You know when you’re on holiday somewhere beautiful and you find every vista and spectacle so irresistibly stunning that you take brazillions of pictures and upload and categorize them all, perhaps with some cunning file naming convention so that you can readily access each splendid panorama (depending on your nerdlitude), checking in on Facebook constantly, charting your trip on GPS, creating clever prose poems about the magnificence you’ve witnessed…

…and when you get home you realize you have no *actual memory* of your holiday apart from camera cabling and digital fluff? My love of the Internet is legendary, and I generally avoid taking neo-Luddite pot shots at people actually using their phones or being really proud of not having a TV. However, I’ve been keeping a really low electronic profile since the twins were born, partly because I’m way too busy feeding them and/or cleaning up after them, and partly because most baby-related material is not exactly riveting journalism to me, and partly because I felt like once I started diving into the avalanche of needed e-communication I’d never dig myself out again. But mostly, just because I don’t want to miss any moment of this, no matter how hallucinatory or hormonally amplified. However, the longer I wait to surface the more it seems like I’m potentially unwell or something disastrous has happened, and I want to be clear that both they and I are in good health and the delivery was a success, if by no other metric than they used to be inside me and now they’re not

Hannah (back) and Robert (front) were born on April 19 at 2:38 and 2:48 pm respectively. Hannah had the cord wrapped around her neck, which if local anecdata can be trusted is true of pretty much half the people I know, and was therefore delivered by forceps (as was I); Robert was helped down the road via vacuum, which gave him a little yarmulke of bruise that we used to differentiate him from his sister while they were still so wrinkly and generic newborns that we had trouble remembering which was which. They don’t actually look anything like each other, but let’s face it: we weren’t the brightest logs on the Yuletide fire in that little postpartum room.

I kept thinking to myself during labour: I haven’t ruled anything out, I am not attached to any one method of getting these guys out, I am “ready” at least on the conceptual level for different levels of pain and different interventions. I did, however, realize that whatever it took to get the first one out I was then going to have to duplicate or intensify to get the second out, and so I elected to have an epidural, which ended up being a great mercy once we knew that Hannah was having trouble. I am about 15-25% guilty that I could not deliver them without intervention, mostly due to some bullshit-fueled narrative about Womyn Goddess Power or some such crap, but I’m pretty much over it (amazing how pernicious that meme is).

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Hannah (back), Robert (front)

They are as well-put together as we can ascertain with the battery of tests that they launch at neonates these days, like they’re studying for the LSATS or something. I’m recovering well although understandably still pudgy and slow. So! Healthy babies, healthy mom, and a healthy (if stubbly) dad.

Weirdly, the experience of raising these guys so far is more like a meditation retreat than any other experience of mine, but not for any of the poetic fluffy reasons you might expect. Ways In Which Newborn Twins Are Like A Meditation Retreat:

1. Your existence is ruled by time: gongs, beeps, arbitrary chunks of time by which you measure the repeated menial tasks which are your due.

2. Mealtimes and excretions are the most exciting parts of your day.

3. You wear pajamas 24/7. (to be fair, I pretty much did this anyway)

4. Even if you could somehow access an adult to whom you might express some insight arising from the experience, through fatigue and energetic confusion you couldn’t form accurate words anyway.

5. There’s no way to record your insights, either because journals are prohibited or because you don’t have any time and even if you did you don’t make any sense (see #4)

6.  At least for as long as they are 12 days old [yesterday], both experiences last for 12 days.

My love for them, and everything else that I really feel, is too sacred and quiet to write about.