (Staci... FG...) Surely you can squeeze out 24 syllables.
Some days were so hot,
At the Thai Mission,
[Your haikuPlus here!]
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.
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!
Because moms like to be scolded about our child-rearing practices, we like to take the babies directly to the strangers who make themselves available to berate us. Apparently 1am is too late to have the babies on Metro North, even if they've been asleep for the previous 6 hours at Aunties Lili and Leki's house (while their mothers have gone, for our sins, to see Cry Baby and do some off-duty boozing.)
It's good times in the Bronx, as the babies bring Villagers, Brooklynites, Jersey girls and Irish jet-setters uptown like flies to honey. Did youse ever think you'd spend as much time in transit?!
Baby O and Baby Geo now both seem to know they have a sister. And a cat. Whatever those are!
