A Friendly Competition

Have you seen these Circle of Moms badges all over blogs?
It's a website listing popular moms by category. Style blogs, Baby Journals, etc.
For the last few weeks (until May 30th) there's been a contest for the top 25 in each category, which -unlike that other website I'm constantly pestering you for votes at - after the winners are announced they stay the same and are listed as such.
I hadn't joined any, but I saw that there's a "Moms of Mulitples" category... and I'm a mom of multiples....

So now I've joined. We've started a little late, but we can do it!
Vote for Baby Making by clicking the badge below or on the sidebar, and you can vote again every day.
Thanks for being such awesome readers, seriously.
You guys rock.

Guest Post: "How do you do it?"

Hi friends, today's guest post is by Gabrielle from The Morel Family Blog. She and her husband are experts on having twins, since they have two sets!
If you don't remember why I'm not writing the rest of this post then check out my Guest Post intro from last week, and then be sure to leave lots of nice comments so Gabrielle knows what awesome readers hang out around here. :)

*    *   *

We've all heard it. The negative comments from complete strangers, when you tell them you're expecting or that your children are indeed twins. It always surprises me, how so many people think there is nothing wrong with their negativity.

"That's a lot of work for someone so young, you poor thing. How do you do it?"

Yes, it is a lot of work.
It is also so much fun, that I would never be able to experience with singletons.

(Thing 1 & 2 did make a mess but this moment is priceless because of how funny she looks!)

Watching my twins interact with each other is the most heart warming moment of my day. My older set of twins, identical girls, will sit down together and talk to each other in the sweetest, most, caring way. One time, Thing 2 fell down and bumped her head on a hard plastic toy. Before I could run over to her to make sure she was okay, her older sister walks up to her and pats her on the head. She then gave Thing 2 a kiss on the head and said "Aww." That was all my daughter needed to feel better.

There are moments when I'm giving them a bath, where one of my girls will help me bathe their twin. They'll blow bubbles at each other and laugh. At bedtime, they'll "read" each other a bedtime story and give each other a kiss and say "Night. Night." The funniest moments are always when I'm telling them not to touch something. As I'm writing this, I told Thing 1 to stop hitting the buttons on the TV because she could break them. As soon as I tell her "No, don't hit the TV buttons," her twin sister walks up to her and waves her finger at her saying "No. No. No." That made me smile. :)

When my second set of twins were born, Thing 1 wanted nothing to do with them. She would have felt left out, had it not been for her twin sister. Those two stuck like glue, more than ever before. She saw Thing 2 smiling at the babies and eventually realized that the babies aren't anything to be afraid of. Three months later and Thing 1 loves her baby brother and baby sister. My girls will help me with diaper changes, by entertaining the baby.

Even Thing 3 & Thing 4 bring me so much joy and they're only 3 months old! Sure, they cry just like any other baby but seeing their smiling faces can cheer me up! Listening to their babbling and cooing at 3am makes the late nights manageable.

(Who could not be in a happy mood after a silly face like this?)

These moments might not seem like much to some people, and sure this can happen with an older sibling in the picture but the unique bond between twins is something completely different.

Sadly, most strangers will never know the joy us twin mothers feel, when we're with our children. They only see the mother with two babies/toddlers in a stroller and wonder how can she still be sane.

(Three out of four twins are in this picture)

It's the love we feel for our children, and the love our children have for us. That's the secret. :)

Tomorrow someone who isn't me will write on my blog.

If you are my husband, or one of the few people I've managed to coerced into coming to hang out with me you might have heard me bemoaning the fact that "There are no mommy blogs about twins."
This statement was often followed by me saying "Moms of twins just don't have time to run a blog!"
I came to this knowledge completely on my own.
Because I've been a blogger for several years and never seen a twin-mommy blog, they must not exist.

But recently a comment was left on my blog by Brittany, a mother of 5-month old twins.
I went to her blog A little of this, a little of that and immediately read through every post since her babies were born. She was like me!
She and her husband are mormons. They live in Utah. They have twins!
I started harassing her via email for information on cloth diapering twins and sleeping babies in the same crib.
Then I found Mandey from Mama and the Dudes.  She was like me!
She was from the Midwest, living in the west. She has boys born a year (possibly exactly) before mine! She has twins!

Then I realized there might in fact be an entire secret community of twin-mommy bloggers that I did not know about because when you're pregnant with only one baby twin-blogs aren't that interesting.
But now I wanted needed to be a part of the twin-mommy blog community. I felt such a connection to these women as I blog stalked (and then pestered via email) them. They know what I'm going through. They know what I will go through. They understand me!

And so, because I love them and need them and they've all "been there, done that" I asked them to help me.
Every single day someone tells me (with pity in their voice) that things are going to get worse. That I'm in over my head. That the most stressful, horrible, sleepless days of my life are ahead of me.
And that might be true.
But stop freaking telling me that. You are not helping me.

The people who tell me that are never the mother's of twins.
I usually respond with "We'll be okay, we'll figure things out."
And people say "You have no idea what you're in for."
Well, neither do you.  Where are your twins?

But these women, these twin-mommy bloggers DO know. And several of them have kindly agreed to help me with a little project.
Every Friday starting tomorrow (and hopefully continuing until the babies are born), I will feature a guest post by one of these amazing women about how awesome it is to have twins. None of that doom and gloom nonsense.
Some of these women have twins who are kids, not babies. Some of these women have twins who are still pretty new. One of these women has two sets of twins! What!?
And so I'm pretty freaking excited to see what they all have to say.
And you have that to look forward to.


.