Author: Isolde

It was hard work preparing for Christmas this year. I wrote a list of presents I needed to buy. Luckily we do the ‘kris kringle’ present exchange now in our family, so I only had to buy one present for dad, although of course I bought one for Steve too. I wrote a list of other people to buy presents for. Heidi, who is the girls’ nanny – her present was a dash to the Body Shop on Thursday. I ran because I had a meeting I needed to be back in the office for, and had been flat out…

There are three things that I don’t enjoy about having young children. The disturbed sleep. The early morning rises.  And the mess. The mess was minimal when the girls were babies: at first we had no toys, then when some were given to us they were confined to one corner where the girls lay. When they started crawling they could carry their increasing quantity of toys around, but it has only been in recent months that the girls have been able to: 1)      carry things around in both hands while roaming indiscriminately around the house, distributing small pieces of plastic,…

In many relationships there is a dominant person, and in the case of Lara and Rhea it is no secret that up until now Rhea has been the dominant one.  I give them each an object or item of food and Rhea often grabs Lara’s so she has two and Lara has none. It doesn’t matter too much: I can usually find something else that Lara would like, or Rhea loses interest after a few minutes so Lara can take the item back. Poor Lara sometimes fights back, but she doesn’t often win and most often gives up without a…

–          ‘How quickly does twenty years go?’ He had been a friendly boy but I doubt I had exchanged a word with him when we were at school together. We were standing with a group of other ex-students in the courtyard where we had all hung out in years 11 and 12. The reunion was a combined five, ten and twenty-year affair held concurrently with some sort of naming ceremony for the lecture theatre which held many memories for me. There were less than twenty of us from our year there, from 150 students who graduated in 1991, probably in…

When does a baby become a toddler? My local baby centre nurses are adamant that the transformation occurs at the age of one (at their 12-month checkups: ‘I knew these twins when they were babies.’ Me, somewhat defensively: ‘they’re still babies!’). If they’re not walking or talking and if small children in the street refer to them as babies, in my book, they are still babies. It’s with mixed feelings then that I’m facing the fact that Rhea and Lara are now very close to becoming toddlers. They have started to toddle. They have both taken their first steps. It…

We stuck to our plan, more or less, and enrolled in a seminar for parents of older babies who sleep poorly. I never got around to doing the internet research or ringing the parent help line – I didn’t have time and it isn’t practical when you only have one arm free. But we did make it to the sleep seminar. There were three other couples and two mothers without their partners there, two facilitators who were child and maternal health nurses, and us. The main facilitator began by noting that in many cultures, babies sleep with their parents into…

Lara and Rhea have turned one, and I went back to work part-time last week. We’ve started another chapter in their lives and another routine for all of us. The last six weeks have been hard. Not because I was getting increasingly desperate that we’d find someone, anyone, to look after the babies two afternoons a week after mornings with mum and godmother Margaret (To random stranger on street: ‘You think they’re cute? Would you like to look after them on a part-time basis?’). Or because I was particularly dreading going back to work, although both of these may have…

The babies are now nearly one year old. They have grown from loose-fitting 00000-sized clothes to a respectable size 0. That journey, as much as anything, has been about food. And drink. The first six months were all about drink. Magic milk, as a mother in my mother’s group calls it. Maybe it is because we don’t think of ourselves as mammals that sustaining our children exclusively with our own milk for such a long period can seem such a miracle. I kept the babies alive on my own milk for more than six months. When I was at peak…

Since Steve went back to work two months ago, one of the biggest changes to our lives has been the busyness of our weekends. Like most families, weekends are when we do the grocery/ market shopping, clean the house and maintain the garden. We share these tasks and take it in turns to look after the babies so we don’t have the stress of trying to look after them as well and can get it all done. By the time we have also taken it in turns to sleep in and Steve has given me a couple of hours to…

People are starting to ask me whether the babies’ personality differences are becoming more apparent. We don’t want to label and stereotype them for their future years, so we don’t overplay the differences. There seem to be some though: Rhea, inquisitive and active from birth, has been the first one to crawl and to cut a tooth (two in fact). Lara, as mum has pointed out, looks at you so intently when you talk and makes noises in reply. She is almost talking back with her facial expressions. She is not as busy as Rhea and doesn’t smile quite as…