Hellobee

Where does the time go? I have two two-year olds!

When the girls were turning one last year, I remember having so many emotions. I also remember feeling like the girls must be turning one because it definitely felt like it had been a year since they had arrived! But the second year has been different. I felt like their second birthdays completely crept up on me, and it doesn’t feel like it has been a year at all, except when I write posts like these and reflect on their development and what has changed…

Physical

On the physical front, the girls are growing well and they love to dance and jump around!

We continue to work with a physical therapist for Audrey’s overpronation, and she is still wearing her orthotics every day. With summer season now here, one of my biggest concerns was warm-weather shoes/sandals that would work well with her orthotics but that also would allow her some breeze and comfort on hot days. I really cannot bring myself to disclose how much time I spent researching sandals that fit the bill, but let’s just say that I finally settled on pairing some thin mesh socks and a couple of different pairs of sandals. We’re still experimenting with both pairs and, knock on wood, it seems to be going well so far.

The girls have been in swim class since they were about seven months old, and we’ve had the same instructor for most of that time. She recently recommended to us that we move the girls up to the next level of swim class, which happens to be the first level without in-pool parental participation. Up until now, Mr. Starfish and I have been in the pool together with the girls for every single class. And all that time, I will admit that we have longingly looked at the parents behind the glass observation partition who get to avoid the pool and have a cup of coffee while watching their kiddos.

Well, the girls had their first independent class without us this past Saturday and it was….how do I put this delicately?… a complete disaster. Luckily, we were warned that this would likely happen and so Mr. Starfish and I weren’t exactly surprised when the girls spent the whole lesson crying and screaming. Still, it’s pretty obvious that we are many weeks away from sitting down and watching the girls’ lesson while leisurely sipping a cup of coffee. The reality is that swim class currently consists of the girls screaming in the pool, us hiding from their field of vision, and me apologizing nonstop to every staff member who crosses our path!

Language

The girls’ growing language abilities easily remain my absolutely favorite part about this age.

Since my last update, the girls have started singing with me and it is so much fun! To be clear, when I say “singing”, we’re not talking about any mini-Celine Dions in the Starfish household. Instead, they quietly mutter along with me until they get to a part of the song that they know and then they yell it out loudly. For instance, Old McDonald Had a Farm goes like this, “Mutter mutter mutter, indiscernible quiet words, whisper whisper, and then – very loudly and very suddenly – E-I-E-I-O!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

The girls now also are starting to have more real conversations with us. These are still very basic conversations but they will tell us what they ate for lunch that day, what they did at the park, etc. We are also hearing much longer sentences from both girls as they are learning to connect ideas and words together.

Over the past quarter, we had one of the girls evaluated for a potential language delay by the state’s Early Intervention program. One of the major challenges of having twinblings is the tendency to over compare development, and in this case, we noticed one of the girls was not as far along as the other and we worried that she was falling behind the curve. As luck would have it, about three days before the evaluation appointment (following weeks of setting it up), she had a huge language leap. While we admittedly felt a little foolish following through with the appointment following a very obvious and dramatic language leap, the evaluators were quite kind and they assured us that such leaps actually frequently occur like that right before they see a child. They said, and I agree, that if you ever have a nagging worry like we did prior to the leap, that it’s best to have it checked out.

Emotional and Social

It really seems as though the twinblings alternate their emotional phases. As soon as one girl cycles out of a very emotional, tantrum-filled phase to a relatively more calm and observant one, the other girl barrels headfirst into the tantrum phase. While I’m grateful that they aren’t in extremely challenging phases at the exact same time, it’s also tiresome to feel like you’re out of the woods for a week or so only to be faced with the other one hitting a challenging time.

Over the past few months, I’ve also noticed that both girls are becoming increasingly more controlling, especially concerning what her sister is doing. If anything is slightly out of routine, things go sideways pretty fast. For instance, Audrey this week had a pretty big issue with her sister not wanting to drink water with her dinner (which she normally does). In contrast, Lilly regularly gets upset if Audrey doesn’t want to do something that she (Lilly) thinks that she should want to do.

I’ve been working a lot with the girls on the concept of sharing in recent months. I’d say we are finally starting to get somewhere, but their interpretation of the concept is currently pretty funny and narcissistic. They understand that “share” means that an object is transferred from one person to another, but they see this only from their own point of view. So when her sister has something that she wants, both girls right now will yell “share!” as they proceed to take the toy from the other. I’ve found some success in counting to 10 when they are having a hard time sharing, as in, “Lilly, I’m going to count to 10 and then it’s Audrey’s turn”. I’d say that over half the time, this works really well and they pass the object to the other before I arrive at 10.

Sleep and Eating

On the sleep front, we have moved back bedtime by 15 minutes as the sun has been extending the days. The girls’ bedtime alarm on Alexa currently goes off at 6:30 and we head up together for bedtime routine. Over the past few weeks, the girls have started to assert their preferences for which books are read before lights go out. Only a few months ago, we would read the same four stories, but now the books are changed up as the girls make requests. The girls also have their names spelled out over their cribs in big wooden colorful letters, and they’ve recently come to wanting the letters identified before we turn out the lights. So that has now come in to our bedtime routine as well.

As for eating, we have dialed back Lilly’s dairy but not entirely. We made a special trip to our pediatrician to discuss a suspected dairy allergy but they weren’t overly concerned or convinced based on her symptoms. Following that appointment, we ramped the dairy back up but she had so many digestion issues as a result that we have just decided full dairy milk is not in her best interest (nor our laundry budget considering how many outfits she soils when drinking lots of milk!)

So there you have it, a twinblings update at 2 years old! I’m really proud of Lilly and Audrey, and I think they are such great souls. They make me laugh so much, they make me think and reflect, and they make me love harder and more intensely. Thank you, my girls. I love you both more than I can express, and wish you a very happy second birthday!