Found

...One pair of Due North Mitts. Finally. We've had an abnormally warm winter in Winnipeg. It's been lovely, really mild...with temperatures over freezing on several days recently. Apparently I wore a gray maternity jacket one last time during the fall and left the mittens in the pockets of the jacket. I looked in the jacket pockets on a whim and, after weeks of searching? Found those mitts. Finally. I thought I'd lost my mind with lack of sleep when I realized I'd misplaced those mittens.

Also finally found some time today while someone was helping with the babies to upload photos from my camera. Some of those shots dated all the way back to November.

Here are a couple of recent photos of the babies. They are, of course, sporting knitwear that I've managed to make for them. You may notice that the sweater has enormous stitches. Yes, I knit on #13 needles because there just aren't many spare moments for knitting these days.

I designed this sweater. It's a one off and my version of a traditional "college man" cardigan sweater. It fits Leo well right now and Sam will get to wear it next. In our house, this sweater would be sized 8 months. That's now, and it fits.

The other thing I've managed are one pair of bright yellow knee socks. These wool socks are designed to be worn over a pair of regular socks AND their sleepers for when they go out on cold days. Then, they usually are wrapped up in a fleece sleeping bag in their car seats. They even have sleeping bags for their double stroller...you need it at -20C or colder still. ( -4F) The ribbing is purely to keep them from pulling off the socks. With effort, Leo can still pull these off.

Continuing the "college" theme, the next pair of socks will be navy. The mustard yellow and navy are U. of Michigan colors; one of my mother's alma maters. (sp?)

In any case, we are now entertaining two young gentlemen who sit up, roll over and look very close to crawling. They are both doing pre-language babbling. There is a lot of noise here, lots of yelling and cackling, including words like:

dadadadaada

mehmehmehmeh meh

dididididi

Hey or Hi

and some sounds that actually sound an awful lot like Harry and Sally's barking.

I guess we won't need to teach Dog as a second language here.

I'm off to bed. I "found" these moments by staying up later than the babies....and I'm sure to regret it tomorrow. Just dropping by to say hello, celebrating finding some precious mittens, and show off a new project or two. As Sam and Leo say, with big smiles:

Hey.

Lost

Lost:

One pound of coffee...this was lost sometime last summer. After the babies were born, I went back to drinking a large strong cup of (french press) coffee each morning. This has a lot of caffeine in it. I have needed it.

Most people who know me know that I do not lose things with any frequency. I try hard to keep track of things...but I lost a whole pound of coffee.
This is, in retrospect, entirely reasonable. Anyone who has as little sleep as I have had would be losing a lot of stuff. At this point I estimate that I have not had a complete, long, full night of sleep in a year...since I had to get up every 2-3 hours starting last January while I was pregnant. (Twins in the womb don't leave a lot of room for, err, liquids to collect at night.)

I started asking everyone to keep a look out in case they found the coffee someplace weird, like in a baking pan or something. Nobody found it.

A very unhelpful person wondered if I had early onset Alzheimer's. (Really.) It wasn't funny...

The professor has been in charge of baby bottle stuff, since I am not to fully supply two babies with breast milk. He lost some very expensive plastic baby nipples, new in the package, at the same time.

The conclusion? A friend determined that somewhere, we had some nipples very hopped up on caffeine.

More recently, I seem to have lost something that upsets me more. Remember these mitts?

I seem to have lost them, too. I can't figure out if I left them somewhere outside the house (unlikely, since my hands would have been cold all the way home) or if someone picked them up inadvertently when they left our house...or??

I just don't know.

All this brings me to the bigger point. Time, at least for us right now, is not elastic. It doesn't stretch anymore. I cannot find any more of it by managing my time better. Believe me, I've tried. I am using the twins' morning nap time (20 minutes of shared sleep is a great nap around here, I don't get more of a break than that. Ever.)

We are finding it so very hard to get basic tasks done, like making dinner, or doing all the laundry, etc. Why? Well, I had a taste of what it is like to have one baby this week. The professor had to take Leo to some appointments. I had blocks of time with just one baby. WHOA! Amazing!

I could take a shower. (bouncy chair in the bathroom kept Sam amused.) I could use both hands when I put ONE baby down. When one baby napped, I didn't have to try to help the other baby fall asleep. I fed only one baby at a time. WOW.

The professor's undergraduate research mentor had twins. She told him being with just one twin was like being by yourself. I get it now. Really, I do.

All this is to say that time--time to blog, sleep, shower, eat, shovel snow, go to the bathroom, etc. is in very short supply. Having someone around to care for the twins occasionally does not allow me time to work yet, or even to rest. I run around cooking 3 dinners in an hour to feed us for the week. I try to take a shower. I rush off to do laundry...

Ooops. Nap time is over. Crying is starting. If you find my mittens...or the last 7-8 months? Please let me know!

Hanukah

The babies are 6.5 months old now. They are finally, very occasionally, sleeping through the night. (Sleeping through the night is defined as sleeping 4-6 hours in a row without waking up.) They sometimes even do this at the same time.

This is a marvelous thing.

It doesn't happen consistently. I am still very sleep deprived and maybe a little stinky. Showers still aren't easy to come by!

I am again relying on the professor to gift me the time to post this on the first night of Hanukah.

I am also excited to say that today we had our appointment with the Canadian immigration folks. We can now transition from being on work permits here to being "Permanent Residents." This is huge. It means we can be sure that we'll stay in the same country as our little Canadian citizens. (see these photos for who I mean...)

(The professor's work permit relied on his job, which meant he might have to leave if for some reason, he was no longer a professor here.) This is even more important because although the twins are also US citizens, we still don't have passports for them. It's a long story, so I won't go into it here.

Instead, I will mention a brief encounter I saw this summer. Each morning, I get the chance to leave the house every day to walk my dogs. Sometimes this 20 minutes a day is the only outdoor, baby-free time I have all day or all week.

It was summer, about 9-1o in the morning. An older gentleman, 75 or so, hailed his friend as he crossed the street. The older gentleman (OG for short) had a British accent.

"Hubert," he said (I think it was Hubert, but it might have been Herbert--forgive me, I'm sleep deprived), "How are you?"

"OY!" Hubert said. "I'm Shvitzing! It's already 26C out here! It's going to be so hot today!"

"Yes," OG, nodding. "I know. Quite. Hot."

I walked on, smiling. First off, 26C is really not that hot. (79F) We were maybe aiming for a high of 90F?!

Second, I realized I'd had a special, uniquely Canadian encounter. A man emigrated from Britain. Another man emigrated from Eastern Europe. I walked by, and I'm here from the U.S. One in five Canadian citizens is born outside of Canada.

Today I got a potential chance to enter that club someday. In any case, my two babies? They are those other Canadians--you know, the 4 out of 5 born in Canada. That was my realization.

Neat gift on the first night of Hanukah.

treading water

My friends have been asking me--"When will you post new things to your blog?" It has been more a problem of...when will I be able to open my computer up again?

Right now, I am taking advantage of an absolutely unusual thing. Both babies are napping at the same time. To get to this place, we had a day of fussiness and then I took the babies on a long walk in the stroller. (While editing this post, one of the babies woke up. Oh well.)

Usually when this rare thing happens, it is a mad chance to:

go to the bathroom

take a shower

eat

pump (I am still breastfeeding/pumping/bottle feeding with formula--all of it. Yes.)

I don't get to do any of these things very often, so blog posts seem like an impossible luxury right now! I promise I'll try to drop in when I can.

So, here is a brief update. In both of these photos, you can see Leo on the left and Sam on the right. The top photo features a multicolored blue baby surprise sweater knit by a friend. (hi Liz!)

The other two sweaters (cotton light blue and light green) are also versions of the same pattern, knit for the babies by my mom.

I am still working on the same knit toy that I started when I came home from the hospital 4.5 months ago...yes, the babies are nearly 5 months old now. I have knit this toy previously (before these babies) for one of my nephews. It took me two evenings.

Yup...there is NO TIME for anything at all. I can't even remember the last time I was able to go to my office on the third floor. It's getting dusty.

People have asked how one manages with twin infants. Some lifesaving things:

1) a baby carrier or sling. I wear a baby in a sling (and nurse using the sling, while feeding the other baby a bottle) for hours every day. Yes, my back hurts after a long while, so I use more than one kind of sling so that the weight is distributed differently using the two different slings. Wearing a baby allows me to do crazy two handed things like fold laundry, make dinner, or even change the other baby's diaper.

2) The stroller. Yes. I walk around the neighborhood a lot, and I am dreading winter. When real winter happens, I'm not sure what we'll do...hopefully by then the babies will be older and do better at napping on their own. We've had an outstandingly wonderful fall with lots of good weather so far, and I've walked miles while pushing a really big stroller.

3) A very involved spouse. Baby #2 just woke up, they are crying, and the professor is managing it for now.

4) Really helpful friends...the kind who come over, face two babies screaming with a calm aplomb, pick up a baby, and give me a chance to cook or eat dinner, shower, or well, have a strong drink. :)

5) Hired guns. We've got a variety of people helping us for about 16 hours a week, and they all have different strengths. It is expensive, and a financial stretch and I can't leave home most of the time anyway because there are TWO babies here, never mind the laundry, bottles, and other chores. It is a really good week when I can be out for 2-4 hours without babies. Not 4 hours all at once, mind you, but a few minutes here and there.

6) I hear that this phase of childrearing ends and I can't wait. I miss my friends, my work life (now on hold), and getting more than 2 to 3 hours of sleep at a time!

A lot of folks have asked me how things are and I hardly have time to email back. Forgive me if this post sounds blatantly honest...but things are sort of a blur at present. People stop me on the street, address me by name, talk about the babies--and I have no idea who they are! I hope someday to have enough sleep again to do better.

In the meanwhile, if I smile and nod at you, but look vacant? It's not you. It's me...and juggling two 4.5 month babies. Please keep the cheery emails, visits, and good vibes coming in our direction...I appreciate it all even if I can't manage good responses. Those communications mean the world to me.

Thanks so much.

Joanne

PS: Yes, if you were curious, those U.S. passports are still lost in the mail. We have a couple of senators, a congressman, the U.S. Consul and some other folks working on it. It's kind of a bureaucratic mess. This problem on its own makes me need to take deep cleansing yoga breaths, never mind the baby stuff.

stained glass colored glasses

Thought you'd enjoy seeing our newest acquisition...we got this stained glass panel Sunday at an old house warehouse/antique mall place. (Old House Revival, if you live in Winnipeg.)

We hung it immediately in our dining room. Check out the photos! We're hoping that this will:
A) Block out some views of the ugly new condo across the street, which is growing uglier by the day. The latest is the landscaping, which appears to be all rocks....no greenery at all so far.

B) Screen views from the street so people can't look in and see the babies all the time.

C) Beautify our lives a bit.

So far, option C is working. I think it looks great and that makes me happy! I have a call into the store to find out if they know anything more about the history behind this piece. I am so sleep deprived that I am surprised by how nice it looks every time I enter the dining room. I just can't remember that we bought it. :)

It doesn't entirely screen out the condo (very little would) and now it appears that some of the lighting they've installed on the staircase directly facing our house is purple. GROSS.

We acquired this really quickly--went looking at stained glass with the babies in tow on Saturday. We asked for the Old House Revival folks to get a price quote on this piece for us. They called us on Sunday, and the professor went and bought it, brought it home and hung it.

It was a great way to make a decision about decorating! Quickly!

I am posting this colorful set of images to offset the not-so-wonderful other complications we're encountering. This summer I had some big postpartum health complications which I'm not going to go into here. The major stuff is mostly resolved now, but I won't lie, it hasn't been an easy haul. Meanwhile, my professor has been juggling his busy laboratory, teaching a course with 50 some students, life with new twins, taking care of me and two dogs...and a lot of bureaucracy.

You see, we're American citizens living in Canada. The twins are eligible for both U.S. and Canadian citizenship. There's a lot of paperwork involved in all of this passport, Social Security Number and Social Insurance Number acquisition, of course, and the bureaucracy around it is boggling. If, for instance, we want to visit our families in the US, we must straighten all this out before we leave home so the babies' papers are in order to cross the border.

Anyway, as you might imagine, life with two infants is very busy. The babies eat every 2-3 hours, and at night, they stretch that out sometimes to 4 hours. So, we don't get much sleep. A rare and great night is more than 6 hours of sleep with only a single interruption. Usual is 4-5 hours, with perhaps two feeding or diaper changing interruptions.

When patience is stretched to the breaking point by crying, barking, and passports potentially lost in the mail (no kidding) and the new parents in question are seriously tired, sometimes maybe one needs a bit of colored glass (rose colored glasses?) to try to see the world in a more cheerful light.

Sometimes one needs bread as nourishment. Sometimes too, I need art nourishment. This stained glass is helping make the bread feel more like a meal these days. I think it belongs in our dining room.

first knitting project

There is knitting after giving birth to twins. It involves multiple people holding babies--so I can knit. Every stitch takes a village.

This is my first postpartum personal design project. It's a sleeping bag for a baby who is often cold in the middle of the night, no matter how many flannel blankets he's wrapped in.

Size 15 needles, 2.25 stitches to the inch and wool blend, machine washable yarn.

It's been warm here, but I chose a cool morning to try it out. Thirty seconds after putting the baby in? He was asleep.

The project cost me about $44, but with a $30 gift certificate, I paid $14.

The cost of a warm and sleeping twin baby for one very tired Joanne? Priceless...

Baby Want Ads

I'm cute, available, and 9 lbs.

Pick me up.

(Pick up line courtesy of the professor and his 9 lb date, Sam. Here, Sam is two timing with his brother and me...yes, slings are a lifesaver with twins.)

Active twins seek well-rested playmates. Parents need not apply.

Want to save the earth? Do more laundry. Cloth diapers are a great choice for us--economical, ecologically friendly AND?

(Joanne adds: incredibly time intensive with twins...this is the closest I've gotten to fiber arts or textile creativity of any kind since the babies were born June 1. I hope this changes some day...)