"a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down"

I feel like one of the advantages to having these twins a little later in our life is that now we have our older kids to experience it with and enjoy the fun. It's important to remember to have some fun every once in a while. If you don't then I'm pretty sure it's more a case of "when" you'll crack rather than "if" you'll crack. One way I like to unwind is to mess with Jackie and the kids. An oldie but goodie that I like to do with Jackie, is wait until she puts a baby on the couch and surround them with pillows to keep them from falling off while she runs to grab their diaper. I wait until she's gone and I carefully move the baby onto the ground then wait and see how fast all the color drains from her face when she comes back in the room. Now that every mom reading this hates me, you should know that I've quit doing that one because Jackie threatened me physically, and I don't want be the boy who cried wolf , just in case they do fall off something for real.

I do think the kids get the worst of of the pranks. Case in point, when we were in the NICU with the babies they had these huge syringes that they would feed them with. When I saw those syringes naturally I had the same thought that any dad would have, "That thing would scare the crap out of my kids!" so I borrowed one of the humongous syringes from the hospital, filled it with apple juice, threw a huge needle on it and told the kids a story. I told them that Grandma Shoell had called and told us that all the local pools had tested positive for kryptospiritum (sp) and that if they wanted to be around the babies they would need a Gamu-globulin (sp) shot. How they reacted at the sight of needle said a lot about how each of our kids handle pressure. Lindsay immediately broke into tears; Kade looked frantic and started crying; Kalli impressed me the most, she kept quiet, made herself look smaller, and located the nearest exit. Me and Jackie couldn't keep a straight face for long, and eventually the kids were able to laugh about it. I like to think that by the time they are grown, our kids will have built more character than any of their friends.

Kalli's really getting into the role.

 

Kade still needs to work on his acting a bit.

 

Brynn & Owen

It's been two months since Jackie had the twins, I would have posted sooner but honestly who has time anymore.  It's funny when we first told people that we were going to have twins, quite a few people made the comment " I always wanted to have twins". At the time I could understand that, twins just seem like they would be fun. Now that we have them here my perspective has changed. Now when I hear people say " I always wanted to have twins" all I hear in my head is them saying "I love the sound of crying babies and I hate to sleep". 

Luckily things are much better, than the first week, which I honestly don't remember much. All I do remember is that I was sure not to put my head on my pillow, because that would upset the babies and then they would start crying again. Now we only have to get up about once a night and we've got a pretty good system of changing the diaper, feeding, burping, wrapping, and passing out.

Me and Jackie were talking the other day about how glad we are that we had the twins last now that we have a little experience.  We're glad because now we are a lot less uptight.  With our first few kids you would jump up at any little noise and try to sooth them, or want to hold them all night long, but we're kind of over that. Don't get me wrong I still love them and I love holding them, but it's amazing all the things you can get done when your not holding a baby (like napping, and eating brownie batter).

Here is one of the pictures we took of Owen & Brynn. If you ever want to test your patience I would suggest having a photo shoot for one month old twins. After 8 hours, 3 arguments, 5 disagreements, 17 bowel movements, 31 peeing incidents, a fifth of vodka (to steady my nerves),12 costume changes, 8 backdrops, and 765 pictures taken we ended up with about 6 usable pictures. I'll try to post the other 5 pictures after I can pass them through photoshop.



Owen & Brynn