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When it comes to eating that is…

Leah is a champ. Takes to the bottle immediately, complains when you interrupt her to burp, burps like a trucker, then finishes the bottle and conks out for a few hours. In between she drops some of the nastiest smelling bombs I have ever had the displeasure of feeling on my hands, stomach and lap. *Like mommy like daughter huh?*

Mason on the other hand, is a Nancy when it comes to food. You have to tease him with the nipple to get him to pay attention to it, and when he does you have to interrupt him a good dozen times to burp him throughout. Otherwise, dude is a puke machine. And not just tiny urps, I’m talking half and full bottles worth of puke, but not puke-puke, more like whatever we just put in just came out.

We are currently under the impression that he might be dealing with a pyloric stenosis situation, but the first ultrasound at the hospital showed, while the pyloris was a bit large, it wasn’t completely cutting off his food from digesting. Dylan, our oldest, had pyloric stenosis and Jules discovered it at day 21. He had surgery to correct it on day 22. Julie will never let me forget that she rules at mother’s intuition, and I’m okay with that. Just put the laundry away once in a while. BURN!

So why is it one twin is a monster, devouring anything in sight, be it nipple of rubber or flesh; while the other is more interested in daydreaming and breakdancing? (I’m not kidding about the breakdancing, will upload video soon, dude has an uprock many would envy)

What tha gwan?

I remember when I was a kid getting smacked up-side the dome for dropping a “shit” or a “damn” when I screwed something up. It wasn’t that my dad didn’t use that kind of language around me, it was that those words were reserved for only certain situations away from the public ear. I started to pick up on each cuss word’s place throughout the course of daily life and I started to understand when and were to use them. I got better and better at holding my tongue around my parents and teachers and bosses, but as soon as I was free of all formal restraints, I went fuckin’ crazy with that shit, bitches.

I also remember around 5th or 6th grade, playing football at recess and every other word you heard or used was a cuss word. Because it was a Catholic school there was this large pent up aggression towards following rules that just seemed dumb to us kids, cussing being one of them.

You didn’t say “HIKE!” You said “Fuckin’ HIIIIKE!”

It was this powerful sense of doing something wrong that brought most of us kids together as rule breakers, rebels and shitkickers.

When I got to high school, again a Catholic school, I can recall conversations flowing out of our mouths dropping well placed cuss words as verbs rather than just exclamations. Shittin’ me. Fuckin’ with me. Quitcherbitchin’. Various types of action were placed within the context of the swear, and cussing became an art form. It was a way to let off steam without punching someone, and if you shared it appropriately away from the nagging ears of teachers and parents, it was akin to drinking in public.

Then college turned me on to a whole new way of feeling people out, utilizing cuss words as a barometer for how down to earth someone was. Say you’re on an interview and the guy asking you questions and looking at you over the desk asks you about something on your resume. You describe the event or whatever without delay and he responds back like a guy you’re drinking with “You have to be shittin’ on me, you serious?”.

Boom. Open door to not only become a friend with this person, but you’ve just allowed yourself into his little club. He likes you. He just said shit in front of you on an interview. You have this in the fuckin’ bag! Soon I started noticing that if people older than myself allowed themselves to relax and drop a few swear words in front of me, I was pretty sure I could act more myself. Not that swearing was a major part of who I was, but shit, I fuckin’ cuss like a trucker when I’m comfortable, and I’m okay with that not being okay to a large number of fuckin’ people.

Now as a parent, I understand and practice restraint when talking around my kids, nephews and nieces, and other people’s kids. I don’t want my 2 year old son walking into daycare sayin’ “Holla bitches!”. (Not that I wouldn’t laugh my ass off.) Nor do I want my son to be looked down upon because his parents (or parent, Julie is half cuss queen, half nun) have dirty mouths. I want my son to learn as I did about the amazing power of using words that were once completely off-limits as a way of venting anger, frustration and letting off steam that would normally build up because of a cork in my ass that’s limiting my word usage.

I find the nicest people on the planet know how to drop a good “well, fuck” once in a while. Whether they do it alone or around a few friends is up to them, but I know that the release of stress via saying “OH SUGARPLUMS!” is probably half of what a well timed “Shit Bitch!” can allow you to feel.

In parenting I find a lot of things that piss me off that are completely dumb: Avent bottles leak all over the fucking place. Getting pooped on. Getting puked on down the back of my shirt and I don’t realize until I see the white chunks on the couch, etc. All of these things are fucking annoying. Dumb and inconsequential in the long run, but still, fucking annoying.

If I were a deadbeat, I’d drink a ton, yell at my wife and kids or take out my frustrations physically. I’m not that guy. No, I’m the guy who can relax and feel oh so much better by dropping a few f-bombs out of earshot of my 3,876 kids.

But why do you fucking cuss so much with your fingers Joel?

Simply put? It makes me feel like I’m being more honest with myself and other people if I type like how I would talk if me and you were at a bar shooting darts, taking back jaeger bombs and chatting about the fucking Cubs and Bears. If you are my friend, which you may or may not be, I hope I would feel comfortable enough to fucking cuss in front of you. If I wasn’t, well, we might not be destined to be that good of friends.

Bang your bible, throw up your nose, talk shit behind my back that I’m a caveman or a dicknose, whatever. When my kid asks why it’s okay for me to cuss and not okay for him to, I will tell him honestly:

Society deems it inappropriate that children use words like shit, damn, fuck and bitch. Why? Well, it’s language specially reserved for maturity, when you have so many responsibilities that you wouldn’t dare dream of not taking life seriously everywhere else besides talking a little shit with your buddies. When you go to work everyday, take care of your kids everyday, pay your bills on time, put food on the table and clothes on everyone’s back, you can cuss your fucking heart out.

Until then little man, cuss your ass off. Just don’t let me, your mom, your grandparents, your teachers, or other adults you don’t know hear you. You never know, those people might be shiteating bitches who don’t know the goddamn beauty that a fucking cuss word brings to the soul of those man enough to admit that there is enjoyment in saying such words.

I promise not to intentionally offend you if I meet you in public, but you got here somehow you dumb shit! Fuckin’ cheers.

I am a father that cusses. Because cuss words fucking rule.

Every waking minute we’re either feeding, burping, changing, rocking, bouncing, wrestling dylan, working, doing household bullshit or dreaming about sleeping.

Excuse my absence from actual posts. In a few weeks I’m sure my body will adapt to these weird hours.

The purple painted room is a “while you were out” that myself and a few friends arranged as a surprise to Julie when she returned from the hospital. I’d show you the reveal video, but Jules would kick my ass.

I have a few close friends with twins of their own and I saw one on the way to work this morning and he laughed in my face across two lanes of traffic as we sat at a stoplight.

“You’re lookin’ pretty rough there Joely-bear.” *A lot of my male friends seem to call me by nicknames that I had once thought reserved for romantically involved couples… It’s unsettling but oddly comforting.

‘Nah. Doin’ fine. How’s the fam?’

“Don’t change the subject jagbag. You’re drunk on tired aren’t ya?”

All I can really do is nod at this point because I’m getting at least 5 hours of sleep a night, but it isn’t really coming all at once, rather in 2 hour bursts. And that’s only if my two year old son doesn’t wake up at some point during the night.

The twinsies have to eat every three hours, so there is a half hour for feeding and a good fifteen minutes for putting them back down, which includes a change and a dozen kisses each. Add in the one pumping Julie does at like 2am, which I say doesn’t wake me up, but come on that Medela pump is fucking creepy and it talks to me about assassinating Sesame Street characters with tainted cookies. If there’s a 10pm feeding, then a 1 or 1:30am feeding and then a 4 or 4:30 feeding and then I get up at like 6 for work or 6:05 on the weekends when my 2 year old sleeps in, we’re just on top of 5 hours.

So I guess I’m always drunk on tired right now.

Symptoms of this rare but extremely common complex are:

• blood shot eyes
• bags under said blood shot eyes
• chalky taste in the mouth from coffee three times a day
• breath resembling, to quote Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: pig shit in turpentine
• sentences that start with, contain and normally end with “uhhhhmmmm”
• blank stares at people who ask simple questions like “Do you want a cookie?”
• incorrect word order. example: “I need helping this with.”
• inability to finish typing sente

*exhale*
Things are going as well as can be expected.
The twins were born at 5lbs 12oz (Leah) and 5lbs 9oz (Mason) and are now at 5lbs 14oz each. Which means, yes they are growing, but also that we have to wake them up every 3 hours to feed them, mainly because they were 5 weeks premature and tan as hell (jaundice).
Three hours seems so long when you’re at work or driving, but when you’re twinning, it’s like 15 minutes. There’s no time to get a good poop in, a lengthy shower, a trip to the local watering hole  or even a quick nap.
But as the days slowly pass I am sooooo fucking thankful that we didn’t have twins on our first shot. I remember the “looking uphill” and “I’M SURROUNDED” feeling that I had when Dylan was born in 2008.
It was miserable not knowing how to have confidence in yourself as a parent, I remember leaving the room once when D was just a few days old and calling a friend’s wife and basically crying to her that I couldn’t change my own son’s diaper or feed him or burp him, anything! I was spooked. Nothing seemed natural, every movement I had with the baby meant a neck was flailing, or an arm was caught in a onesie, or he wouldn’t eat or burp for me… I was horrible at everything and good at nothing besides loving the damn thing.
After a few weeks of that helpless feeling I started to settle into my role as Dad, but friends and family all told me the same thing “It’ll get better” and it did. But just as I was getting a better feel for handling my little dude we discovered he had pyloric stenosis at 21 days old.
That fucked me up for a good month and a half. I was paranoid, edgy, quick to emotion, sad and completely out of sorts. Granted, none of what happened to D was at all related to anything I did or could have done, but I felt like I had somehow let my kid down. And I remember I was okay at the ER, okay in the xray, okay in the ultrasound of D’s stomach, okay while following Julie and D in the ambulance to another hospital but when they brought him back in with the IV in his arm and the bag of saline was almost as big as he was I completely lost it. I wailed like a little bitch. I hadn’t let my guard down at all that day because I felt I had to stay strong for my wife and kid.
But when I think back on it, only after I allowed myself to be vulnerable did I become a better parent. I knew I didn’t know all there is to know and at one point I was ashamed of not having prepared well enough or something dumb like that, but as soon as I accepted my stupidity, I started gaining ninja skills as a Dad without trying, they just magically came. It wasn’t instinctual or taught, it was acquired through divine somethingorother.
Now, armed with the truth that “I don’t know shit” about being a father to twins and that that is okay, I’m ready to be a ninja at it.