While Lisa sits next to me drafting an email to our parents with the daily update on our two little ones, I’m pounding out this, the first post of our new project: Growing Twins, a blog by two new parents of twin boys. The dichotomy of our two writings couldn’t be sweeter.
As relatively public people active in our community, we’ve been surprised at how intensely inwardly-focused we’ve become as parents- protective of our little guys’ online and offline identities: sharing photos (thus far) with only family, apologetically explaining to our friends why they haven’t met them yet, and spending all our free time in private moments- just the four of us, getting to know our new existence.
At the same time, the tools of modern communication inevitably provide us the means to stay connected with all our loved ones and our supportive community. We blog updates on Lisa’s personal blog that are cautious but emotionally revealing, post updates on our twins’ progress on Twitter, and, for some strange reason, are motivated to start a blog on twin parenting.
As the popular saying goes, “write the book you want to read.” Ever since the first OB appointment’s ultrasound revealed we were expecting twins, we’ve voraciously consumed content from all corners: books, blogs, the local twins club, etc. Not only are we twin parents for the first time, we’re first-time parents- and we figure there’s gotta be a least a handful of people out there who share at least one of those descriptions with us. Learning what we’ve learned, and experiencing what we’ve experienced has been an amazing story so far, and we look forward to what unfolds for many years to come. And we’d like to share this story with others.
Countless themes have already been written about extensively on why twins or multiples parenting is different: the enhanced scale and scope of day to day parenting, agonizing over the possible finite amounts of love and affection and how not to short one child’s share, the protective desire to always honor each child’s distinct identity while honoring their special bonds as twins, etc. Day to day we’ve been learning these tough life lessons- and our little guys are only a month old.
One particularly trying aspect that seems unique about our experience really isn’t: our two boys were born early, preemies, at just shy of 31 weeks, and are still in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU.) While we’re on top of the world right now with how our twin boys are doing, we’ve had many dark days, and know we’re not out of the woods yet. Through all the twists and turns (”walking through fire” as one of my friends put it) and despite our intense feelings of family privacy as we labor to bring our boys home, the number of stories we’ve heard from others about their own experiences with twins in the NICU have encouraged and sustained us. While the scope of this twins blog is broad, unpacking these trying experiences in the NICU will be part of it in hopes that others can benefit the way we did.
So what do you think? Are you interested? Thinking about putting the feed of our humble little twins blog in your reader? Let us know. We welcome your suggestions, questions, and sharing of your twins parenting stories.
Time to publish this posting and get going to the hospital. We’ve got a feeding we don’t want to miss.
