Me & Mine in November

This has been our first month of parenthood to outside-of-womb children.  Today is the day that Balthazar and Lysander turn one month old, and much of our experience has been chronicled in my blog post of earlier today.  The most important thing to note is that we are wildly happy.

This month has come with ups and downs.  Balthazar was hospitalised at four days old after losing 11% of his bodyweight, and we had a truly miserable three days back on the postnatal ward.  That was a dreadful time for us, but we came through it and I think that my relationship with my partner is even stronger for facing our first parental adversity together.  Aside from the various miseries associated with time spent in our local hospital (the birth wasn’t particularly nice either) we have had a wonderful time.  The boys are perfection.  Parenthood is better than I could ever have imagined.

We are seeing so much of their little characters already.  For such tiny people, they certainly know their own minds.  We have been forced to dismantle the crib after they flatly refused to sleep in it, so for now they are sleeping with us.  Lysander loves music and singing, and seems to find it particularly amusing when Kirsty reads to him.  He has suddenly become a proper little person.  Balthazar is still very newborn in his ways, but insists on holding our hands whilst he feeds.  He is very tactile, and also likes to grab for one’s face when he is picked up.  They are such sweethearts.  We have seen first smiles from both of them already.

Our little dog, Josephine, cannot be ommitted from any summary of  the family’s activities.  As anybody who knows me in real life knows, I have been crazy about her since she joined our family almost three years ago.  She has adjusted beautifully to the arrival of our newest small family members.  She seems to recognise that they are human and vulnerable and is very careful when they are in her immediate vicinity.  I had anticipated jealousy – she’s been our ‘baby’ for years – but thus far, we seem to have escaped lightly.  I think it helps that we’ve made a priority this month of keeping her routine and our commitments to her more or less the same – if anything, we’ve increased the amount of time that we spend cuddling her and taking her out and about.  After all, a tired dog is a happy dog!

We are commiting to joining Dear Beautiful’s Me & Mine blog linky for the last month of this year, and for 2015.  On the final day of every month, we’ll be summarising our adventures and sharing a photograph of the whole family.  This photograph was taken when the twins were precisely one week old and it’s shocking to me how much bigger they are already.  I love this picture because we look so happy; you can’t tell that we were freezing cold, that I was stroppy because people kept interrupting us to comment on how tiny they were, that our heels were sinking in to the mud.  We’re just two mums, holding our babies, with our favourite girl in the middle of us.  It’s perfection to me.