I can't feel the pinky toe on my left foot. I don't know if this is something new or if it is something that I've always had and just never noticed. Is that even possible, you ask? Yes it is. I'm discovering a whole slew of new aches and pains on parts of my body that I never knew could hurt. For example: Did you know that if a 7-month-old jams her finger into your ear at 3:07 in the morning one day and scratches you, it will take over a month to heal? That's a true fact. The inner-ear canal takes longer to heal because the skin is not as exposed and thus, is more delicate and less resistant to trauma. I guess the silver lining to all of this physical damage that I've sustained over the last several months is that I've become a walking medical Wikipedia for all sorts of old man ailments. Hooray for me.
But not all the news this week is bad. Something amazing happened over the weekend that injected new life into me. On Saturday evening, Treicy confused the babies and called them by the wrong name. I don't remember if it was Renata or Catalina that she confused for her sister and quite frankly, I couldn't care less. the point is that she got it wrong for the first time ever! So the $60,000 question now becomes: Now that my wife has confused them this one solitary time... does that automatically excuse my complete and total inability to tell them apart every single day? The answer is: Absolutely and undoubtebly, yes! I mean... Come on! They are identical twins after all, and everybody outside of Mommy mistakes them for each other constantly. I was feeling horrible because I was the only parental unit in their ecosystem that kept confusing them. Treicy had never done that before and I felt that it was a sign that I was not up to this type of assignment... that I was somehow not smart enough to raise a pair of twin girls if I couldn't even tell them apart. But now that Treicy has shown that she is human, it makes me human too by association. This was a shocking and unexpected development. This is Mike Tyson getting knocked out by Buster Douglas. This is Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner. This is the 2017 Presidential Election! I can now truthfully state that we both, on occasion, have had trouble telling them apart... anything else is fake news.
They woke up early and surprised us with a 2:30 AM feeding this morning. Treicy went immediately back to sleep (I envy that skill) and I have settled myself into the living room couch in order to catch up on my Walking Dead episodes and to finish off the last box of Girl Scout Cookies left in the pantry. It gives me an opportunity to share something that I've noticed from the girls recently. They are normal babies in every sense of the word and they enjoy all of the stereotypical activities that all babies are associated with. Peek-a-boo games, Giggly kisses, tickles on the tummy, etc. All except for one thing... riding in the car. My entire life, I've always heard how much babies just loooove to be in a moving car because the vibration and the motion soothes them to sleep and calms them. Well... not with these two. As a matter of fact, they hate it. They never go to sleep. They're never calm. Nothing is soothing about the ride and one of them (usually Renata) will more than likely have a meltdown halfway through the journey. We've had to pull over and take them out of their car seats in order to calm them before being able to continue to our destination. This does not bode well for any road trip plans that we might have this summer. I can't imagine 4 hours in the car with 2 fussy babies. Screw that, Mickey and Goofy can wait till they're 30 years old and can drive themselves. Is it the restraints that bother them? Is it the fact that they are staring at the back of the car and cannot see us? Whatever it is, it makes me wonder if they will be rejecting any future stereotypes and doing the exact opposite like they have in this instance. Will they hate cartoons? Will they love vegetables? Will they refuse to date until after I'm dead? I guess at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. We'll just take each new development and try to adapt to it as best we can like we did when Catalina went through her orange-colored pooping stage (it was the cold medecine). One thing is for sure, they are unpredictable, full of surprises and I cannot wait to continue this journey that we are on with them... as long as we don't go by car.
