First and Third

This time four years ago, I was on day three of my maternity leave with my girls. Their birth was seven ish weeks away but it was a twin pregnancy and the recommendation was to leave work a little earlier than you would with a singleton. I found maternity leave with no children both ridiculous and boring, luxurious and worrying. I read books, I napped, I watched box sets while eating biscuits, I sometimes waited until an hour before Jody was due home from work before I got dressed and put make up on. I tried to walk a little every day and I missed work a lot, the structure of a day, I wondered why I was doing this crazy thing when my life was settled and happy.

I can remember once just sitting in a chair in my bedroom for a whole hour and instagramming about it.

This makes me laugh so much now. Obviously, needless to say, there is no maternity leave this time. I’m at home with my kids anyway, but even if I wasn’t, I think that work would feel like a break. I am up early almost every day, the more after six it is, the more of a victory it feels. Both girls started sleeping until seven for a bit but this was clearly a phase. A nicer phase than the 5am phase…

There is food to be prepared, constant food preparation. Breakfast: Isla likes cereal, Grace doesn’t (unless it’s mine in which case she loves it), Grace eats toast, Isla asks for it then picks at it. They have fruit together and juice but now they drink from ‘grown up’ cups so supervision is needed. If it’s a nursery day, then there’s a lunch box to make, sandwiches (which neither are that enthusiastic about, but you need a sandwich in a lunchbox), fruit winders, fruit to peel and chop, a yogurt. If it isn’t a nursery day, then snack time is within what feels like minutes and there’s more fruit to peel, a biscuit, a plea for something that they shouldn’t have.

 

In between, there’s constant work, housework, washing, ironing, dressing them, constant potty training (the worst part of twins so far, hands down), playing, breaking up arguments, trips to the library, watching the rain.

I rarely even feel the baby move in the morning, certainly don’t have time for counting kicks, there’s never any down time, I sometimes wish that they were the type of kids who watched films all day, that would give me time to do something in less than three minutes. My make up is done in increments if I don’t have time before Jody leave for work, foundation quickly smeared on, check on them, concealer, then another check, then one is sitting on my bed begging me to put lip gloss on them.

You get the gist. And I wouldn’t change it. I’m looking forward to our landscape changing now, to incorporating the baby into our lives. Part of this is boredom at being pregnant, not sleeping well, heartburn all day long and worse if I even look at a cup of coffee. And part is just plain excitement. Then there’s the part that wants to be pregnant forever, to feel my littlest one squirming inside me for ever more. Because you can never quite remember the feeling until you feel it again. And it is the best part of pregnancy. For me, anyway.

And of course, just six more weeks of just me and my girls, I think about as I settle down to do story time, the baby responding to the words and to the voices of her sisters, I wonder how it will feel to read with the baby snuggled into my shoulder, my three girls on the outside where they belong.

I’d like to do this once more. Quickly, just have another quickly. Not because she won’t be enough, not that my girls were never enough, they were and always will be. But I feel very strongly in the deepest part of my soul that four is our number.

There are four weeks until the Easter holidays. Six weeks until her due date. I have so much to do, but so little too. She’ll be a tiny thing, they really don’t need much. We have clothes, a cot, we’ll get a car seat to bring her home. Some rest would be nice, but that might be pie in the sky. But I’ll try.

Other People’s Lives

Yesterday, I had a sad hour or so. We’d had a lovely morning, the girls had stayed at their grandparents for the night, their regular fortnightly Saturday night, and we had decided on a whim to go to Brighton for the morning. It was an almost sunny day, the kind of day we rejoice about as Brits in February and we didn’t want to spend another morning in the town where we live. It was a really nice morning, we didn’t do very much, just walked around, talking about our girls mostly, those parent moments where you can talk to the other person in the world who reveres your children as much as you do. J bought the new baby some little suede pumps and we ended our visit by popping into Mothercare.

Everything for a new baby is so expensive. And it made me immeasurably sad. When we started trying to conceive, and even when we did, we absolutely could afford to have a baby. For reasons, political and otherwise that don’t need going in to, we are struggling. J has a better job, we are on a much better path than we were, but things are harder financially. We also got rid of a lot as the girls were growing up, we just don’t have anywhere to store anything, my parents kindly kept all of the clothes so apart from those, we need everything. Oh, we have a cot. It needs a new mattress but we have a cot.

I don’t want a nursery (ha, like she won’t sleep in an alcove in our bedroom) full of new things. It definitely doesn’t matter if the pram is second hand, it doesn’t matter if 95% of her wardrobe belonged to her sisters first. It doesn’t matter but it makes me feel like a failure. I’d like the option of buying it, I think, the option of buying a new pram, the option of buying new clothes or a bouncer or whatever it might be.

I make the mistake of watching YouTube videos about people, very privileged people, who get a LOT of baby things delivered to them. The latest buggy, a snuzzpod (which I covet but definitely do not need), thing after thing that they can probably afford themselves. It isn’t jealousy, more envy. Yes, I am envious of the things that money can afford but I have no desire for their lives.

In the last few years, since becoming pregnant with the girls, I honestly have not coveted anyone else’s life. I can feel envious, I can be frustrated by the opportunities that some get that we don’t, without wanting to live anyone else’s life but my own. I love my life, I have the family that I have always wanted and I am happy. Sad moments can occur within happiness without altering that overall happiness.

Once the baby is here, looking adorable in clothes that I’m sentimental about because her big sisters wore them, riding in a pram bought off eBay, I won’t care. It won’t matter. But it kind of does at the moment.

It just kind of sucks.

Enough

We conceived our twins the first time that we ever tried to conceive. We had been together eighteen months, were very happy and went to a birthday party. J had a few drinks and I drove home and said that we had to make a change while we were still young (ish), either travel, you know, leave our jobs for six months and see some of the world or start a family. You can be brave, I find, if you think that the other person is only half listening, or deny it in the morning. Children were, at that point, a theoretical conversation, something we knew the other wanted but there were absolutely no time scales involved.

That night, I whispered to ask him if he was sure and the girls were made.

We didn’t know that there were two until the November, a day that I will remember for the rest of my life, and without doubt, the most life changing day that I will ever have.

The plan was for four, we talked about it a little, we liked the idea of four, a big happy family, with lots of kids and cats and just noise, sports being played at the weekend, films being watched in the evening, that sort of thing. But twins are absolutely exhausting and they were over two, just slightly, before it was even a consideration to have any more. I must admit that I thought that it would be fairly quick, yes, I was over 35, but I had been 33 the first time and I didn’t feel any different, certainly not any older. I read quite a bit on conceiving when you’re older and I felt quite prepared for there to be a wait.

I wasn’t at all prepared. The months stacked up and I felt more and more like a failure. I tracked my cycle and found myself getting more and more cross if we didn’t try enough during my fertile period. I went to the doctors and was told, in no uncertain terms, that any fertility, and I mean any, would have to be funded privately as we had children already. I was told to try until Christmas, that there was no need to panic and to not panic, as panic would make me stressed and that wouldn’t help at all.

J and I talked about it a lot, of course and his biggest question was along the lines of why I felt that the girls weren’t enough for me. I  don’t blame him for this question at all, it seems perfectly sensible to ask, we have two amazing little girls and surely that should be enough. What I couldn’t quite articulate, and probably still can’t, is that it wasn’t about them. If we never had conceived again, then it would have been, in time, just fine. I would have got over not having any more children and they would have been more than enough. But this was about me. Having twins is an entirely medical thing, you have scans and appointments almost all the time, you are reminded constantly as to your high risk pregnancy, you know that the birth itself will be a medical one, no water birth, monitored the whole time, the midwife not leaving the room at any point. And I wanted to experience something more holistic almost. I wanted to just enjoy a pregnancy, a “normal” birth, enjoying just one baby in the hospital afterwards. There is a whole blog post needed for the after birth care in the hospital but suffice to say, it wasn’t the best.

The question is now, will this feel like enough? I have read many blog posts and articles that suggest that you know when it is your last pregnancy, your last baby, a feeling of calm almost that accompanies you throughout the whole thing. That your family feels complete almost as soon as the baby is born. Maybe that will happen, but this hasn’t felt at all as if this will be my last pregnancy. It’s strange, I expected it to, but I still find myself drawn to baby boy clothes, feel myself wanting a neutral pram just in case a little boy has to go in it after our daughter.

If she is our last child, then so be it, I am a huge believer in life turning out as it should. That, generally speaking, things happen as they are meant to. But sitting here now, eight and a half weeks before she is due, I still think that I’ll do this again. She will definitely be enough, just as her big sisters were and my word, three daughters, what a joy, what an absolute honour that would be.

How lucky would we be?

Currency

Before I had my twins, I rarely thought about sleep. I just did it, went to bed and went to sleep. I can vividly remember, in the early days with J, waking him to talk in the middle of the night, going for walks at approaching midnight, watching films until the early hours and still managing to wake up and go to work with minimal effort. I probably have distinctly rose coloured goggles on about this, I probably moaned, I definitely bought too many Starbucks but I will allow myself the memory of sleep being an easy thing.

Oh, and the naps. We used to nap. It was fairly rare that I went through an entire day off without a little sleep in the afternoon, waking just before J was due to come home and reapplying the mascara that had smudged all over my face.

Then the girls were born, and oh boy, did things change. Twins are exhausting, sleep depriving demons. There were nights when I watched it become morning without having slept at all, the two of them tag teaming to make sure that as soon as I put one down, fed and changed, the other would fuss. Grace was a low birth weight baby, so she could only be fed every two hours at first as she was so small and this made things harder and harder. Eventually, we worked out a routine, a routine that we intend to do again with this new baby and things improved but there was a time there when sleep seemed entirely absent.

You expect things to improve now that they are nearly four and you would be half right. Isla has always been an amazing sleeper and remains so, asleep at seven every evening and consistently waking at seven the next morning. If she does wake up, she is soothed back to sleep almost immediately and I pray and hope that this baby takes after her biggest sister.

Grace is less good. At the moment, she wakes for an hour to an hour and a half every single night, and then if that isn’t the case, she is up for the day any time from about half five. She is slowly killing me. She is then miserable from about six in the evening, but I’m so scared to let her sleep during the day. I dread going to sleep myself, and that’s hard now with my very own in-utero karate kid and I spend more time thinking about sleep than anything else in my life.

It will get better, or it won’t. Or it will and then the baby will be born and I’ll be trying to keep a baby quiet in a too small flat so that she doesn’t wake everyone up. But that will ebb and flow into a routine of it’s own and I will allow myself, once she’s here, to give myself a break, to maybe sleep when she sleeps, to maybe thinking that playing candy crush for half an hour with a cup of tea is a perfectly acceptable way to spend my time.

It’s what I didn’t expect from parenthood. That and being obsessed with common (and not so common) childhood illnesses. It’s funny, isn’t it, how things evolve, how what you expected from your reading of baby blogs and the odd book didn’t come to pass at all, but the things that people never mentioned did.

I will add that Grace is an example to us all in many ways. She starts every day, EVERY DAY, with a smile on her face, telling me she’s had a beautiful sleep, asking me if I have had a beautiful sleep. I lie. She likes to chat and cuddle and I must do better than being grumpy because I’m exhausted.

*in case sleep stories are your absolute thing, my insta stories are often about sleep, so please follow me there for more fun!*

A Moment

I’ve been following closely the dreadful aftermath of Simon Thomas’ wife dying so suddenly of cancer last November. He has documented far more eloquently than I could ever hope his true desperation at carrying on without her and raising their son and I have been struck mostly at how everything can change in the blink of an eye. I knew this, of course, we all do, but it has been something that has almost plagued me for the past little while.

Yesterday, Isla tripped over her own feet and fell into our back step. We were on her way out and my sister scooped her up to hand her to me, and she was holding her hands up in front of her face. For a moment, I thought she’d broken her arm, it was the way she was holding it but as I cuddled her, I realised that she’d bashed her chin. It swelled up almost immediately and I applied some arnica and she had some calpol and whilst she was a little dramatic, it must have hurt, she was absolutely fine. But it was a moment. She could have fallen the other way, she could have hit the back of her head, she could have had concussion, she could have actually broken her arm, we could have spent the afternoon in A&E, not Asda.

It was a moment when J accepted this job and we shelved our plans to move to Yorkshire. It was a moment when this baby was conceived and changed everything again. It was that moment that led to this moment where I try to make a go of writing and accept that I won’t be working in retail for another few years. These are good moments, of course, but still seconds of time that change the direction of a life.

I moan at J at the way he slurps his coffee, it drives me slightly bonkers that he drinks it practically cold but there is something now that stops me. Because if something happens to him, would that be something that I wanted to remember, nagging him over soemthing so unbelievably petty. With my girls, now just seven months off starting school, and a mere eleven weeks from having their lives changed by a new baby, I am trying very hard to analyse when I say no and why I’m saying it. Why am I saying no to them getting a train track out an hour before bed? Does it matter that it will take three or four minutes to tidy it away? Of course it doesn’t.

For myself too, the girls stayed overnight last night at my parents and we painted their bedroom. It’s needed doing for a while and last night, we finally did it. They won’t be home until teatime and I am trying hard to just relax, not tear around like I do, trying really hard to just mooch. I might go and get a coffee soon, I might not. I might make a sandwich, I might not. I might even read my book instead of sorting through the girls toys (another job that really needs doing) but we are on the final countdown now and I should relax.

Shouldn’t I?

The Difference

Isla, our eldest twin, has/had plagiocephaly. It is commonly known, though it is not at all commonly known, as flat head syndrome. She was born with it, it is fairly common in twins, she was engaged at 32 weeks, her head wedged into my pelvis, her soft head just slowly going from round to well, another shape entirely. Nobody noticed, it was noted with amusement when we had scans, that Twin 1, as she was known, had her sister sitting on top of her, but now, though I place no blame, I don’t find it funny at all.

I noticed it at around 11 weeks old. I was slowly emerging from the twin fog and it was apparent that she looked different to Grace. I made a doctors appointment and was dismissed largely, it took going back again to secure a referral to a consultant at Bexhill Hospital. I don’t remember the time line exactly, it isn’t necessary to know but I am angry most at the complete lack of information. No midwife brought it up as a possibility, no health visitor checked either of the girls at any of the checks before being discharged from their service. Doctors didn’t know, and frankly still don’t, I have had to explain it several times to several GP’s and most recently, to eye specialists as we negotiate potential glasses for Isla.

I researched obsessively, of course I did, I do with everything, it’s both a blessing and a curse and J despairs of me. Just last night, I was googling why our in-utero baby had stopped moving as much. She’s tired, he said, just sleeping, and she was, waking up and flip flopping for an hour at 5am this morning. But anyway, in this case, it was needed and when I insisted on a further referral to a specialist after two fruitless visits to Bexhill, I got what we needed. I was told over and over that heads were rarely round, J’s head was felt and declared slightly asymmetrical and we were supposed to accept this. Yet, her eyes were in different places! One side of her little face protruded further than the other. My big girl. My baby.

We went to Great Ormond Street and we were listened to. We were acknowledged and validated and it felt good. It did not feel good to give your less than a year old an MRI scan, or go into a studio and have your baby photographed for progress checks like a science experiment. But it felt good to have a diagnosis and an action plan. We took her to see a wonderful osteopath who sorted out her misaligned neck, within two sessions, her face looked straighter, we had pillows that she slept on in her cot and different ones for the buggy, both designed to make sure that she didn’t gravitate to the more comfortable flat side. We changed her nappy so that she had to lay on the round side to see the TV or whatever book we were showing her. I don’t remember all of the details now, it is only very recently that J has stopped putting on her bedtime nappy with her head facing the ‘good’ way.

We went to a private clinic to ask about a helmet. This is a hugely controversial subject within the plagio community and I will only touch on what I think. If the plagio is mild and you catch it early then helmet your child. If your child, as ours had, has been seen at a world leading Children’s Hospital and has a diagnosis and a prognosis that her head will never be totally round, then don’t. I view Isla’s condition as a medical one, not something to be sorted by throwing money at it. It divided us, that helmet, J and me. He was for it and I wasn’t, for months afterwards he would ask if we had made the right decision and I would cry, as I did in the car the day we saw that no good, money grabbing salesman. Sorry, I’m sure that there are some good eggs out there, genuinely wanting to help babies get better but this man does not fall into that category.

Her plagio has led to eyesight problems, we think, though that could be coincidental. We know that Isla needs glasses, we are just waiting for a prescription. But most importantly, it has led to her looking different to her identical twin sister. Not in a bad way, I like it, in fact, that they look slightly different. You probably wouldn’t be able to tell, on first meeting them, no one can, but they do look different. Grace has a rounder face than Isla and Isla is a little more angular. You no longer see wonkiness, I can now put her hair in bunches or french plaits and they will fall evenly on both sides, she can now wear sunglasses as her ears are in the same place on both sides of her head.

She will never know anything more than what we choose to tell her. We will use medical terminology and tell her how brave she was, her big trips to London by herself while Gracie stayed at home.

A dent in a tennis ball is bigger than a dent in a football.

That is the plagio mantra, that her head may well be as wonky as it ever was when she was three months old but it won’t look like that. I repeated it over and over to people who asked why we weren’t helmetting her, what we were doing in osteopath appointments and with a physio. I believed that it would be OK in the end.

And it was.

Adding A Third

Izzy Biz and Doodle are thick as thieves. Of course they are. They spend almost every minute of every day together, separated occasionally when we remember that it’s important, and mostly, they love that time. They get ratty with each other, obviously, and they wind each other up, the giggling and the hysteria drive me absolutely bonkers but when they snuggle up together, Izzy’s hand on Doodle’s knee, Doodle’s head on Izzy’s shoulder, you cannot imagine them ever not being this close.

I was lucky enough to grow up with sisters and I was clear that I wanted the same for them. People would patronisingly explain that they had each other, but I didn’t mean that, I meant the experience of a younger sibling, I had a picture in my head of one of my big girls cuddling a baby, a gaggle of kids running ahead of us as we walked to the park. The idea of the twins and no more was not at all what I had pictured for my family.

I didn’t factor in fourteen months of trying to conceive said third baby but that is another story for another day. When I did the pregnancy test and it was positive, I was delighted, J was his usual nonchalant self and we didn’t say a thing to the girls before we had had a scan and all was well. Doodle wondered if the baby might be a horse instead and Izzy still wonders if she can have a brother. But they are excited largely and their understanding is growing as to what might actually be about to happen.

But then I worry. Worry that the new little one will be left out, will be excluded either because there is a four year gap between them or because they are twins. Worry that the little one will be lonely with her big sisters at school, just hanging out with me, doing all the things that I did with the girls but by herself. Is this a twin mum thing? At the moment, I can’t imagine babies coming as one, just one baby, how is this possible? I’m imagining a relationship with one baby that I simply didn’t have with the girls, able to have a cuddle because I, or she, wants one not because I have to console a screaming baby or she wants feeding or winding or rocking to sleep.

The girls will be our focus after she is born. She will require a level of looking after that is physical, to be fed and changed and cuddled but emotionally, the girls are going to be the priority. Three weeks after she’d born, my parents are taking them on holiday and I’m delighted that they are going, it’ll be just what they need and the timing should be spot on, long enough after she’s born that they won’t feel as if they’re being sent away and exactly when they’ll need that one-on-two attention.

A third baby (or second in most cases) is a curious and unusual thing.