A whole post about Joel's unmentionables.

               I really do not like being sick. I’ve got a snotty nose, headache, sore throat general bleh kind of thing going on today and It’s made me completely miserable. Andrew and Joel have compromised immune systems because of some of the complications of autism so they catch everything that every other snotty nosed little kid brings to school and then brings it home to us. I’ve done good this year. Everyone else has been sick two or three times here this season but I’ve managed to avoid it all until now. It is interesting to observe the boys when they’re sick because they’re so under-sensitive to everything. They’ll be running around the house at about 111% percent (as compared to the normal pace of 135%) and all of the sudden one will grab his stomach and say, “Oh Mommy my tummy hurts.” We know now to rush them to a toilet because there is going to be something projected out of one end or the other within the minute. That was not a fun lesson to learn.

Coming home

            While the twins were still in the special care nursery our church had their baby dedication Sunday. Our worship pastor’s wife found Hannah crying in the nursery like a crazy person (her words, not mine). She was really struggling because our boys had arrived, but we couldn’t bring them to something as special to us as a church dedication service. That season in our life was tumultuous to say the least. We were pulled in so many different directions and stretched to our absolute limits. There was turmoil at my job because it wasn’t at all what I felt called to do, but we couldn’t survive on wishes and dreams. There was turmoil at the church because of typical church politics and because church is full of broken selfish sinners just like me, so naturally when you get a group of them together the results are, well, exactly what you’d expect.

What happens in the special care nursery...

               

This video is just a few short clips of Andrew and Joel during their 17 day stay in the special care nursery after they were born. I had to sit down this afternoon and have Hannah refresh my memories about those days because although it was only two and a half weeks, it felt like it lasted for months.

How to forget all the important memories.

              The day we went to the hospital for our 20 week ultrasound with our second pregnancy was the day we discovered we were having twins. Hannah and I were both in shock, but I was forced to retire to the waiting room with a rambunctious Caleb while Hannah visited with the doctor. We expected them to tell us all kinds of horror stories about different birth defects because the doctors were convinced that Caleb had Down’s syndrome while he was still in the womb. We didn’t expect the doctor to treat us like sub-par human beings. Both the technician and the doctor observed a few anomalies that raised concern so they were obligated to bring it to our attention. The doctor informed Hannah of her concerns ‘in case we wanted to terminate the pregnancy.’ There are those moments in a marriage when your spouse is faced with a situation and you are powerless to do anything about it. This was one of them. I didn’t even know what was occurring since I wasn’t in the room. There are also those moments when you feel so compelled to be a savior only to be confronted with the reality that you married someone far better than you. Hannah informed the doctor that we didn’t care if everything imaginable was wrong with our children, we were having those babies.

             

The Whole Story Part 1

We took the boys to a birthday party Saturday afternoon and when we arrived there were 14.6 billion little kids running around in the front yard playing hide-and-seek and poke-each-other-in-the-eye-with-a-stick. Naturally Andrew and Joel wanted to join right in the fun, but we needed to make an appearance indoors first, plus I knew they’d want some cake. We went inside and had our cake (actually we ate it too) and the boys were ready to get outside for some much needed rough housing. I went outside with them to the front yard where all the mayhem was in order to set some boundaries since there was no adult supervision out there. I debated with myself a little as to whether or not it was wise to leave them outside alone, but I hoped that with the sheer number of kids they’d just be so caught up in the fray that nothing would cause them to wander. I walked both of them around the perimeter of the yard on the sidewalk and explained to them that they were only allowed to play in the grass. I then asked them to show me where they could play, and they walked to each boundary to show me they knew where to stop. As I was explaining their boundaries some of the other little gentlemen let their curiosities get the better of them and finally asked, “What are you doing?”