Mad About Multiples!

Why I Believe in Miracles

August is a strange time for me.  This is the month that I celebrate the life of my beautiful daughter, who just turned five.  I also mourn the loss of her twin, Peyton, who died at birth.  From outward appearances, my involvement in Gemini Crickets stems from my being the mom of my crazy three-and-a-half year old twin boys.  But, I was a twin mom even before that when I got pregnant with my identical twin girls.

Mine is a somewhat confusing tale to outsiders.  They ask if my twin boys were born premature and I shake my head as I remember the birth of the boys, one who weighed just over seven pounds; the other, just under seven pounds.  The doctor and nurses exclaimed as they pulled the boys out, “Wow, those are BIG twins!”  If I happen to mention that my daughter was 13 weeks premature, inevitably the next question is, “Do they know why?”  The answer to this is unfortunately somewhat complicated and too tragic for public consumption so I usually respond with something vague.

The situation is that Nicole and Peyton were in a precarious physiological state when they were in my womb.  Being identical twins, they shared a placenta and were at risk for a condition called “twin-to-twin-transfusion-syndrome” or TTTS.  Single babies actually reside in two sacs.  The outer sac is the amniotic sac; the inner is the chorionic sac.  When twins share a chorionic sac, they also share a placenta and there is a danger that their blood supplies can become connected.  This results in one twin literally giving the other a transfusion.  As a result, one twin gets too much blood/nutrients (the recipient); the other not enough (the donor).   This places a lot of strain on both babies and the mortality rate is 60-100%.  Strangely, it is often the recipient who has the harder time due to the stress of all the extra fluids on the baby’s organs, but this wasn't the case with us.  Nicole was the recipient and Peyton was the donor.

Topic Week Recap: Confessions From Never Say Neverland

Wow - that did feel good! We aired our dirty laundry on a crowded line and nobody told us to take it down. That's how it goes in Never Say Neverland where the dirty laundry never ends and the population keeps climbing. Whether you have singletons or multiples or both, parenting is hard work. There is no perfect parent. There is no perfect parenting style. Parenting is a learning process, one that goes through changes and backtracks and baffling turns. We've learned to be flexible, we've learned not to judge, we've learned to laugh at ourselves and we've learned that what we said we'd do (or not do) before we had kids was totally insane a wee bit idealistic.

A recap of this week's posts:

Akemi/svtwinmom from Chalk and Cheese Chronicles worries her kids are now the bullies in Keeping My Inner Sanctimommy at Bay

Susan from Thoughts from the Delirious Mind tries not to scream at her kids in Never Say Never

Amy T. from Audren and Nathan reassures herself that she was born to be a mom (right?)

Lisa George from The Curious Georges reexamines her views on parenting in My Life, Examined

Mari B. tries to control her kids...and her past judgments in Please Control Yourself

Polly F. from Fox Tales isn't a bad mom, just a flexible one in I'll Never Do That

Linda D/MommyTwinGirls from Solheim Photography admits to Backpedaling on the TV-thing

On behalf of Mad About Multiples, thank you for reading along. Now go and air your dirty laundry. We won't judge you.

Original post to Mad About Multiples.

My life, examined

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living.  However, I am a big proponent of denial (and that ain't no river in Egypt.)  Once again, at the prompting of Akemi, I am having to write about a subject that I’d rather just push under the couch along with all the dust, Lego’s, hair bands and other detritus that our family of five loses in that abyss.  The subject is:  what do you do as a mom that you swore that you would never do? In the words of a fellow we probably all know too well,  “Oh maaaan!”  (Thank you Swiper). 

Where do I begin?  It’s somewhat hard to remember, but I do seem to recall that I had a lot of high and mighty views on parenting.  One being that parents should be able to control their children at all times.  Anyone who has ever seen me with my monkeys at the grocery store can attest that I do not have control over my children at all times (or hardly ever).  Oh, there's Logan, grabbing a handful of peaches from the fruit bin and dropping them on the ground to see if they will bounce.  Oh, there’s Dane flipping the switch on the jelly bean dispenser and shrieking with delight as they scatter all over the store.  (And, by the way, why do they have that at a child’s eye level?)  And then there’s Nicole who is screaming bloody murder because I won’t let her buy a pair of Dora flip-flops.  

Got Octuplets? What we can learn from the fate of twin pandas.

Today as Nicole and I were waiting for over an hour at the allergist's office, I had a lot of time to read to her from her "Highlights" magazine.  There was a fascinating article on giant pandas and I sure learned a thing or two.  For one, a baby panda is so small that the mother panda has no "bump" and thus zookeepers have no idea that the panda is pregnant.  At birth, the baby panda weighs significantly less than its mother.  In July 2005, a 235 lb panda gave birth to a baby that weighed 4 ounces, which is typical.  Pandas subsist on bamboo, which is not nutritious enough to produce bigger babies, or even very many babies.  But they still have twins about 50% of the time.

The panda article got me thinking about the higher-order multiple births in the news.  There is a family who just had quintuplets in our neighborhood and then of course, we have the recent birth of octuplets to a woman who already has six kids.   We're talking high-maintenance here!  Likewise, baby pandas are extremely high-maintenance.  The mother has to sit up for six weeks to hold the panda cub and keep it warm and safe.  The harried panda mom does not get to eat or drink for two weeks.  They nurse the babies up to 12 times a day.  Also, daddy panda doesn't help at all.  For these reasons, a panda mom is almost always incapable of caring for more than one cub and the second cub will die from neglect.  In an effort to save the species, they've implemented programs where the twin cubs are separated, cared for by zookeepers and fed formula.

Now, we know human moms can care for more than one child at a time.  I should know.  I had twins when my daughter was only 19 months.  However, it is hard!  It's still hard.  I'm constantly being pulled in three directions and doing mental triage has become second nature.  This means that the child who is being the most outrageously annoying is usually the one who gets the attention.

This leads us to this crazy mom of fourteen!  I am not going to mince words here.  The woman is a lunatic!  What woman willingly brings this many babies into the world without resources or even a father?  What kind of life will these babies have?  All the appearances on Oprah and a house built on "Extreme Makeover" aren't going to make up for what these babies will lack, namely a quality bond with their parents.  The details of how this selfish woman got pregnant are still fuzzy, but the possible scenarios bring up many ethical issues.  If she did IVF, what kind of doctor would willingly implant eight embryos?  Human females are not physically made to give birth to a litter.  It is extremely dangerous for both the health of the babies and the mother.  Even though these babies made it to 31 weeks, that is still fairly premature and many of them will likely experience a host of life-long problems.  Who is going to drive all these kids to their many appointments with physical, occupational or speech therapists?  How will they coordinate for extracurricular activities?  What kind of car will be able to accommodate this many children?  Oh, the list of how wrong this is goes on and on.

The answer to these questions is that someone besides the mom will be doing and providing all these things.  They will survive on hand-outs and volunteering from individuals, corporations, the government and the most insidious of all, the media.  Maybe they'll do a "Jon & Kate Plus Eight."  We think all this careless breeding is cute, but what a life!  How sad to be forced to live in the glare of media attention.  But will they have a choice?  In my mind, this is a glorified orphanage ... with cameras.

So what can we learn from our panda friends?   Pandas do not willingly have twins and they know their limitations.  In the future, nature will adapt when it has figured out that panda mommies should stick with singletons.  Now, human beings can handle twins or even triplets and most will not willingly neglect their offspring, but the red flags are a-wavin' when some nut-job decides to have a litter of eight (especially when she is already a single mom of six).  The reality is that one person cannot raise this many children, especially if they were born at the same time.  My friend just told me the saddest story of a family with five kids under the age of six.  The youngest child recently drowned in the bathtub.  When I asked her how this happened, she alluded to the chaos in the house with five young children.   I'm not advocating big-brother-ish control here, but can't something be done to stop the madness?  Or will society go on condoning this outrageous behavior all for the sake of good entertainment?  For the sake of these poor children, I truly hope that someone comes to their senses.

Cross posted on Mad About Multiples by Lisa George.

Original post from The Curious Georges.

A rose by any other name...

When I was pregnant with my first set of twins, I bought every known how-to book on parenting twins out there.  And there are lots of them!  Some of the advice was somewhat off-putting.  I remember reading that this one mom of twins affixed a sign to her stroller saying, "Yes, they are twins. No, they're not identical."  In other words, "Bug off, nosy stranger!"  I just could never imagine being so annoyed by the sweet attention of strangers.  In fact, I absolutely love it when strangers come up to me and ask if my boys are twins.  Since my "older" daughter is only 19 months senior to the boys, we even get the "Are they triplets" question.  Of course, there aren't very many witty responses to "Boy, you have your hands full," but I just gamely nod assent and say perkily, "We sure do!"  In other words, we do have our hands full, but I so love having these three little monkeys, that I'm going to stay perky and willingly bask in the attention of strangers.  It's just plain fun.  One time we were ambling with our triple-wide stroller in the Rose Garden park and there was a group of Japanese tourists that were all a-twitter over our trio.  Many of them even took our photos, which made me feel like a rock star mommy!

Anyway, I'm digressing.  The main subject of this post was on the topic of what we call Dane and Logan.  Every book I read stressed the importance of not lumping your children into a two-word moniker, such as "the boys" or "the twins."  This is considered verboten among those dogmatic twin experts.  They are not one person, they say.  They have their own names.  Well, I have to admit that 9 times out of 10, we call Dane and Logan "the boys."  I talked in a prior post about how twins do experience life a bit differently than singletons.  The early life of a twin child is not a solitary existence.  They do virtually everything together.  Look at the last post!  They were gently touching hands while they slept.  This is one of the reasons that they are lumped together with the term, "the boys."  Also, we are just so busy that this helps us say what we want to say and fast.  Believe it or not, having to say "DaneandLogan" (4 syllables) is much longer and thus less efficient than "theboys" (two syllables).  Does that sound ridiculous?  Well, in the chaotic world of twins plus a singleton, cutting out two syllables can make a huge difference.  We're all about simplifying life here.

Have Twins, Won’t Travel

When our fearless blog leader told us that the topic of the week would be travelling with twins, I practically experienced the symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.  Based on my experience, the best advice I have on travelling with twins is DON’T!  Okay, here’s another don’t:  Don’t take me too literally.  Everyone’s kids are different and this is only the story of one hapless mom of twins plus one.

When the boys were about five months old, I decided to drive them from San Jose to Orange County to visit friends and family.  My husband and I had done this same journey with our singleton when she was about the same age, which had been relatively easy.  She slept most of the time in the car and was happy in new surroundings.  Not so with the twins.  I won’t go into all the gory details but let’s just say that what should have been a 6-hour journey ended up taking 10 hours and that 8 of those 10 hours were fraught with hysterical crying (mostly on the twins’ part).  Dane was miserable because he couldn’t sleep in an upright position.  Being the compliant brother, Logan figured he’d go on crying duty as soon as Dane took a break. Logan just sort of picked up the slack where Dane left off.  God forbid we have a moment of peace.  Part of the reason the trip took so long is that we had to keep stopping to try and soothe the twins. 

Boxes

I have found that having twins of the same gender elicits pre-conceptions among strangers. There are two types of reactions:  1)  Are they identical?  2)  Are their personalities really different? Would it be that life was so black and white. Number one, they are not identical and to my eye, they don’t even look that much alike. I’ve remedied this by only cutting one of the twin’s hair. Believe it or not, I think the hair is what was making people think that they were identical. Now I’m getting, “Wow, they don’t look much alike.” 

Yes, the twin experience is different than being a singleton but the way this affects their personalities is up for debate. They did share a womb and are almost always together so this does affect how they perceive and interact with the world (nurture).  But, biologically, they are the same as any two brothers (nature). When they are young, it is difficult to keep their identities separate and distinct and most of us probably fall into the trap of lumping them together with terms such as “the boys” or “the twins” or in my case, “the monsters” … I say this in the most loving manner possible (wink, wink).

My Cheatin' Heart

No, I haven't gone country on you now that I've moved to Texas.  I just thought this was an appropriate title for this post.  As a mom of twin boys plus big sister who’s 19 months older, I often feel torn in many directions. Sometimes the act of being “torn” is more literal than others. If I’m watching tv on the couch with the kids, they all jockey for the prominent position in which to a) cuddle or b) which is more often the case, stake their claim (in this instance, the claim is mommy). I start to feel like a human trampoline, with six legs, hands and feet all pouncing with abandon. Then there are the tears because no one ends up being happy with all this jockeying and pouncing.   Being a human jumpy house is not just reserved for mommy; daddy gets treated like this too.

It’s nice to be wanted, but I’m in a relationship with two men and a little lady. I often feel like I’m “cheating” on them because I can’t focus solely on each child. This is especially evident with my little men. The cheating with Dane and Logan is fairly brazen. As just happened a few minutes ago, both were needing some mommy lovin’.  Logan wanted to be comforted and Dane wanted to be playful.  So here I am with  Logan in one arm whispering soothing words and stroking his head while I’m tickling Dane who’s on my other side laughing hysterically. This can’t be emotionally healthy for anyone involved. Such is the life of a twin (plus one) mom. People have told me that it will get easier when the boys are 3-1/2 and Nicole is 5. OK, I’m holding them to this. Only 1-1/2 years to go …

Original Mad About Multiples blog post.