I have been known to complain to my girlfriends in great detail about Paul. He doesn’t clean enough, and when he does clean he does such a crappy job I suspect him of being deliberately incompetent in the hopes that I’ll say “PLEASE don’t help.” He can be inconsiderate, grabbing my towel when he forgot to get a fresh one for himself, and then leaving mine wet on the floor next to the toilet. He can appear to listen to me for ten minutes or so, when actually he is doing a physics problem in his head and hasn’t heard a single word. He’ll put a huge load of laundry on the low, hot cycle, because he doesn’t think to set the cycle, and then he’ll leave it in the dryer to get cold and crinkled–and moldy, because he didn’t set the cycle for a large load. He’ll step over cat barf to let me find it later. Spiders? My job.

But in many, many ways he SAVES us, he saves our family. He comes home from work in a good mood, and he plays actively with the children. He doesn’t expect to have time to relax right away, and he knows he has only a short time per day with the kids and so he takes all of it, waiting to do his own things until after the kids are in bed. When I’m falling apart, he makes a funny remark that puts everything back in perspective. He never says “Oh, you must be PMSing.” When I’m cranky, he doesn’t escalate it by cranking back at me; in fact, he acts extra affectionate, like he thinks I’m being cute when I am actually being a total bitch. He doesn’t give me a hard time about the messiness of the house. He doesn’t go out partying with his friends. He doesn’t spend all our money, leaving me wondering how we’re going to pay the bills.

Things like “doing a good job cleaning the toilet” pale in comparison. (Though I still would really, really like it if he could do a good job cleaning the toilet. I mean, it’s not rocket science.)

It is difficult to shop with twins. Aside from problems with fussing, crying, grabbing things off shelves, etc., there is the problem of where to put them.

A shopping cart has only one child seat. I’d read on twin sites that it was possible to put the twins in that seat together, one leg of each twin bent and the other leg of each twin through a leg hole. That did work, but only in the window of time after they were old enough to sit alone and before the shoving and hair-pulling began (about one month; your results may vary). Also, the seatbelt isn’t big enough to go around both of them, which is nerve-wracking if you depend on the seatbelt to be Officer Safety.

The other twin can ride in the back of the cart, but not if he keeps pulling himself to standing, threatening to plunge his top-heavy little self right down to the hard polished floor. Even if he stays sitting, he has access to everything you put into the cart.

Some places have enormous, heavy, awkward carts with an attached 2-seater section. The sticker on these carts says that only children older than a certain age, usually 2 years, may ride there, but I’ve used it with my 1-year-old twins. The primary problem is that the two seats seem to be arranged to give the children maximum kicking and hair-pulling access. Edward will grab enthusiastically for Elizabeth’s hair time and time again, pulling her head down nearly to the floor as she yells, or he’ll cheerfully kick her again and again.

The best solution for keeping the babies restrained and comfortable is their double stroller: two seatbelts, low access to each other (I put Elizabeth in the back seat because she is unlikely to pull Edward’s hair or kick the back of his seat; and from the front seat he can’t reach her), comfortable seats. But then I have only a stroller basket for whatever I’m buying. It’s a nice big basket as strollers go, but it’s not big enough for much more than a 12-pack of toilet paper.

I read (again, on a twin site) the idea of getting two carts, and putting one twin in the child seat of each. You can push one cart ahead of you, and pull the other cart behind you. This also gives you double the carrying space for purchases, which is great for minimizing trips to the store. I’ve tried this in times of desperation (we need toilet paper AND diapers AND paper towels AND laundry detergent AND cat litter AND cat food AND…), but it leaves me a wrung-out wreck. It’s hard to keep track of both babies when they’re spread out like that, it’s hard to steer around corners, and there’s the social discomfort of taking up ALL the room in every aisle you go down.

The only solution we’ve come up with is to wait to go shopping until the twins are in elementary school. (Actually, I wait for Paul to get home from work, and then I run to the store with only one twin.)

My mother-in-law sent me one of those dumb email forwards. This one was one of her very favorite sort: it lamented the passing of Mr. Common Sense, going on to say all the things old people believe: that children don’t respect their elders anymore, that nobody spends within their means anymore, that no one dresses properly anymore, that no one bothers to learn their sums anymore, that no one knows the meaning of hard work anymore, and so on. Also, everything’s so expensive, the portions in restaurants are huge, and you kids get off my lawn.

I’ll say this: Mr. Common Sense’s passing must not have been recent, because GENERATIONS of old people have been talking about it. It is astonishing that anyone who isn’t elderly manages to raise children or keep to a budget or hold down a job, or that the human race manages to continue on at all, considering how the elderly are the last of the people with any common sense.

“Are they identical or fraternal?” is one of the most common questions parents of twins are asked. (“Did you use fertility drugs?,” “Are they boys or girls?,” and “How much did they weigh when they were born?” are others.)

If one twin is a boy and the other is a girl, the twins are always, always, always fraternal. They can’t be identical. As my mother says when anyone asks her if her grandtwins are identical, “Take a peek in their diapers and see.”

If there are two boy twins, or two girl twins, the situation is more complicated. Fraternal twins can look very similar, and identical twins can have some differences. When I was pregnant and didn’t yet know I was having a boy and a girl, I looked into the subject and found that DNA testing is the only accurate way to determine if same-sex twins are identical or fraternal. There are lots of casual ways for guessing, but it’s the DNA that tells you for sure.

Of course, if you have one red-haired blue-eyed boy twin and one brown-haired brown-eyed boy twin, you may want to save your money for their college education instead.

When my firstborn was little, we didn’t have enough space for a playpen unless we wanted to jettison the couch–which was actually a loveseat, because there wasn’t room for an actual couch, either. When my secondborn was little, I didn’t think of a playpen: I was on auto-pilot, using whatever equipment we already had.

As soon as the first twin started crawling, I knew we were in an entirely unfamiliar world. Here is a glimpse into the world of twins, free of charge: unless you can unhinge your eyes so that they’ll move independently of each other, it is very, very, very difficult to keep track of two babies at the same time. Childproofing helps, and we ramped that up to previously unachieved levels. But what really helped was something that goes beyond the word “playpen” and on to the word “corral.”

It is the North State Superyard XT Gate. Ohhhh, yeahhh. Eighteen-and-a-half square feet of toddler patrol. There’s enough room in there for two toddlers and a heap of toys, and if you have triplets or an extra-big living room you can get the extension kit that doubles the inside area. We bought the extension because my grasp of spacial relations is tenuous at best. We’ve never used it, because my grasp of spacial relations instantly improved when I saw how the original gate without the extension used up nearly all the floor space in our living room.

It is such a relief to have a safe place to put the babies down if I’m bringing in groceries or folding laundry. Or, you know, finishing just one more chapter. It’s big enough that they can crawl around, and they don’t have the pitiful look of a babies in a cramped prison cell. An adult can easily sit in the pen with the babies, if an adult feels like having babies crawling all over her.

The whole thing is plastic, so you can hose it down if the need arises. It folds down accordian-style to the size of one panel (but thicker, of course), and can be brought outdoors or to the beach if you’re ever feeling brave enough to attempt such a thing. My aunt says she has seen the same play yard advertised in her pet catalog, for use with dogs and puppies. It can also be used to keep children (or dogs) OUT of a place: I read online that one mother said she used hers to surround the Christmas tree, protecting it from all those little curious grabby hands. I’ll keep that in mind for next Christmas: this Christmas, it’s still more needed as a corral.

Paul and I split the dishes, as I’ve mentioned. I end up with more, because I’m home during the day with the kids, and so I’m responsible for all the dishes they generate during that time, which I believe is fair; I also do my own dishes, of course, and any that I use making meals for the children. He is responsible for his own dishes, and for the dishes he uses when he makes dinner for the older kids. Whichever one of us makes dinner for the grown-ups, the other one does those dishes. We treat this as an agreement that, while not actually carved in stone, is at least written on stone in Sharpie marker.

When I do my share, I don’t mention it. When he does his share, he mentions it. “I did the dishes!,” he announces, leaving me in a quandary. If he did MY share for me, of course I would thank him–but that’s not what’s happening here. If he routinely thanked ME for doing MY dishes, then I guess I would thank him for doing his, too–but that’s not what’s happening here, either.

What IS happening here, I think, is that he’s revealing what he doesn’t realize he believes: that I’m only doing what I should be doing anyway, whereas he is doing something special, something that isn’t really his job to do.

It has been suggested to me that I should be grateful for what he does do, since other men do less: look at our fathers’ generation! our grandfathers’ generation! They did SO MUCH LESS. I think that’s like saying I should be grateful to a stranger for not mugging me, since there are other strangers who would. People should be compared not to people who are in flagrant disregard of what is fair and right, but to people who are in compliance with what is fair and right.

I may have gotten a little beyond the dishes problem here. This is what can happen with household matters: they seem like small things on paper, but they can represent larger issues. The problem comes when one partner sees them as symbolic of a larger issue, and the other partner sees it as a small thing. Paul: “I did the dishes!” Me: “Why not just MUG me while you’re at it, ‘Grandpa’?”

Paul and I have this thing we do. It flies in the face of an almost sacred convention: that families should eat dinner together. That’s what we fly in the face of. I’m flinching, anticipating produce (produce if we’re lucky) flung in our faces in return for this admission.

Paul and I have four children, ages 7 and under. One of Paul’s friends said it best: we’re no longer playing one-on-one, we’re doing zone defense. (Or it was something that that effect, anyway. Sports metaphors don’t quite reach me.) Dinner time is a difficult time of day: I’m tired and I’ve had my fill of children; Paul is tired and has spent an hour with children climbing all over him; the children are tired and getting hyper and wild and crabby. So what we do is, we divide and conquer. Paul takes the older boys and handles their dinner at a table we have in the living room. I take the twins and handle their dinner in the kitchen.

When the children are fed, we continue the division for their bedtime routine: Paul supervises Robert and William as they brush their teeth and get into their pajamas, and then he reads to them; meanwhile I read to the babies while they’re still in their high chairs, and then I get them into their pajamas and put them in their cribs.

Then, when all the children are theoretically asleep in their beds like little lambs, that’s when Paul and I have our dinner. We eat together, just us.

I’m re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, about how a situation can be going along steadily with a slight increase or slight decrease of something, and then abruptly there’s a BIG increase or a BIG decrease. This happens with fashion fads, he says: a few people will be wearing something, and then suddenly everyone has to have it. It’s not a steady slope, it’s a big plummet.

Where I notice this concept in action is the mold on our shower curtain. There will be a few little dots of grey, and I’ll think, “Huh. Probably should get around to cleaning in here some day.” A day later, there will be a colony of little dots, and I’ll think, “Better move that up the priorities list.” And a day later, the entire curtain is covered in gross, bad-housekeeper mold, and I’m frantically spritzing it with Tilex Mold & Mildew, trying not to scream or breathe.

At 15 months, the twins are eating almost exclusively bite-sized finger foods. I make a peanut butter and jam sandwich and cut it into little bites. Cheese, cut into little bites. Fruit, cut into little bites. Dry cereal. Goldfish crackers. Quesadilla, cut into little bites. Fried egg, cut into little bites. Toast, cut into little bites.

I do still spoon-feed them a few things: applesauce, yogurt, and the “vitamin A fruit or vegetable EACH DAY” so firmly demanded by the handout from the doctor’s office, which for some reason I have trouble facing in any other form (carrots, which take so long to cook; cantaloupe, which goes all mushy if you don’t use it quickly; peaches, which are only briefly in season). I have read that other children this age are spoon-feeding themselves, to which I say “Bwah ha ha ha ha! No way.” I am not giving these children a “spoons and mushy stuff” combination until they are DRIVING.

There are a few things I give them whole, and let them take bites of: graham crackers, mostly. They CAN take bites of other things, like sandwiches and bananas, but given the opportunity to do so, they will more often get transfixed by the way those foods mush through their fingers when squeezed. And so in the interests of my sanity, I mostly still cut their food up for them. (See “take so much, a mother can only.”)

They drink milk from sippee cups. If they are allowed to keep the sippee cups on their trays, they will sometimes take sips and then gently put the cup back down until they want another sip. More often, they will wait until I am lulled into thinking they will do this, and then they turn the cups upside down and shake them vigorously until their trays are lakes of milk to be splashed in until milk coats the walls.

I have finally given up on bibs, except in extreme circumstances such as pasta. Both twins would rip their bibs off and fling them to the floor, again and again and again and again and again until I was nearly going mad. I hear my mother-in-law in my head, saying in That Voice, “So they WON, huh?”–but too bad. The twins are tidy eaters. My firstborn practically needed TWO bibs, he was so messy, but these two babies only occasionally get anything on their clothes.

We have two high chairs, side by side. Edward always sits in the one with the seatbelt, because he is the only one of the four children to figure out that he could turn around and then stand up.

Each twin tries to jettison food he/she doesn’t want by putting it on the other twin’s high chair tray. If they are sharing a cup (if, for example, I have only one that’s clean), they will hand it back and forth.

If I’m spoon-feeding them, I use one bowl and one spoon, and I alternate bites between them.

I have to stop myself from feeling as if they have to eat the same amounts of everything. The other night I made them fried eggs and buttered toast. Edward was eating tons of toast and only a little egg; Elizabeth was eating tons of egg and only a little toast. This made me feel agitated, and as if maybe I should start giving Edward only egg and Elizabeth only toast so they’d “even out.” Then I thought about how if either of them were a single baby and eating that way, I wouldn’t give it a thought, and so I continued to offer both twins both foods, but didn’t worry that Edward was favoring the toast and Elizabeth the egg.

I’ll tell you this, I’m not doing those dishes. Paul and I, we have a deal: we each do our own dishes, plus each person does the dishes created by any meal he or she prepares for the children. This comes out pretty even.

Here’s what lights me: when he leaves his own dishes and the kids’ dishes from the night before, and skys off to work. I have to look at those dishes all day, thinking about the possibilities. I could do them and end the issue–except that I’ve learned that if I give Paul an inch, the next day he’ll take the same inch and those dishes will be left there again. Plus, I’d feel like a patsy.

I could leave them there for him, but then I have to see them there, all messy and bad-housewifey in the sink, reminding me every time I’m in the kitchen that I have an inconsiderate husband who is sitting in his totally clean office (cleaned by an actual maid) while I languish in squalor. And then he’ll do them that evening, and I’ll sit there thinking, “Since it takes the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME EITHER WAY, why couldn’t you have done that LAST NIGHT?” And he will not sway under the force of my thoughts, but will hum a tune as he dries his hands.

Third possibility is today’s favorite: fling them out the window to shatter on the driveway below. No, I’m not going to do that: they’d just sit there until I cleaned them up.