Simple living with twins

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Sandi

I find that more and more of my google reader is stuff about min­i­mal­ist liv­ing, liv­ing with less, sim­ple liv­ing, unclut­ter­ing, the list goes on. I want to find a way to do all of this with my family.

I feel like I’m drown­ing in “stuff”. I want to teach my kids the value of expe­ri­ences ver­sus accu­mu­lat­ing things. Not that there is any­thing wrong with things, I’m just tired of the cheap plas­tic toy that breaks within an hour of being unpack­aged. So per­haps it’s time we started to focus on buy­ing things that will last.

I know that when a new baby is one the way the drive to start buy­ing stuff is over­whelm­ing and when you are expect­ing mul­ti­ples a lot of peo­ple think that it means two of every­thing. I will cast my mind back and write about how we did the baby years with less and I will start to write about we are try­ing to sim­plify now. Is min­i­mal liv­ing with mul­ti­ples an oxy­moron? I don’t think so.

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run run run runaway

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Sandi

When the going gets tough I want to flee. Fight or flight? I’m def­i­nitely all about flight. I’m a lover not a fighter. Seri­ously, when it gets stress­ful it’s all I can do to stay put and not run and hide. Today was stress­ful. I received a copy of my Papa’s will. It’s not going to change my life, but I’m going to get a lit­tle some­thing. It kills me that I don’t get to say thank you. Just the thought makes me weepy all over again.

I’ve come up with a lit­tle cop­ing mech­a­nism, because appar­ently peo­ple (my hus­band) doesn’t like it when I want to dis­ap­pear (even if it’s just for a lit­tle while, I’d come back. Probably.)

When it gets tough I plan vaca­tions. I pick a date and a des­ti­na­tion and I plan it all out. I look at air­fares, hotels, train tick­ets you name it. I find it so sooth­ing to immerse myself in all the lit­tle details, I can for­get about my trou­bles for a short time. There is some­thing so won­der­ful about plan­ning a trip. The excite­ment of a new place or the antic­i­pa­tion of return­ing to some­where that I haven’t got enough of yet, takes my mind off of what­ever is mak­ing me want to run. In this per­fect, pre­tend vaca­tion I wouldn’t have to deal with two jet-lagged preschool­ers, missed con­nec­tions, cram­ming four peo­ple into a small hotel room or any of the other has­sles that come with travel.

Now some­times plan­ning a trip that I have no way of actu­ally pay­ing for bites me in the ass. I get emo­tion­ally invested. Yes, it would be lovely to fly with my fam­ily to Lon­don. It is espe­cially tor­tur­ous when I find a ridicu­lous deal on air­fare. I start to get wist­ful, try­ing to think up ways to turn this pre­tend vaca­tion into the real deal. But the real­ity is that a trip to Lon­don is out of the ques­tion unless I find some­one that wants to send me and my fam­ily on a vaca­tion. What do you say British Air­ways? Need a mommy blog­ger to spon­sor? Some how wait­ing around for a inter­net fairy god­mother just doesn’t seem real­is­tic. So I strug­gle to get my head out of the clouds and get my feel rooted back on famil­iar ground. I know that flee­ing won’t solve any­thing and my prob­lems would prob­a­bly just fol­low me but for an hour I was lost in a world of planes, trains and big red buses and I was happy.

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V is for vasectomy

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Sandi

My hus­band has been ready to get a vasec­tomy for almost three years and he recently asked me again when he could book his vasec­tomy. When the babies were still tiny he told me that he was ready to get the snip-snip. Car­ing for new­born twins is tax­ing to say the least! The sleep depri­va­tion, the over­whelm­ing need­i­ness of two infants, the finan­cial bur­den, our house was thrown into com­plete chaos, these are all good rea­sons not to have more kids. I know that I devoted myself to car­ing for the kids entirely. My hus­band was a saint! He took over every­thing else so that I could focus entirely on the kids. He sat patiently on the side­lines wait­ing for when it would be his turn for my atten­tions. There are still days when it still feels like we are in sur­vival mode. The thought of me get­ting preg­nant again with one baby or twins again thor­oughly messes with him.

I, on the other hand, am not entirely sure that I am done with hav­ing kids. Part of my reluc­tance to agree to the vasec­tomy is that I feel like I was cheated by hav­ing twins. I loved being preg­nant! I was so lucky that I didn’t suf­fer morn­ing sick­ness or preterm labour or any of the other things that can make a twin preg­nancy high risk. I can’t believe that I won’t get to have that feel­ing of a baby hic­cup­ping away or those swirly fin­gers and toes strain­ing against my belly. I’m wist­ful just writ­ing this! Is it a self­ish choice to want to expe­ri­ence preg­nancy again?

There are days that I feel like our fam­ily is very much com­plete but there are also days when I feel like our fam­ily is miss­ing some­one. How long do I wait to see if this feel­ing goes away? Is it worth turn­ing our fam­ily upside down to have another child or chil­dren? (there is a 1/10000 chance that I could con­ceive twins again) Should I be prac­ti­cal and sched­ule the appointment?

How did you know that you were done hav­ing kids?

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