Touch You Last

 I love my kids.   I’ve been staring at this screen for the past ten minutes wondering where to start, and that’s my best attempt so far.   There are two reasons I don’t write here much these days.   The first reason is that I’m incredibly, incurably lazy.   More important is the second reason: the more time goes on, the more I feel compelled to write honestly .   Which is not to say I was dishonest before, just that it’s been easier to fall back on hyperbole, jokes, and cliché.   It’s why my posts about Sarah are so hard to write.   I don’t just want to say, “She is the best, greatest, most wonderful woman in the history of time!” whether I believe it or not.   I want to find honest and original words to explain precisely why I think she’s amazing.   She really is the greatest, the facts are there.   It just takes patience to find the right words. My kids are really good friends right now.   I like to think that’ll alw...

Veronica first.  Because it’s usually Teddy first in this family.  Not because we love him more or favour him in some way, but because he’s reasonably verbal.  It’s easier to take care of the needs of one kid who’s saying, “Want milk.  I snuggle Daddy?  I go to park?  Potty!” and trickier to respond to the needs of another kid who says, “Dabum, dabum, dabum?  Hiya!  All done!  Dabum?  Dabum, dabum?  EHN! EHN! EHN!” She’s not a big talker, that Veronica.  I can count on one and a half hands the number of words she uses repeatedly.  Then there’s this strange pile of words she’s used perfectly just once and then never again.  There’s that nagging, taunting part of me that says: she has a speech delay; she has an impediment; she needs help.   And then there’s the other part of me that thinks she just does what she wants and no more .  On our last cruise (which was about five months ago), we said to her,...

When I moved over to this new template (which I loooooove, by the way), it became immediately clear to me how long it had been since I’d posted anything about the kids. The most recent picture of either of them that pops up here was at least a year old. Way overdue for an update, and let’s start with Veronica. I’m pretty sure she’s going to be the daredevil of the family. You always assume it’s the boys that’ll be jumping off stuff, tormenting your pets, and being fearless little pains, but that’s not Teddy at all. A sweet kid is Teddy, but Evel Knievel he is not. Veronica’s still a bit too short and slow to get into real trouble, but once in a while you get hints of what’s to come. She’ll do a chin-up off the edge of the entertainment centre. Or she’ll claw at Gunther until he gives her a wallop – and still keep after him. And she’s not afraid of us at all. When Teddy was this old, you could use your SERIOUS VOICE to get him to stop touching something. Veronica just turns...

Time passes in very strange ways when you have a newborn. Sometimes two days can seem like a week, then the passing of a week seems to whizz by in a blink. It's because you can alternate between incredible highs and awful lows several times in the same day. At noon you feel like a star and that you have everything under control, then at one in the morning you're in a fit of despair , then everything's totally cool again by breakfast. At this point in time, we're off that rollercoaster officially. Things are great and look to be staying that way. But damn, you really forget what those first few days can be like. I'll go light on detail here because I suspect Sarah will provide the gory blow-by-blow on her sight shortly. At about 3am on the 24 th , Sarah went into labour. With Teddy, the start-to-finish labour was epic, so we were both convinced that we had tons of time. But contractions were two minutes apart by 5am, and we were at the hospital and into serious lab...