The twins are four weeks old today and three days shy of a month old, but I'm still going to use the phrase, "When the twins were little," in this post. Here goes.


When the twins were little, i.e., a few days old, feeling like I was treating them fairly was really easy. They'd wake up, I'd feed them both, change them both, and put them back to bed. We were lucky if either boy opened his eyes for more than a few seconds during all of this.

(Just a note, now: This post will be shorter than the last one because I need to do some house-stuff and the boys are starting to fuss themselves awake.)

Anyway, time (okay, days) passed and they started to keep their eyes open more. We went through one or two days of a lot of fussing at nap time before I realized, "Oh, wait, they're crying because they're bored." My sons were ready to join the world! For like, twenty minutes after eating, anyway.

Now we're at the four-week mark and their awake-time seems to be about thirty minutes after being fed and changed, give or take ten minutes before they start yawning and getting cranky. And they like to look at toys or faces and get quiet and wide-eyed when people tickle them or talk to them. Also, they like when they're held and get to be walked around the apartment.

Also, tummy time is pretty nice, for like, five minutes. Sam can roll over from his tummy to his back already (yay for being four months ahead of the game!) and Theo seems less interested in moving; he just likes to stare, still. But then I'm trying to avoid flat heads and at the same time, don't have enough arms to carry both of them comfortably around the apartment. So they still end up spending some time on their backs, on a blanket (they still don't like swings or bouncers).

In a way, I'm okay with that when they're being played with. But here's where my desire to have more arms comes in: I'm starting to suffer from Mommy Guilt.

I remember being about thirteen or fourteen when my mom announced to me, at the start of a fall shopping trip, "We're not going to try to get all the kids an equal number of gifts for Christmas this year. I've decided we were focusing too much on trying to be fair and that's not the most important thing."

Well, I want to be fair. And sometimes I can't be. Sometimes, I shouldn't be. And that's hard.

If Theo got my attention for five minutes, I want Sam to have it for an equal amount of time. If I carried Sam around and talked to him, I want to do the exact same thing for Theo. And it took all of a few hours to realize that it's just not possible.

So I have to pray against the guilt and just deal with it, because "fair" isn't the ultimate goal in life. "Fair" isn't what I really want to be teaching them. I want them to get attention, yes, and I want them to get lots of it from me. If one boy is wide-eyed and needs some play-time or to be held, giving him that attention is great! But if his brother is yawning and getting fussy and really just needs sleep, it's not right for me to keep him awake and deny him that for the sake of "fairness" -- and, more unjustly for him, to make me feel better.

I'll just keep working on balancing that, but I gotta go. I have two boys to feed. :)