Milestones

P & E's first birthday is coming up. That blows my mind. To underscore the fact that they are big kids now, they have officially outgrown their infant seats and moved on to their big kid side-by-side stroller. Don't get me wrong; they're still pretty small for being eleven months old. E tips the scale at 17 pouds, while P weighs in at 19.5 (the poor girl is already destined to have her mom's "svelte" thighs, it seems). Still. That makes E nearly six times his birth weight, and P nearly five times hers. It's amazing. And difficult, now, to remember just how small they really were. When they were born, the only way to convey to people who lived too far away from the hospital to come visit how truly tiny they were was to compare them to ourselves. (i.e., when Peyton grabs my finger, her entire hand only covers the first joint on my index finger). We're thankful now for having done that, because now it's the only way we can remember it ourselves.

Anyway, about the first birthday. We're not really sure what our obligation is here, partywise. We assumed, since they won't remember a thing about it, that it was probably meant to be just an immediate family thing. But then everyone started asking us about the party, and saying things like, "They'll only have one first birthday, so you have to do it up right!" Well, shit. What does that mean? Am I supposed to invite the neighborhood? Should there be food and drinks? Is plain old cake and ice cream not enough? I better figure this stuff out soon. I've got less than a month.

Less than a month. Unbelievable.

What the ???

Ok. While it's true that my own laziness is mostly to blame for the 6 week delay since my last post, I do have one small defense: I've wanted to post here several times in the past couple weeks, but whenever I logged into Blogger, there was no link to this blog. My only option was to create a new blog. The whole thing was truly bizarre, because I could access the damn thing no problem by linking through other blogs. Not that anybody's been exactly beating my door down demanding a new post, but still. Aggravating.

Not a whole lot going on around here. P & E are both crawling now, and if I removed E from the stairs once today, I must have done it 50 times. I know that he knows I don't want him on the stairs, because what I've noticed him doing is watching me over his shoulder as he begins the climb. When he sees me coming for him, he starts to haul ass.

Their birthday is next month. It's impossible to believe they will be a year old already. They've changed so, so much from those tiny little things hooked up to all the monitors and wires in the NICU. It's been amazing to watch. They're doing so well, in fact, that I've started to entertain the option of trying for another one someday. Not soon, but someday.

When they were born so early and had to stay in the hospital all that time, not to mention the two endless weeks I spent in the hospital beforehand, you couldn't have convinced me those memories would fade enough to allow me to seriously contemplate doing it all again. People asked me all the time if we were finished having kids since we'd had our boy and girl the first time out, and I always said I wasn't sure. That was true, because whenever I tried to think about it, my brain would just shut down. There would be all these images -- my doctor telling me I was to be hospitalized immediately until the babies arrived, hopefully at least a month from that point, me crying for hours every day, alone in the hospital room, the high risk OB telling me the babies were in trouble and would have to be delivered within the next few hours, my first glimpse of the babies, so small and helpless, looking less like babies than aliens or baby birds. Then I wouldn't be able to think about it anymore, so the prospect of trying for baby #3 never became real to me.

Now, well. I still have all those memories, but time has taken the edge off, at least somewhat. It helps enormously, of course, that P & E are absolute pictures of health now. They have not, thankfully, suffered any ill effects from their early entrance into the world. And they bring so much joy into my life, so much love and peace and happiness. Being their mom is so much more than I ever imagined -- so now I'm thinking, why on earth wouldn't I try to do this again?

My husband is not on board with this yet, primarily because of the sorry state of our finances. IVF's expensive, and raising kids is even more so. Sure, he says, three would be great if we were rolling in dough, but we're far from that. Instead, he figures, we should just devote our resources to the two we've got, consider ourselves blessed (which we certainly are) and call it a day. I don't know. Maybe he's right.

But I'm still thinking about it.