How It Really Is

In my blog posts, I tend to gloss over the difficulty of daily life with twins. So, to begin, I present a visual demonstration...

Blog-ready boys (Jack left, Henry right): hanging out, playing together nicely, represents maybe 10% of their waking hours.

Jack stealing Henry's pacifier, estimated frequency of occurrence: 6 times per day.

Jack will crawl all the way across the living room at a high rate of speed for the sole purpose of stealing Henry's pacifier.

Jack appears to attempt to return pacifier to Henry... in reality, he's using the pacifier he already stole to remove the new one Steve gave to Henry. Jack can literally have a pacifier in each hand and still go for the third one we've placed in Henry's mouth. It's some kind of obsession.

Steve and I spend a ridiculous amount of time attempting to prevent the boys from stealing each others' toys, pulling each others' hair, grabbing and dragging each other roughly to the floor, and endeavoring to poke out each others' eyes with toys and fingers. 

It doesn't matter how good our baby-proofing gets, we cannot turn our backs as they will use that opportunity to harass each other no matter how well they were just getting along. As far as we've been able to determine, there is no reasoning with a 9 1/2 month old intent on pulling his brother's curls. Henry (the most frequent hair-pulling perpetrator) just smiles at me when I say "no." We realize that, at some point, they will need to work out their own problems, but that's a tad much to ask for kids whose language mastery begins and ends with seeming to understand that their names somehow refer to them.

This is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.