We are in the midst of chicken pox. Or chicken pops as my eldest, Izzy Biz, calls it. She had it first, contracted at nursery or soft play or the supermarket or anywhere really and we discovered a cluster of spots the Friday before Christmas. She breezed through, hardly any spots, no need for anything more than a dab of calamine here and there, she slept her usual twelve hours a night as if she had not a care in the world. You can’t even see the spots on the few photos we have of Christmas Day just three days later.
I wish I could say the same for Doodle. Doodle is her twin, younger by a mere two minutes but the clear and obvious little sister. We thought that she had nappy rash, she was a bit of her food and then, boom, two days later and she was covered head to toe. I had six hours sleep in two nights and argued with J about absolutely everything and anything. She has been miserable. Spotty and itchy and sore. Grumpy and tired and completely off her food. Unless it’s a cheap generic own brand ice lolly, in which case, she is all over it.
I am writing this now as we have turned the corner. She still won’t go to nursery on Monday, which should have been day one after three weeks off for Christmas, but Izzy will and as any twin mum will tell you, one child is an actual piece of cake. She will no longer be contagious so she’ll just tag along with me for the morning, chattering away and telling me how much she missed me if we are separated for more than about ten seconds.
When we got pregnant back in August, finally, but that’s another story for another day, I did not imagine that we would decide to tackle potty training, or I did, but I naively thought that it wouldn’t be the hardest milestone in parenting so far, and illness after illness. We have had colds, sickness bugs, and now chicken pox and if it’s not us, it’s our support network. Our support network was huge when they were first born, people adore newborn twins, one year old toddly twins, two year old cute as a button twins, but three and a half year old twins…. Not so much. Hard work apparently. Which they’re not really. Not comparatively, do singleton mums do that too? Compare the one month phase with the six month phase and the newly walking phase? But the payback is them. The personalities that these girls have, the different ways that they talk, the way that they belly laugh at each other without a single word being exchanged.
Maybe that is why I have decided to try to carve out a tiny space for myself on the internet. To word dump, to express myself, to perhaps be anonymous in my own thoughts, to maybe present these words to my girls one day as a love letter somehow. Parenting is an absolute privilege, not always a joy, sometimes a chore, but always, ALWAYS, a privilege.
Fairy Lights and Fear 