My excuses are wearing thin. If the pediatrician’s office assistant ever asks me why I canceled my children’s last well-child visit (they don’t ask / they never ask / they are reasonable people / I am the one who spends hours explaining to people in my head why I do things), I will have to say “because there are two of them.”
When my kids were six months old, this answer would have gone over fine: anyone can look at two car seats hooked to a shopping cart with ratcheting tie-downs and the mom pushing the cart without shoes/underwear and understand that it’s really just best not to make eye contact.
But with four-and-a-half-year-olds, one might expect, for example, that the children can more or less walk places, or sit in a chair, or look at a book, perhaps accept the occasional reassurance. These expectations are fairly realistic, for ONE preschooler. Not for two. The Rule of Twins states that Should one twin be in a good place, it is necessary that the other shall not. What this means is that the twin-parent is putting out at least one fire roughly 100% of the time.
Someone said please and thank you? Lovely. But the other one is biting your dress and ripping it. One of them is happy to build with magnet tiles quietly for a bit? Excellent, and the other one is emptying ashes out of the fireplace and smearing them on the couch. One of them is ready for a peaceful transition to bedtime? Great. The other one won’t move or admit to understanding English.
Now add a virus to the scene and send everyone to the beach, because this is what I did with my kids yesterday, since one of them, obviously, spiked a fever the morning of the first day of school, and my worst nightmare is