Harry's Blog

My wife is a brave woman, she's nine months pregnant and yet decides to give the twins their first go at painting. But I guess with the rain pouring down that teacher training has stepped in and she's gone into "wet break" mode. What a trooper.

The twins love playing with their toy shopping trolley. You can often find one of them pushing it around, having filled it with a variety of multi-coloured plastic toys. Invariably they will announce they are going to the shops.

Kitty: Look dadda, shop.
Me: You're going to the shops sweetheart?
Kitty: Yes
Me: And what are you going to buy at the shops?
Kitty: BISCUITS

It's always biscuits, every single time they play shop and you ask them what they are going to buy or have bought - the answer is biscuits. We don't feed them on a diet of biscuits, honest, they may have one biscuit a day, often none. Yesterday my son was playing shop while Jo was out taking Kitty to see the doctor. Patrick was pushing the trolley around and I asked him what he was going to the shop for.

Patrick: Mummy's Tea and Daddy's tea

Bless him. Isn't that lovely. Not only has he broken the biscuit spell he's thought of us too.

Me: What are Mummy and Daddy having for tea then Pat?
Patrick: BISCUITS

Lovely.

Butter Wouldn't Melt, originally uploaded by Harry Neary.

Don't the twinnies look gorgeous? And so grown up too. They are in a totally adorable phase at the moment. Though that also brings many a moment of mischief.

Their speech is really coming on too. Sentences are getting longer week by week and their comprehension of what we tell them is improving rapidly too. It really is amazing watching your children grow up.

Neither can pronounce a hard C or the letter K yet though, once they manage that their speech is going to sound really impressive. Right now car is "char", but even that's adorable in its own way.

For the curious photophiles among you II shot this on black & white film. Yes actual film. Taken with a brilliant Canon EOS 5 SLR I bought for £30 on Ebay, oh and a much more expensive Tamron 70-200mm f2.8 lens. The film? Ilford HP5 400.

Kitty and her Grandpa, originally uploaded by Harry Neary.

Our daughter is just over two years old but has clearly decided that she is a grown up. She points at other children, often ones a year or two older than her and declares, "Look Dad, a baby."

And that last quote brings up my main point for this post. For the last few weeks Kitty has been calling me Dad. I've got very used to being Daddy or Dadda especially as Kitty's voice¹ is so sweet and angelic.

Now I'm merely Dad. And while she's still the same tiny adorable flirt that ignores her mother's orders and attempts to wrap me around her little finger, something has changed.

Being called Dad makes me feel old in a way that Dadda or Daddy didn't. When I try to point this out to Kitty she just laughs at me like I'm an idiot.

_{¹At least her normal voice, not the one she uses for screeching "my toy" at her twin brother.}

Click the image to watch the video of our twinnies...

From Ring o Roses

Granny and Grandpa bought Patrick and Kitty a sand pit. Foolishly Mummy and Daddy let the twinnies play with sand and water at the same time. And this is the result.

While we're no fans of the continuum method and its mad fixation with toddlers learning to chop cucumber our twins have spent the afternoon playing with knives.

Wifey bought them some toy fruit and veg to go with their new play kitchen and the plastic food is quite interesting. It comes complete with a plastic knife. And the fruit itself splits down the middle and is only held together by Velcro.

Patrick took no time at all learning to chop the fruit and veg in half using the plastic knife. Our daughter on the other hand struggled quite a bit. Despite being able to feed herself and being very capable in many areas her skills with her hands to lag behind Pat.

Our little girl has the sweetest voice you've ever heard, the kind of bell-chime angelic tone often inpersonated by actresses when providing toddler voices for TV shows. She even has a slightly higher sweeter voice reserved especially for me - when she wants something and her mother has already said "no".

Kitty has another voice though - one that will be all too familiar to any of you who have seen The Exorcist (hence the title of this post, which is a quote from the movie). Crikey it's a scary voice. It tends to be reserved to shout at her brother - who she's terribly bossy with.

This morning I was awoken by the twins having a screaming row with each other over who could use the wicker chair in their bedroom.

"My sit down Kitty."
"No my sit down Pat."
"My sit down."
"PAAAAAAAAAT, MY SIIIIIIT DOOOOOOWN."

I was expecting to hear Tubular Bells next. Scary little girl.

I resolved the conflict in the time honoured way of avoiding the conflict completely. The coward's approach is often the best where warring twins are concerned. I just took the chair out of the room and went back to bed.

Both of the twins are in the "why?" stage of toddlerdom. Kitty more so that than Pat. You can guarantee that whatever you say to Kitty she will respond with "whiiiiiiiiy?" Most of these times the "why" doesn't actually seem to fit the conversation at all.

Kitty will point at her cereal. "Breakfast Dadda", she'll say.
"Yes it is sweetheart."
"Whiiiiiiiiy."

Where do you go from there conversationally?

Being the parents of twin toddlers certainly has its ups and downs. Watching them play together, chatting in what little English they posses, is just adorable. If you don't have twins I think you really miss out on this part of your baby's life - there's something very special about the interaction of twinnies.

But it's damn hard too. Especially when your beloved daughter turns into a snatch monster. Kitty has been on the step twice this morning for snatching toys from Pat. Meanwhile Pat has been a whiney little so and so for a week, understandable when his cold was in full flow, less so now. Right now he seems to want to whine and cry at the least little thing and it is driving us a bit potty.

One of the most amazing things about having toddlers is watching their language skills develop. It's especially entertaining when you have twins because of course they eventually start to talk to each other.

That way when one of them learns a new word, the other can learn it from them pretty quickly. The downside is that they tend to reinforce each other's mistakes. Quite often one of the twins has nailed a word first time, only for repetition with their sibling to pull the word further and further away from the original.

For us the most entertaining aspect of two year old twins learning to talk right now is the compound nouns that they come up with. The children are creating their own words to describe the world around them based on their own experiences.

They were up before 7am.

Bugger.

I mentioned earlier today our difficulty with the twins' sleep pattern at the moment.

So today when I brought the babes home from their child minder at 2pm I decided to try something different. Normally they go to bed, stripped to their vests¹ and eventually have an afternoon nap.

On mornings at home they go for their nap after lunch at around twelve thirty. On child minder days it's just after two in the afternoon. They tend to be more grumpy after those later naps.

Anyway, I'm digressing here. So today I decided no nap. If they wanted a sleep they could have one on the sofa. And so we got home and started to play.

So one of our munchkins thought their first experience of snow was the most exciting thing ever. The other thoroughly hated it. Can you guess which was which?

We're at war with our children at the moment - the bone of contention being their insistence on getting up before six for the last few mornings.

Perhaps it's our fault for putting twins that aren't even two years old yet in beds rather than cots, but when they can walk and talk it seems a bit silly keeping them in a cage.

So a few months ago we made the leap to beds and on the whole it has been quite a success. Okay, so often one has to loiter outside their room at bedtime to quickly throw them back into bed should they feel the need for mischief, but on the whole it has worked rather well.

The Naughty Step is something many of us young parents have come to know through the show Supernanny and something many of us use too.
We've been pretty sparing with it until recently, but now the twins are old enough to be naughty it's started getting some use.

However it's clearly had an influence on our daughter. She's only 21 months old but seems to think she's the family's second mummy. Daughter will tend to boss her twin brother around, fetch and carry stuff needed for nappy changing and helps a lot when tidying up.

Yesterday though she rather excelled herself. She was playing with Baby, her favourite doll. All of a sudden she exclaimed "Step" crossly and took baby off and put her on the step.

She came back into the room without baby and wifey asked her, "has baby been naughty?" Daughter answered "yes". She waited a while then collected her plastic child from the step, cuddling it and patting it on the back as she returned to the lounge.

Bless her.

Our twins' favourite people in the entire world are my wife's parents - who they know as Granny and Grandpa.

But being under two they've not quite mastered these two words yet. Granny is apparently "Momo" and Grandpa is known as "Bumpa".

That was until we visited over the New Year. Now it seems both twins seem to have evolved "Bumpa" into something that sounds almost like "Bumhole".

It's actually so clear that at one point my surprised brother-in-law said to the twins "Don't call me dad a bumhole!"

Kids eh?

Our little twinnies play their favourite game. Peekaboo. And look for some telepathic behaviour from them. How do they do that?

There are fewer happier or funnier sights in this world than watching two toddlers eating Heinz Spaghetti with little forks.

They are doing a surprisingly good job though. But both children are orange now.

Right now, as I type these words, my wife is downstairs about to give our children their first cookery lesson.

They are going to make chocolate cornflake cakes.

The children are 18 months old.

How exactly do you think it's going to go?

Update: Here's a photo of the aftermath.