It’s been a while.
We’ve been underwater—literally. A week and a half ago, I noticed a strange smell coming from the nursery. I spent a week looking for a peed pullup set aside by a sleepy dad in the middle of the night. But when the floorboards started lifting and the baseboards popped off, it was safe to assume no peed pullup has that kind of power.
Our air conditioner stopped draining. In theory, this should not be a big deal. A little switch should flip. The air conditioner should stop working. Someone should check the air conditioner, see it’s not draining, drain it, and everyone can go on with their lives. But when the little switch does not flip, the undrained water must go somewhere. And in our case, it went under the floorboards in a third of our house.
My house is a construction zone awaiting testing for potentially hazardous materials, but I’m totally ok because my kids can almost swim.
This pair of two-and-a-half-year-olds who came into the world with severely underdeveloped lungs weighing just one little pound, hold their breath underwater. They kick their feet, paddle their arms, and reach for the edge of the pool. They monkey crawl along the pool’s edge all the way to the stairs.
Before they were born, a high risk OB told me that if we intervened, the twins could still die, and if they didn’t die, they could have severe challenges. “They may not walk or talk or breathe on their own,” he said. He was not wrong, those things could have happened. I don’t remember that OBs name, but I think of him often.
I thought of him when my daughters crawled and then walked. I thought of him when they said their first words. I thought of him last week when the pediatrician told me they are right on track—maybe even better—than their peers.
Every mom thinks her kids are the most amazing in the world, but is it possible that mine are the eighth wonder of the world?
I’ll leave you with this last wonder…
When the girls were about a week old, they did the twinniest thing a set of extremely premature twins could do. They suffered bowel perforations on the same day. They went to surgery and got almost matching ostomy bags on that day.
There’s no other way to say this, so I’m just going to say it: they did not poop from their butts for a long time. Vivienne was nearly four months old and Margot was nearly six months old.
You’ve never met a family more excited about poop than mine.
We had a lot of blowout diapers in the first 18 months of the twins’ lives, and we often reminded each other how long we waited for that poop. “Poop is gold,” my mom used to say. And when the diarrhea and the blowouts turned into normal, formed poop, I would send pictures of poop to Jerod and to my dad with captions like “look at this beautiful poop.”
Recently, Margot was sitting on the potty having her moment, when I declared, “That poop stinks, Gogo!” Vivienne marched right up to us shaking her head. “No no no, mama. Caca bella,” she said to me, which translates to beautiful poop.
The adults in our family don’t need to talk about how beautiful the girls’ poops are because they are talking about it on their own now.
I hope you are well and having a summer full of sun, swimming, and beautiful poops.