Our twin sons Doug and George turn 1 today. Their arrival last summer changed our lives in many amazing ways. Life with three young boys (their older brother Henry is 3) can be stressful but it's also a lot of fun.
I'm taking the day off of politics and news. Check back Thursday.
This is my weekly Hibbing Daily Tribune column for Sunday, April 27, 2008. I archive my columns at my writing site.
Losing mind, one child at a time
By Aaron J. Brown
So we’ve got these babies all over the house. Two actually. Twins. And a toddler. All boys. And while that particular configuration is neither historically significant nor biologically unexplainable this is a pretty big deal in our lives. This babysplosion is why we don’t schedule things at 3 p.m. (baby snack time and big brother’s nap). It’s also why anyone who calls the house between 4 and 7 p.m. hears only a shrill tone, like the sound the nuclear bomb makes when it melts the phone at the end of the Cold War drama “Fail Safe.” Don’t worry. We’re fine. It’s just loud like that sometimes.
We’ve passed the baby twin stage where people mob us in public places. When Doug and George were extra tiny we had to fight our way through crowds of well wishers and general gawkers. Now people mostly stare from afar. But folks who talk to us often ask if we’ve seen a show on The Learning Channel called “Jon and Kate plus Eight.” It’s a reality show that follows the lives of a Pennsylvania couple and their
eight kids – including a set of school-aged twins and a set of sextuplets who are three years old.
Yes, we’ve seen the show.
In fact we watch the program regularly, mostly to admire the family’s ability to
function with 166 percent more children than us. And while our lives aren’t quite as crazy as that of Jon and Kate we do see many familiar struggles on their show. How do you spend quality time with every kid in the house? Where is (name of kid)? What is that? Put that down! You, too! Stop squeezing your brother! Cords are not for chewing! Drop and roll! Drop and roll!
In a voiceover at the beginning of the “Jon and Kate” show, Kate says, “Today, I may very well lose my mind.” We know what she means.
When the twins first arrived all the stress focused on basic life functions like bottles and diaper changes. We would joke about how as parents we were now playing zone defense instead of man-to-man. Well, it’s easy to run a zone defense when two of the people you’re guarding have the physical dexterity of giant aphids. The babies “got game” now, covering ground on all fours faster than a remote control truck. In weeks, perhaps by press time, they’ll be on their feet, expanding their reach, amplifying their destructive (but oh so cute) powers.
There also remains the constant struggle of sibling rivalry. Henry, our oldest, is adjusting slowly to the end of his solo domination of our attention. The side effect of this is sporadic poking, shoving or screaming directed at the increasingly wary pair of newcomers. I warn him that Doug and George are likely to become just as big as him, but he has yet to compute the mathematical implications of this scenario.
At the same time we remain in awe of how cool it is to have three healthy boys growing up in our house, learning to talk, think and ponder the same northern Minnesota sights that filled my childhood memories. Sometimes, when the stars align, we peek around the corner to see the boys playing nicely together. No screaming. No naughtiness. Just good times. Even if momentary, these times sustain us.
One time Henry went to play with some nearby kids, including someone’s new baby. That night when I got home from work Henry told me, “I saw a baby today, daddy.” Pause. “Just one baby.” The bar has been set high for the H-man. In his mind, babies should come in pairs. I must admit, we now scoff just a tiny bit when we hear folks lament the difficulties of bringing home their first baby from the hospital.
“Hmmph’” we say. “Just one baby.”
Sorry fellow parents. Today we may very well lose our minds, so we must find comfort in small triumphs.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune. Read more or contact him at www.minnesotabrown.com.
Read how one British scientist believes that political ideology might be at least part genetic. This means that I need to start making plans with my family for what might be a long, slow descent into Libertarianism and gun hording. The only known treatment is whiskey, which yields sketchy results.
We survived a rather extensive family Christmas marathon involving lots of meat, cheese and potatos and very few green vegetables. Also, lots of baby holding and toddler chasing, but that's a given these days. Santa brought Cranky the Crane, so all is well.
So we sent out our Christmas cards which were actually just letters, and photocopied letters at that. I’ve read the etiquette columns and I know such documents should be augmented with personal notes, ribbons and probably glitter, but we just sent out the black and white photo letter. We have three boys under the age of three, including a toddler and twin babies. I think people understand the unspoken truth that any complaints about the letters might lead to a stabbing involving the tree angel.
See, people set the bar low when you have small children. It really doesn’t matter if your Christmas letters lack whimsy, if the font is clunky and unreadable and there are no verbs. All they want are pictures of “the babies.” Oh, and if those babies are doing something cute – smiling or pursing their lips or reflecting colors from the visible spectrum – they might not care if you’ve written anything in the English language.
We white-knuckled it through the first big snow storm of the year last night. We averaged about 20 miles an hour from Hibbing out into the Itasca wilderness where we live. We made it, but it wasn't easy.
Check out Christina's new blog, Northern Cheapskate. Unlike my undisciplined, eclectic blog, Christina focuses on a specific topic: living frugally in the north woods. She talks about her experiments in running our household more efficiently, money-saving ideas and resources for trimming the family budget. She's a whiz at this stuff and her blog is clever, fun and useful. And she never, ever talks about Range politics or energy issues.
Toddler dialogue from this morning:
TODDLER: Santa bring Cranky? (the Crane, from "Thomas and Friends")
ME: That depends, are you a good boy?
TODDLER: Hmmm.
ME: Are you a good boy or naughty?
TODDLER: I like breakfast.
The firearms deer season opened this weekend, a time-honored tradition on the Iron Range that I'd never participated in ... until now. On Saturday I joined the festivities at my family's hunting shack in the woods that separate the Iron Range from Canada. My grandfather, dad and uncles have spent a lot of time putting together a pretty nice hunting setup with dozens of acres of hunting land, a nice shack with copious bunk space and a campus of amenities including a sauna, fire pit, outhouse and skid steer for impulse landscaping.
I didn't bring or shoot a gun. In fact, I didn't even buy a license. My mission was simply to observe and join the fun. My family's tradition includes a very casual attitude about hunting. A couple people try hard and the rest make brief patrols along the trails hoping that a depressed deer wanders into their line of sight and asks for a quick death. My brother-in-law shot a deer but when I left Sunday that was the only success the group could cite.
But that's not really the point. Hunting season has been a longstanding male tradition in my family, one that puts revelry and conversation ahead of actual hunting. I expected to drink some beer when I got up there, but sometime before midnight my grandpa asked a dubious question: "Want to try some of the 'shine?" He had a clear bottle that read "MOON" in permanent marker letters. That's right: moonshine. The stuff of Roger Miller's "Chug-a-Lug" and George Jones' "White Lightning." There used to be quite a vital moonshine industry on the Iron Range, but the craft is starting to disappear. Nevertheless, there I was on Saturday drinking 'shine while wearing an orange hunting jacket.
Moonshine is partly what you'd expect ... a very potent alcohol that goes straight to your head. In truth I thought I handled it just fine. In combination with a glass of whiskey and, well, "more than one" beer I had a little headache the next day but nothing terrible. But then I started noticing something. I got home and changed one of the boys' diapers. "Hey, baby pee smells like moonshine," I thought. Then I noticed that hot dogs also smelled like moonshine. And so did toothpaste. And most of my clothes. And then I realized that these things did not smell like moonshine but that I had in fact suffered some kind of nerve damage. I think I'm OK now, but I just might categorize moonshine as something I've tried but won't seek out again.
I don't mean to suggest that drinking was the only activity at deer camp. The men of my family can and do drink at other times. And my dad has given up drinking entirely. But we are a hard working family and these weeks in the fall are a chance to cut loose and catch up. I heard plenty of stories and came a little closer to figuring out how it is that I ended up here. My hunting season is done for the year but most serious hunters have plenty of time left. Stay safe in the woods and enjoy your time at the shack, everyone.
Behold the Brown family pumpkin for 2007!
"Sure, there are other fall traditions. Raking leaves. Watching “foo-ball” on “teevee.” But none of these photograph as well as picking out a pumpkin and petting goats so domesticated they know how to TiVo stuff. I don’t mean to diminish the very real and very fun time we had; but I had to chuckle when I realized how photo happy the whole pumpkin patch crowd was."
~An excerpt from my Sunday, Oct. 21, 2007 Hibbing Daily Tribune column posted today at http://www.minnesotabrown.com/. You can also read it in today's paper or archived here. As you can probably tell, this week I talk about our first trip to the local pumpkin patch with Henry.
