Angie Kinghorn

Open letter to new moms (of twins)

Dear new moms of twins,

I am having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.  And my twins are three and a half.
I would like to tell you that after all the night feedings and spit-up cease, things become a cinch, but I promised my readers that I would give them things straight up.
So, straight up it is.  You may want to sit down.
Motherhood is hard.  And for me, it is not getting easier as the kids get older.  It’s just morphing into a different type of hard.
Before you brand me a wimp, let me tell you that I am actually quite capable, intelligent, up for a challenge, and resilient.  I made it through law school, passed the bar exam, practiced corporate law, jumped out of an airplane, scuba dived on the wreck of an iron-side steamer in 100 feet of water, went parasailing, endured the loss of both my grandfathers and my father to prostate cancer, got through the medical scare of a lifetime after finding out that my brain harbors a small tumor, then weathered a traumatic pregnancy and birth only to end up with postpartum depression.  (Full disclosure: I got through all this, but with the help of my good friend Sam the pharmacist.  Better living through chemistry, I always say.)
There’s no way to be ready for parenthood.  It’s not an experience for which you could adequately prepare, no matter how much time you had.  I hope you’re one of those new moms who exists in a blissful state of pink-tinged cloudy happiness, and if you are, I’m thrilled for you.  But if you’re not, know that you’re not alone.  Even if your friends don’t talk about it, they have days where they sit and cry for no reason.  Some of them hate nursing but feel like they can’t stop without being branded a bad mother.  Some of them hate nursing but feel like they can’t stop because it’s the only reason they’ve lost weight.  They panic and think they’re pregnant again, rushing out to the drugstore to buy a test, then berate themselves when, after peeing all over their hands, they remember that they may not have actually had sex since their last period.  How do I know this?  I’ve talked to a LOT of new moms.  When you ask how they’re doing and take the trouble to get past “fine,” you realize that the experience is hard for everyone.
You’re not the only one who:
  • Wonders at the end of the day whether you remembered to brush your teeth.
  • Goes out in public with Desitin smeared on your shirt.
  • Needs a shower but would rather nap.
  • Looks at your cracked, bleeding nipples and wonders if it’s worth it.
  • Sees your preemie newborns and thinks, “Ugh.  My babies look like aliens!”
  • Stood up in the hospital and had a gush of blood ruin your slippers.
  • Wonders, while holding your screaming, feverish child in a tepid bath at 2:30 in the morning, why you decided to procreate.
  • Falls asleep pumping.
  • Feels like a dairy cow.
Some tips and general things to know:
  • Crying is ok.  If they’re crying, they’re not dying of SIDS.
  • If you don’t already drink alcohol, consider starting.  If you already enjoy the good grape, consider moving up to hard liquor.
  • Understand that you’re going to feel incredibly isolated for the first year or so.  Not only is it hard to get around with twins, but most of your friends will not have twins.  Every time you relate a particularly horrible parenting experience, they’ll sigh and say, “But you had twins!”  As if you didn’t know.
  • Learn to accept help, even when that help is doing your laundry and making fun of the condition of your delicates.  Accept help even when the help is doubled over laughing at your husband’s boxer shorts.
  • With help comes less privacy (see above).  Best to get used to it now.  You won’t be able to go to the bathroom alone for several years.
  • You do NOT have to breastfeed.  If you have to supplement with formula, or for some reason cannot, or choose not to nurse, it’s ok.  Don’t let anyone make you feel like you’re letting your children down.
  • More than likely, you’re not going to see your “old” body again.  And it will take about a year to feel remotely normal.
  • Any time you have an option, go for what makes life easier, even if it isn’t what you’d envisioned pre-twins.  For example, if you always pictured yourself as the cool mom in the SUV, consider that a minivan, while less cool, will make your life significantly easier, and thus happier.
  • If you don’t already have a dog, get one, if for no other reason than to avoid having to sweep and mop under the kitchen table three times a day.  But also because your dog is infinitely more likely to obey you, unconditionally love you, and greet you with enthusiasm than are your own offspring.
  • But don’t take the easy way out.  Take the kids to church, even if they do get sick every time they’re in the nursery.  They need it, and so do you.
  • Pray with your kids, even when it’s the last thing you feel like doing.  Introduce them to God so he’ll know who they are when you complain about them.
  • Don’t avoid discipline because it’s inconvenient.  Someone once told me, with kids, “it’s pay now or pay later.”  Truer words were never spoken.
  • Remember that your job is not to be their friend, but their mother.
And yes, it is worth it.  Even on a day like today, when my kids have pestered me with the same questions time and time again, when they’ve thrown tantrums, screamed and refused to go down for a nap without a fight, even on the days when someone vomits on my shoes and pees on the bathroom floor.
It’s worth it.  Someday you’re going to find yourself engulfed in a huge toddler hug, and a little voice will whisper, “Mommy, I love you.”  And you’ll know what I mean.
Love,
Angie

Be careful what you say …

My son thinks he’s a triceratops.

Usually, this is fine and kind of cute.  He romps around wearing an adorable dino tail, courtesy of Mick&Mack, growls a lot, and occasionally stalks his sister around the room until she ends up standing on a chair, shrieking.
But this morning, when the fierce dino charged me in the kitchen, I felt teeth graze my arm.  No, no, no!  We solved the biting problem two and a half years ago.  We are NOT going there again.
So what did my Brilliant Mommy Self say?  “Grant, don’t do that.  We don’t bite people, and besides, it’s silly.  Triceratops don’t eat people.”
He looked at me, obviously perplexed.  “What triceratops eat, Mommy?”
At this point I was wishing I remembered more from middle school science about the Jurassic era.  I have a knack for remembering the irrelevant.  I can rattle off the elements of adverse possession, tell you the year in which Rutherford B. Hayes was elected, and recite, verbatim, a poem I learned in second grade called “One Bright Day in the Middle of the Night.”  However, I cannot remember whether the triceratops was an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore.  For parenting purposes, it seemed that herbivore was the logical choice as it posed the least potential harm to others, so I told Grant, “Honey, they eat plants and trees and leaves.”
Cut to this afternoon in the back yard.  It was a rare moment of suburban idyllic-ness. I was happily chatting with my neighbor over the fence while our kids played in their respective yards.  Our dog was patrolling the perimeter, stopping occasionally to dig furiously in the dirt.  Birdsong filled the air, mixing with the children’s giggles to create a blissful symphony.
Obviously, something bad was about to happen.
Sure enough, I looked towards the twins, and there was Grant, my little triceratops, methodically stripping leaves off an ironwood tree and chomping away.  Because basically, that’s exactly what Mommy told him to do.
Three years of twins have made me much faster than I used to be, and I managed to get the leaves out of his mouth before they were ingested.  Thankfully, we avoided another call to poison control.

I’ve learned my lesson.  Next time he asks, I’ll tell him that triceratops eat asparagus, zucchini, Happy Meals, and milkshakes.  

Creative parenting

Parenting is all about acting and improvisation.
Kids do not come with instruction manuals or demo DVDs.  And no matter how many parenting books are on your shelves, you’re going to come across something they don’t cover, or something that needs to be dealt with immediately, without giving you time to look to Dr. Spock for the answer. 
For instance, what do you do when you’ve just moved into a new house and your two year old locks herself in the bathroom with God knows what?  You haven’t finished unpacking and you certainly have no inventory of the items in the loo.  There could be razor blades, Liquid Plumber, or Ex-Lax under the sink.  What makes sense?  When this happened to a friend of mine, she pleaded with her child to unlock the door, then gave up and kicked the door down.  I am not making this up.
Discipline requires some quick thinking and creative solutions, and there’s nobody better at that than my husband’s cousin, Melissa.  When her son (age 8 or so) ran upstairs in a fit of pique and locked her out of his bedroom, she promptly removed his doorknob, and then left if off.  He endured approximately three months of his little sister and her friends peering through the hole in his door every time he retreated to his room, and I doubt he’ll ever try to lock his mother out again.  If he does, she’s warned him that next time she’ll remove his entire door.
Her son is now 13, and this week he’s been leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor.  Her solution?  She’s given him only a hand towel to use for the rest of the week.  Brilliant. 
I suppose it’s only a matter of time until my children tell me they’re running away.  How to respond?  My grandmother offered to help my mother pack her suitcase when she threatened to leave home.  That’s pretty good, and it stopped my mother cold.  But the best I’ve heard is a friend who called her parents while they were out at a party to say she was running away.  They said that was fine, but that if she was going to run away, she had to pack ALL her things, and that she and all her stuff had better be gone by the time they got back or they’d be really upset.  What happened?  She packed everything, and then found the suitcases too heavy to get past the front porch.  She was squirreling boxes of stuff behind a tree to come back and get later when her parents pulled in the driveway.  And yes, she got in a lot of trouble. 
I’ve wished for Melissa’s creativity many times in the past three years.  Unfortunately, I’m usually too tired, irritated, or just plain mad to come up with disciplinary solutions as creative as hers.  So my mantra has become, “stay firm.”  This means that what the twins get for a meal or a snack is what they get.  Period.  No short-order cooking or throwing away perfectly good food in this house.  Predictably, this is not a popular policy. 
Another mantra of mine is “explain things so thoroughly and so complexly as to distract and silence the children completely.”  And hope they learn some vocabulary or valuable information along the way.  For example, as I was wheeling my grocery cart through the frozen food section the other day, Grant and Anne spotted the Little Mermaids splashed all over boxes of cookies.  Naturally, the cookies and the mermaids were strategically placed at child-in-cart level.  I’m sure you can imagine what happened.
“Mommy!  Look!  A mermaid!” they chorused.  “I want that,” Anne whined.  “Please, oh please,” Grant begged.
Usually my response would have been a stern “No,” followed by getting the hell out of Dodge.  But we were in a traffic jam, hemmed in by another double cart (with only one child in it), one older woman with a walker, and a couple of moms in chic workout clothes pushing carts full of organic food.
“Do you know why the Little Mermaid is on those boxes?” I asked.  The kids continued to whine for the cookies but were clearly curious.  “It’s called product placement.  Disney owns the rights to ‘The Little Mermaid,’ and other companies know that people love the Little Mermaid, so they ask Disney to put her picture on things to help sell them.  It works.  See?  You don’t want those because they’re organic granola cookies.  You don’t even know what they are.  You just want them because of the Little Mermaid.  It’s brilliant, really.  So then the companies who use her picture pay Disney a fee.  Then they put those boxes down on the middle of the shelf so little kids like you will see them when their mommies stop to get eggs.  They hope you’ll do exactly what you’re doing and beg your mommy for some of the cookies just because of the Little Mermaid, until your mommy gives in out of sheer frustration.  Product placement, guys.  Can you say ‘product placement’?”
By this point we’d cleared the traffic jam.  I could hear at least one woman behind me busting a gut laughing, and my kids were saying, “pwoduct pwacmen.”  Success.
I use this tactic a lot in the grocery store.  One of the kids will beg for something completely random, like a pineapple.  I’ll say, “No, we can’t get that.  It’s not on the list!”
“But Mommy, I waaaaant it!”
“Well, we can’t get it, it’s not on the list.  Do you know why we have a list?  A list is very important.  It helps you be organized.  You plan out your meals for the week and then you make a list of ingredients you need to make those meals.  That’s a cool word, isn’t it?  ‘Ingredients.’  Can you say that?”  By now they’re usually staring at me in stony silence.  “So you make a list of all the ingredients you’ll need to make meals, because you don’t want to have to come back to the store, do you?  It’s very important that you stick to your list, because if you start buying things that are not on the list, you’ll end up with a bunch of things you don’t really need that might be good but don’t go together to make up any meal.  Then you don’t ever use them and they go bad and you’ve wasted money, which is a very bad thing to do, because Daddy works very hard to make money.  So you have to make a list and stick to it.”
By the time my monologue ends, we’re usually well away from the offending food.  I’m aware that this provides either endless entertainment or irritation for fellow shoppers, but I figure it’s better than listening to the kids’ screams echoing around the supermarket.
Another tactic I love is reverse psychology.  If my kids throw a tantrum and refuse to follow me in a public place, I’ve adopted my mother’s approach.  I say, “Ok, you stay here.  We’ll see you later!” and proceed to walk away.  It works every time.  
When they don’t like the pajamas we’ve put out for bed, we say, “Ok, fine.  We’ll put them on the dog.”  Usually the mere threat works to send them running back to the room to get dressed, but recently Mark, when dealing with an unusually petulant Anne, actually had to put her pajamas on the dog before she came running back.  The dog was not amused, and neither was Anne.  
Next time I’ll try to get pictures.     

Who let the kids out?

For any of you considering putting your twins on a leash:  a cautionary tale.
This happened over a year ago, but the memory is still appallingly fresh.  One morning, I decided to take Grant and Anne to get new shoes.  Specifically, cheap shoes for playing in the mud. 
With thrift in mind, we headed to Payless Shoes.  Friends of mine in the mothers of multiples group swear by Payless.  There are rumors that the same shoes sold under the wildly expensive Stride-Rite brand are available under different names at this bargain basement store.  Confession time:  until that morning, I’d never set foot in a Payless.  It’s not like my closet is stocked with Manolos or Louboutins, but I do prefer to shop at higher-end stores like Marshalls and Stein-Mart.
For this outing, I decided not to use the stroller, because I’d found what seemed like a fabulous alternative:  the Kinder Kord. 
The Kinder Kord was invented by Joan Lunden (red flag, anyone?) as an alternative to traditional and humiliating child leashes to keep her (nanny) attached to her two sets of twins in public.  The Kinder Kord consists of an adult wristband and retractable cord, and childrens’ wristbands and cords – think retractable dog leashes on bracelets.  It can be configured so that the adult’s wrist is connected to one child, or so that both children are tethered to the adult as well as to each other – think walking two dogs on a split leash in a “Y” formation. 
I thought the Kinder Kords would be perfect for quick trips in and out of stores.  No longer hampered by the gigantic stroller, I’d hook the twins up to the Kords and we’d zoom up and down aisles and all would be fantastic and efficient.  In short, I was completely delusional.
Initially, everything looked like my vision.  Grant and Anne were excited to be out, and they trotted on their leashes like, well, dogs.  We seemed to be in Normal Land until a Payless employee turned up in a t-shirt that might as well have said, “Welcome to Hell.”  This guy, whom we’ll just call “Mr. Toothy” so as to protect his identity, was a nightmare mishmash of British teeth, evil Dracula laugh, an emaciated body, and a knack for disappearing whenever help might be required.  He measured the twins’ feet and then retreated, appearing only sporadically to chortle ominously and perhaps take cell phone pictures to document my parenting foibles and the epic failure of the Kords.
The moment I began trying to shove Grant’s feet into various hideous shoes (no Stride-Rite copies in sight, FYI), I noticed a sudden lack of pressure on my wrist leash.  Anne had simply un-velcroed her wrist tether and was happily browsing the infant shoes about ten feet away.
Joan, do you see the flaw in your brilliant invention yet?  What good does it do to have a freaking leash on your child if the child can just pull the velcro and remove it?!?!?!?
Not five minutes later, the situation was reversed.  While pulling shoes on and off Anne, Grant ripped away his velcro and un-tethered himself.  Fortunately, I managed to catch the back of his shirt before he could go anywhere.  But this child is nothing if not stubborn.  He waited until I was busy helping Anne try the world’s ugliest pair of Dora the Explorer sneakers and broke free again.
“Grant?”  I called, certain he would appear around the end of the aisle.  “Grant?  Grant, come here right now!” 
No Grant.  I felt panic rising in my chest.  “Grant!”  I picked up Anne under one arm like a football, leaving the diaper bag and both kids’ left shoes in the middle of the floor and ran up and down the back of the store, frantically looking down the aisles.  “Grant!”  I was beyond sweaty and beginning to have trouble breathing.  “Grant!  Come here to Mommy NOW!”  Other shoppers ignored me completely. 
Then I saw him at the front of the store, blithely following a couple out the door towards busy South Boulevard.  “STOP THAT CHILD!!!!” I screamed.   The man was actually holding the door open for him.  What planet are these people from?!?!?  “STOP HIM!  DO NOT LET HIM LEAVE!  GRANT!!!!”  Once again, none of the other shoppers even looked up.  By then I was sprinting, Anne still tucked under one arm like a pigskin.  Then out of nowhere, Mr. Toothy appeared, laughing, natch.  I mean, what’s funnier than a woman about to lose her child to mid-day traffic?
Mr. Toothy blocked Grant’s exit and I grabbed him, half hugging him and half wanting to spank the living daylights out of him.  (And by “him,” I mean Grant, of course.  While I’m sure Mr. Toothy would have been up for it, any such public display would have pissed off my husband and either gotten Mr. Toothy fired or launched him to viral Internet stardom.)  Besides, there were still shoes to buy and only God knows where DSS employees lurk during lunch.
Any sane person would have left at this point, but given the amount of effort it took to get the kids out of the house and into a store, I was not about to leave until we had shoes.  So I re-hooked Grant to the Kord and picked out a pair of shoes for Anne.  We then had three pairs, and it was a buy one get one half-off sale, so naturally we had to look at the women’s shoes before we left.
Anne, ever the fashionista, took one look at the pseudo-leather pumps and sat down, refusing to move.  She was tethered to Grant, though, and Grant seemed really interested in a pair of stilettos about 10 feet away.  I heard shrieking and turned to see Grant motoring down the aisle, pulling Anne along by the wrist.  As in, on her back, red-faced, yelling and kicking her feet while her brother dragged her along the carpet by the arm tethered to the Kord. 
In a shining moment of Good Mothering, I responded to this crisis by picking Anne up and setting her on her feet, telling her to stand so she wouldn’t get pulled along.  I tried on a couple pairs of shoes, attempting to ignore the simultaneous tantrums behind me.  When I turned around, both kids were on their backs on the floor, shrieking and kicking and pounding their fists.  And they would not get up.   Absolutely would not get up.  In order for me to move, I would have to drag them behind me like a sled.  This seemed a less than stellar plan for their shoulders, so I tried to coax them onto their feet.  No go.  Each time, they would immediately flop back down onto their backs and resume their tantrums.
I wanted to flop down and cry with them, but was sweating so much that tears were a physical impossibility.  So I looked at my two year olds having a fit on the Payless floor and laughed like a hyena.  The kids stopped screaming, and muttered to each other in twin-speak.  It sounded suspiciously like, “Wow, it’s working!  She’s about to have a complete break from reality!”
And that was it.  We had to leave.  But on the next aisle, with no warning, Anne literally blew up.  She threw herself to the floor, back arched, screaming, snot pouring out of her nose, tears running off her face.  It was the mother of all tantrums. 
Then I felt something sting my arm.   I looked down and saw the inner whirligig of the Kinder Kord.  That’s right, sports fans, little Anne threw a big enough tantrum that the Kinder Kord snapped open and the steel spring flew out.  And my response?  “Effing Joan Lunden!  How many nannies do you take when you go shopping!”  By this point, we’d pretty much cleared the store, but the few intrepid souls left started to edge cautiously away from us, eyes downcast.
After her explosion and my outburst, Anne was done.  She threw a rag doll tantrum.  (For the uninitiated, this involves sitting down and going completely limp.)  Incidentally, a fireman’s carry is harder than it looks, even with a small toddler.   
You’ll get no ringing endorsement of the Kinder Kord from me.  But I’m not going to slam child leashes as a category.  Watching my child run away from me and almost get pancaked on one of the city’s busiest streets made me realize that in some cases, leashes are a good thing. 
Just don’t buy them from Joan Effing Lunden.