A Boo Deferred

Like any business I have been doing a seasonal inventory, only instead of counting lug nuts or Pez dispensers I have been counting up meandering ideas and turns of phrase. Here are the top three things I have been repeating over and over again:

1) This blog is late, behind, and/or delayed. I am so very sorry and I will do everything in my power to catch up, make up, or otherwise atone for my sins as a writer and human being.

2) Remodeling a house is hard and expensive. I wish it cost less money. More money would be good and please send me money. Boo-hoo.

3) Having twin babies is also hard. However a lot of stuff they do is cool. I will do my best to express this feeling in more robust, expressive terms, but will probably in the end fall back on terms like "sweet", "awesome", and "cool". I will also occasionally throw in an adverbial "pretty" in front of those adjectives, the worst sort of grammatical heresy. This occurs for the dual reason that sometimes the ups and downs of parenting are difficult to articulate and also because this section of the blog usually gets written last and therefore is most likely to suffer serious writer fatigue.

I have never been one to like to repeat myself (although I know I do). Worse is when the repetition is whiney. Blogs are inherently introspective (translate: head up your own ass), so some latitude must be given, but a constant drum beat of complaint is fun for no one. So I have resolved to stop apologizing for being late with blog entires and to stop bitching about poor me and my massive house project. Hopefully that will leave more room for better baby writing. We'll see. But what about the new reader, you may ask? For them I will permanently place these three facts in my sidebar so they can get up to speed right away.

Thinking about not wishing to repeat myself brings me to a slight digression: I have always shied away from any sort of catch phrase or ritual greeting, as they get old real quick. When I was in high school these were known as Kibble-isms, stemming from a group of guys (later christened the Kibble Kids) who went through a phase of yelling "Kibble" at each other. More socially acceptable verbal discourse of this sort would include quotes from the Simpsons or Saturday Night Live or Seinfeld. Yes, whenever any of us do a "D'Oh!" or "Ha-Ha!" we are walking in the realm of Kibbledom. It is unavoidable on some level, but I do my best to not let it get out of control. A more recent, personal example was the phrase "Smooth Move, Ex-Lax" which I would deliver in a goofy, self-mocking tone. The joke was that only an idiot would say such a non-funny, slightly off-color, and ultimately mean thing. Only it is one of those phrases ripe for Kibble and before I knew it I had begun using it more and more regularly, which kind of defeats the purpose: You are not mocking the phrase if you keep using it. It is presently on my internal list of verboten phrases, although I have lapsed a couple of times. The power of the Kibble is strong.



OK, that was kind of a long digression. Now on to today's business: Halloween. Yes it occurred a month ago. I would point you at this time to the new Important Sidebar Fact #1.











With the girls too young to Trick-Or-Treat and our lives too busy to plan, well, anything, our main Halloween activity was a trip to Chris and Marie's creepy shindig. I have included a nice selection of the assorted costumes. We have Lisa and her beau as fallen angel and rotting pirate thing. Check down below for further visitations from this unholy winged one. Then we have our hostess Marie as Pulp Fiction Uma complete with hypodermic needle sticking from her chest. We had a lively debate as to whether Stoltz or Travolta jammed it in her.

Next we turn to Jacole as Britney Spears. No offense to Jacole who pulled this off beautifully, but this gets less funny with every month as it turns out Britney is not just a ha-ha bad parent, but a really, tragically bad parent. Still, baby on string dragged through the grass. Classic. And then there was Karen as Lady BlueRay. That's right, she vanquishes HD-DVD formats everywhere. Bet you didn't even think of that costume. I just bet.




Finally here are some Wonderwomen. I am going to go with Aphrodite and Rizzo from Greece in addition to the the Amazonian warrior. Knowing I have a thing for women in Wonderwoman outfits (oh Lynda Carter, how I miss thee and thy ample bosom) Candy did not allow me to linger long enough to find out all the details.



Of course the stars were the girls. It is an established fact that 25% of the reason people have children is so that they can dress them in cute outfits and then coo at them. Halloween is like that, only to the nth power of cutedom. We had a bit of back and forth as to which baby would be best capture the essence of which outfit, but Kayla made some fairly convincing monkey noises, so that clinched it. Kayla would be the Monkey and Rylie would be the Dragon.



Here is where having twins is a real plus. The girls loved wearing the costumes, because they constantly got to see what the other twin looked like. They would just point their fingers at each other and laugh. We didn't really have matching footwear, so you will have to excuse faux-ballerina slipper socks. We were a bit short on paws and claws.


Since there is no better costume accessory than a baby, we decided to work backwards from the monkey and dragon to our own attire. I went as a Celtic Dragon Slayer, complete with shield and kilt, while Candice put together an all khaki ensemble with San Diego Zoo patch to imitate a zookeeper. She also brought bananas, which doubled as a prop and actual food for both Monkey and Dragon.



Here are the two trouble- makers at the party with their Aunt Darci, dressed in full cat. The girls could not get enough of those whiskers. In general they seemed a bit befuddled by masked and heavily made-up people, unsure whether they should be interested or disturbed.

Welcome to the world, ladies.



Yes, I do own a kilt. I have the whole deal, including a fine sporran, although I will have to admit I went sporran-less to this party as my sporran is presently buried deep in a drawer, deeper in my garage. The short story behind this is that the best man from my wedding, Brian, made me a best man (or co-best man) at his wedding. As is his perverse way, he made each member of his wedding party dress up in formal wear tangentially connected to their ethnicity. I ended up in a kilt, while Mr. Roberts had a top hat and tails, and Arjun went with the Nehru suit. As I was visiting Scotland just months before, I picked up my kilt there. The Tartan style is the family Graham, the last name of the bride. My meager Scottish ancestry, the Smiths, didn't really have a tartan. You can get one, but smith was an occupation, not a clan. Every clan had a smith. So what is a Smith Tartan? Something for tourists, I assume.


Rylie did a good job playing the shy, little dragon. When the mousey, introverted girl from every Hollywood romance (Mandy) showed up at the party, they seemed to hit it off right away. You can see them forlornly glancing askew at dreamy boys who won't even give them the time of day. One wants to find her true love, the other wants to consume their flesh with fire and then crack their bones.

So poignant.

I managed to get Rylie out of there before the mousey girl got her hot makeover and the dreamy male lead realized that what he was looking for all along was right there under his nose the whole time. Phew!



Of course, the worst part about taking little girls out on Halloween is that you are constantly haunted by a chilling vision of death. Of course, just because you have been cast from the presence of God because you rebelled against your maker when he displaced you in his heart with the paltry and pathetic spawn of Adam, doesn't mean you don't like babies. A-Goo-Goo, Snoogims? Whose a goo-goo-snoogims? Does Goo-Goo want to trade in their immortal soul for candy?

OK, Fallen Angel. That's enough. Why don't you get yourself some punch, maybe defile a place of worship on your way over? That's a good demon from the nether regions. Sheesh. A parent has to be constantly on guard for these things.




Like take Rylie dragon and these leaves. You'd think she had never seen leaves before. Oh right, she probably has not seen a lot of leaves before. Because she is a baby. Got to remember that. Maybe dragons need to eat leaves to keep the fires in their bellies stoked? Or just to cut down on kerosene breath? Boy she sure finds those leaves fascinating. I wonder if...


Would Goo-Goo like a pretty leaf? All I need is a drop of blood on this ancient parchment...

Hey, Lucifer Spawn! Away from the baby. I am totally serious. Do not make me get Britney Spears. That girl is ten different kinds of insane and while you may have tangoed with the Damned at the very Gates of Perdition, you are not ready for that level of batshit crazy and she will Hit You Baby, One More Time! And then, Oops, She'll Do It Again. Then she'll make you say Gimme More!



Wow, mixing in Spears song titles was exhausting and slightly degrading. I think it is time we all just lay back, have a beer, and wait for the next Halloween to roll around again.



Do you think the girls will want to get dressed again next year?



Yeah, I think they will too.

---

Observant Reader Award: I am not sure if it is irony or just poor judgment, but in the title to this blog dedicated to not repeating myself I have parodied Langston Hughes' poem, "A Dream Deferred"... for a second time in the pages of my blog (Check the Mars Has A Gigantic Hole entry). Let's face it, early 20th century afro-american alienation is an endless fount of comedy.

Endless.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

I would imagine those of us born into the digital age would pick it up almost immediately, as plainly wrong as the number 13 on a grandfather clock. Digital time pieces, even those in fully 24-hour "military" time do not go to 60. They should never read 60 seconds or 60 minutes. After 23:59:59, the next tick-tock should bring us back to 00:00:00 and a brand new day. Or in the case of my personal bedtime, the last 10-20 minutes of the day. I used to regularly stay up much later, but those were in the BC days. Before Children.

This is not, however, a broken clock, but an example of a relatively rare event: the Leap Second^. As we all (hopefully) know, the Earth we live on spins around once a day. None too surprisingly it is this day that we set our clocks and calenders by: 7 make a week, split it up by 24 and you have an hour. The sticky part about using the daily spin of the planet as a timepiece is that it is not actually constant. That precocious moon of ours is actually slowly sucking up energy from the spin of the Earth, which slowly moves the moon farther away from the Earth while at the same time making our days slightly longer. I wouldn't spend a lot of time trying to watch the moon zip off to Mars or to catch some extra sleep on your longer days: the moon is drifting away at 3.8 centimeters (1.5 inches) per year, while the day is only getting 1.7 milliseconds longer per century.

Still, in a world of computers and instantaneous communication one needs a timepiece more accurate than the length of a day. The best way to keep careful track of time is an atomic clock. Basically when you excite (heat, bombard with light, etc) any atom it will emit energy always at the exact same frequency. Frequency is just a fancy way of saying how many times per second. As this is completely fixed and unchanging no matter the temperature or motion^^, you can just count the number of times the energy from an atom oscillated and keep time to better than a nanosecond (one billionth of a second). In fact, the International System of Units (SI) has defined the second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 cycles of the radiation from the cesium-133 atom.

So we have two ways of keeping time: the fixed atomic clock and the slowly changing day. How do we keep them synched up? The Leap Second (you knew I would get back to it eventually).

At irregular intervals over the past 35 years an extra second is added to our clocks, which tick away in agreement with atomic clocks, to bring them back into agreement with the day. This occurs on either June 30 or December 31, roughly every other year as determined by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). And on those days a digital clock should read 23:59:60 in the weird non-time second right before midnight.

At least that is how things used to be. The IERS is debating whether to do away with the Leap Second altogether, as its unpredictable nature (the Earth does not always slow down at the same rate) means planning things out into the future to the nearest second is not possible. At least, not possible if you use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the present basis for all our clocks. The new plan is to add a leap hour every 600 years or so, which is an idea so dumb it seems to be mostly an "Up Yours" from the atomic clock camp to the solar day camp. It is truly amazing. There are stupid politics literally everywhere.



It is starting to look like a Leap Month won't be enough to get my remodel project back on schedule. Our initial hope was that we would be home by Thanksgiving... which
is tomorrow... OK, Plan B then. Home by Christmas. I have now been informed that will also probably not happen, although the house will probably look finished by then. Final inspection is required before the city will sign off on occupancy and it just doesn't look like we can finish dotting 'i's and 't's in time for the holidays. I imagine getting an inspector out that time of year is also a toughie. So now it is early January barring a miracle. Someone get me a crazy old man, a young girl who no longer believes, and the 34th street sign. Oh, and might as well throw in a 1980s hockey jersey while you are at it.



In the meantime, let me get you caught up on some more things that happened a month ago. You could call this entry "Doors and Floors," as that is what we got. I will start with the doors, as they come alphabetically first, although if you peek hard enough you might see some of the new floors in the same photo. Doors (and windows) to the outside were installed eons ago, but the internal doors waited until the stars properly aligned, or some such. The inside doors are actual one of the few places we have been dissatisfied with the process. Our contractor talked us into solid core doors, assuring us that hollow core doors would be just too light and "fly all around." Well now we have doors worthy of Al Capone's vault. I foresee smashed fingers and loud closet-originating thumps. Oh, and yes, they also cost us more.



All in all we got 3 sets of folding doors, 3 sets of sliding doors, 3 door doors, and one super-gigantic blast door suitable for stopping the onslaught of the Imperial army. The top photo is the folding doors to the pantry outside the kitchen and the next are the sliders for the closets in our bedroom and (if you squint) the closet in the bathroom. The last door photo is the giant pocket door that leads to our bedroom, which is truly a wonder to behold. We went back and forth with our architects on this one. They wanted a pocket door. We wanted a solid bedroom door to keep out sound and riff-raff. I guess we "compromised" on this rolling slab of wood.



Our house had all wood floors before the remodel so after playing with the idea of putting in some slate or slatescape (a ceramic-style slate look-a-like available in large sheets) we finally decided to stick with wood floors everywhere. This led us to the 1/4 vs. 3/4 inch controversy. Apparently the wood floors we already possess are unusually thin, 1/4 inch not the present standard 3/4 inch. This requires a special order for the flooring people and therefore, perversely, more money even though we are using 2/3 less wood. Having our budget already well into the red, this led to one of the bigger fights we have had with our contractor, as the costs were passed along. In the end we caved once assured all our closets would get floored, something that was not included in the original plan.



So just above you can see the new kitchen floor next to our old den floor. One is raw and the other is covered with layers of polyurethane, so that is why the colors look so different. Just to the left you can see where new floor meets old floor in our den. They had to blend in the old with the new in this interwoven manner, doing their best to get similar wood grains so that the transition is not to obvious. Apparently old floors and new floors tend to have different sized wood grain as the length of time the trees are allowed to grow is very different. Fifty years ago they were cutting down old, existing forests. Today they plant and harvest trees, encouraging their growth and cutting them at the most economically efficient time.



Here is a similar meeting of the two wood ages in my bathroom. There was some debate over whether to keep wood in here, which used to be a bedroom/office pre-remodel, or tear it all up and put something more bathroom friendly, like tile or stone. I think the almighty dollar had the final vote here.



Keeping to our theme of time (barely), I just read a blog from my good friend Kavula describing how time seemed distorted as he waited for his firstborn child to breathe her first breath. I have also found having twins is bit like living in the bottom of a tremendous gravity well. Time has definitely slowed. I think it might be a reflection of how much work raising a child (or two) is. Fun times fly by, hard work drags on. Of course child-rearing is an unstable combination of the two, so as you might expect there are moments when things zip by before you get a chance to properly appreciate them. Still, I think I have packed more into the last year than I did the previous five and it kinda feels like it.

Maybe it would help not to remodel your home at the same time.




But time does march on as these photos from the girls' first birthday party do attest. As you might recall form the last post, we had our private party on their actual birthday, but the public one the following saturday. Like any proper event, the twins went through multiple outfit changes. Rylie can be seen in her black and white ensemble on the floor and in her red hedgehog inspired overalls sitting on Jacole's lap. My mother is undoubtedly getting up to help with yet another outfit change into something the girls could wear while eating their giant duck cake. Photos of that do exist, but I mainly shot video which I am too lazy to put on the web, so instead you are forced to imagine what it is like to have a child up to its elbows in yellow duck frosting.



Here are Kayla (in blue) and Rylie greeting the guests as they enter. It is quite pleasant to make your acquaintance Mr. Wild. Oh, you look absolutely smashing in that blouse, Melissa. Please, have some cupcakes and enjoy our yellow duck-themed table you can see in the background of this photo. Oh, pay that crazy Candice woman no mind. She just wants to change our outfits again. Toodle-oo!





Of course as any party- aficionado knows, the real boogie-ing doesn't start woogie-ing until the guests are all gone. Heck, sometimes it could even be a week after the fact, like when Kayla put on her pink mouse outfit, grabbed the baby lawnmower, and proceeded to bust a move. Yes, we have a baby lawnmower. No it doesn't have blades. It has a place to put different shaped blocks. Why are you so obsessed with the mower when this baby is clearly cutting a rug like nobody's business? I'll tell you what, we'll go on to the next photo and you can forget you ever saw the baby mower.



Ok, now we have Rylie in the cat outfit, caught in a moment of deep introspection. Is she pondering the ephemeral nature of being or maybe considering her place in the great chain of --- What? Yes, she is also leaning against the baby lawn mower. They play with it a lot because they can use the push bar to hold themselves up. Look, if I showed you a picture of Socrates thinking on a rock, would you ask me about the rock? No, I didn't think so. Let's move on.



Here we see Rylie screaming in delight while Kayla looks on, probably a moment after some witty remark of mine-- Oh crap. The freaking lawnmower is sitting there dead center in the middle of this picture, too. Well take a good look. You can see the holes that allow you to put different shaped blocks into the mower. Yippee. Hold on while I check the rest of my photos....

Nope.

This one, too...

Sigh. Apparently it is in all my remaining photos, like the haunting visage of a ghost that appears only during development of the film. Well, my treatise on the deep thoughts and ideas of genius one-year olds is just shot. So let me leave you with a picture of Kayla having a moment of pure joy.

While standing on the mower.



^ Although they both have "Leap" in their name, Leap seconds are a bit different than Leap Year. While Leap Seconds account for the changing spin of the Earth, a Leap Year is a year with an extra day in it to account for the fact that the orbit of the Earth around the sun (our year) does not split up exactly into whole days. Since a year is roughly 365.25 days, we add an extra day every four years to account for that 0.25 bit. Of course it is not exactly 365.25 but really 365.242375, which leads to fun variations like no leap year once a century, except for those divisible by 400 (1600, 2000, 2400). Phew! Time keeping is a pain in the butt.

^^ This is not entirely true. Thanks to General Relativity if you move a clock around you will change how time flows for the clock, which would make it appear inconsistent to a stationary observer. I know it hurts my head, too.

Space Station Zebra... but without Rock Hudson

Manned spaceflight is a source of constant conflict in the space science community. Of NASA's 16 billion dollar budget, almost 2/3 goes to manned spaceflight as opposed to unmanned endeavors. Specifically, nearly 7 billion dollars a year goes directly to the shuttle, space station, and related space flight support operation alone. More is spent developing new technology for manned missions, a large percentage of which have never seen the light of day (I think the latest Crew Exploration Vehicle is now the third possible replacement for the shuttle program). However, when it comes to scientific return, i.e. actually increasing our knowledge of physics, geology, atmosphere, space, the solar system and the universe, the vast majority comes from the unmanned space program. This includes everything from weather satellites to the
Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes to the Galileo and Cassini probes to Jupiter and Saturn.

In terms of scientific return per dollar, there is really no comparison. Manned spaceflight is a waste of money. Arguments are often made that money spent in manned spaceflight spawns technological innovation. While I believe there is a lot of truth to this, there is no reason to believe we would get more useful future tech from a Mission to Mars done with men rather than one done with robots. In fact, intuitively you would probably expect the opposite.

Having said all that, I must confess to being an astronaut junkie. Space is indeed the final frontier, despite anything contrary you might hear from James Cameron. In the short term there may be nothing to gain from sending men into space, but that doesn't mean it is not worth doing. Not everything needs to be justifiable in dollars and cents. And if landing a man on Mars gets people excited about science, that may well be worth the ticket and then some.

Somewhere between that visionary trip to Mars and a complete and utter sinkhole is the International Space Station (ISS). Originally conceived as a science station follow-up to Skylab, the original idea (Freedom Station) died a quiet budgetary death in the mid-80s. Perversely the vehicle designed to transport men to the station, the Space Shuttle, soldiered on for another 2-3 decades, a magnificent monument to poorly thought out long-term NASA planning. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the idea was resurrected as an international effort. The thought was to split costs and produce a larger space station without the need for a large number of new technological innovations. Somehow it didn't quite work out that way: The final U.S. price tag for the station is going to end up around 50 billion dollars. This amount could also easily be quoted as 100 billion if you include all the shuttle flights and the original sunk in development costs from the first station.

The station should be completed in 2010, a solid 7-8 years behind schedule and missing a couple of its coolest (and therefore most expensive) modules: Centrifuge Accommodations Module (used to produce varying levels of artificial gravity) and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (measuring cosmic rays). The present long term budget phases out funding for the station in 2016 in order to make room for a mission back to the moon. That's right: 25 years in the making and 12 years of assembly and we presently plan on abandoning it after only 6 years of full use. This sort of planning has brought a great deal of deserved criticism, including that of Bob Park (U. Maryland), whose summation of the present plan seems a bit on the nose:

NASA must complete the ISS so it can be dropped into the ocean on schedule in finished form.

Still, the news from space is not all bad. While the international nature of the program probably cost us money in the long run, it kept the station manned after the Columbia disaster and kept a lot of knowledgeable Russian rocket scientists employed not making Iranian ICBMs. While the science being done onboard may be poor, NASA is learning a great deal about assembling structures of this size in orbit around the Earth. The final assembled station will span nearly a football field and weigh 472 metric tons (nearly 7 shuttles worth). Any large future missions, like say a manned mission to Mars, will require large spacecraft assembled in orbit.



My favorite thing to do with the ISS is to follow its progress, bit by bit. You can see where all the parts came from, or you can check out the remaining erector set-like pieces. The next year should actually be a good one, with the addition of two major science modules: the Columbus European Lab Module and the Japanese Kibo Experiment Module. This is much more exciting than all the pieces of Truss that have been going up the past couple of years. The latest piece, Harmony: Node 2, has just arrived.

At this point, I would say I know quite a bit about assembling large structures. While I certainly can't compete with the icy grips of space, the Valley has horrors of its own. Between the 101 and the 405, no one can hear you scream.

Just too noisy.

As I believe I may have mentioned before, along with all the construction/remodeling I have been painting my house. The original plan had called for me painting the inside of my house, while hiring some plucky professional types to paint the outside. Midway through the process certain economic realities began to sink in. Realities like total money available and debt-to-earnings ratios and other unpleasant things. More savings had to be found. Since most sections of the budget were bursting at the seams, one of the few places we could save substantial sums and not compromise our vision for the house was painting.

As you might suspect, being also the father of newborn twins this additional painting duty has put quite a strain on my free time. As in, until this painting is done, I have no free time. Strain it any more and I will have permanent life stretch marks. Still, I am beginning to see the end of the tunnel on this one, although it is still very far away. More of slightly lighter stretch of tunnel than an actual end, but it is still nice not to be continuing on down into the dark.



But as the song says, one can get by with a bit of help from your friends. Round one was my birthday, when we primed most of the inside of the house. Round two was a couple of weeks ago when Steve and Amy, clearly racked with guilt over missing my birthday paintapalooza, came by to help out. This time we assaulted the front of the house, priming it from head (roof) to toe (ground? brick face? damn this metaphorical language!). Here is Steve scrubbing a substantial layer of grime from my front porch. I am secretly taking this photo from my rooftop perch.



From this same bird's eye view I managed to surveil the other pair of friends that made it out this Saturday, Caer and Ollie. Instead of getting dirty like poor Steve (and Amy, not pictured), they watched the twins (and Kynan) from inside this pen. It can not be underestimated how valuable this is. Anybody can slap on paint, but watching crazy babies...



So in the end we managed to make the entire front of my house a uniform shade of primer white, looking like this photo, only with slightly less blue tape. This is more or less how Steve and Amy, who busted their butts on this, last saw the house. I wanted to jump right in the next day and paint the house the final color, but as I pondered the situation I could not avoid the fact that all the trim overhangs walls. If I painted the trim after the walls I would drip all over the new paint. So reluctantly I did the trim first. Of course, the trim is White so even after busting my ass for a day and a half doing two coats and craning to paint all the overhead, hard-to-reach spots from this distance it didn't look any different.



Speaking of white trim let me take this moment to point out what a tremendous super-pain-in-the-ass painting these old multi-pane windows is. Particular this beast, which has 24 frames. That is a lot of wire brushing, scraping, masking, priming, painting, and second coating. Altogether all the windows on the house front had 54 frames, which is seriously too many. Demand bigger window frames. Write your congressman.



Here I am at the end of that weekend with all priming and white trim done. Look carefully. Look past the paint bespattered exterior. Ignore the drippy hat and the filthy t-shirt. Look into the eyes. Do you see the grim satisfaction of a job well done? Or the empty eyes of man who has journeyed beyond the edge of sanity? Wait. Don't answer that.

Let's just move on.



So here it is after Candy and I finally managed to get the main color on. That's right, I now have a green house. It takes some getting used to after having a grey-blue house for so many years, but I now think it is actually fairly sweet.



Just don't look at the house from too large of an angle, as so far the only part done is the front. With all the other things I have to get done, it may actually be a while before I get to those sides. My apologies to the neighbors on either side who will have to endure my over-extension. I will make it up to them down the road with fried turkey. Or a sugar cup dispensor. Or something.



I try to keep the immortal words of Jack Nicholas in mind, "All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy." I keep seeing twin little girls. Is that bad? Anyway, the girls finally turned 1 year old and had their first birthday gifts.



With the actual birthday (Oct. 18... yes, my blog is now so far behind that historians read it to find it how people actually lived way back when) landing on a Thursday, we were forced to have two days of festivities. Only fair, they being twins and all. On Thursday Daddy had to work (boo) but Mommy arranged her schedule so that she could stay home and take the girls out on an adventure to the Kidspace museum. Fortunately for Daddy, they saved gift openings until I got home.





In this series of photos Rylie is in the pink outfit with a mouse on the front, while Kayla is in the brown outfit with a cat upon her belly. The assignment is relatively random, although we do tend to put Rylie in pink outfits more often for color coding reasons. The fact that Kayla will occasionally pounch on her sister and shake her, toss her in the air, and hold her down by her tail is completely irrelevant.



The small "chunky" books were a big hit. So much so that we have to have monitored visitations to them now. Sadly, the book on kittens did not make it through the first week. Apprently the chunky books are a perfect size for the babies to apply some serious torque to the pages. With a careful weakening of the spine thanks to steady application of saliva, the girls were able to tear it apart. The other five "chunky"s are still in decent shape and remain popular, if only during visiting hours.



The babies seemed to enjoy presents a lot, mostly becasue they are given full permission to do their favorite thing: rip, rip, rip! We had to be constanlty vigilant for their second favorite activity, which would have been jamming the paper into their mouths.

And speaking of jam and mouth, I will leave you with this photo of Rylie truly savoring one of her birthday cards. This from my Aunt Margo (their Great Aunt Margo). The cards were nearly as much of a hit as the presents, but for similar reasons. Envelopes were made to be ripped.



AMIB