Sarah over at SATGS had a few ‘commenters’ commenting on this (???) and, having some experience with it, I decided it would be a perfect post for me to write.
Imagine if you will, twins… playing quietly with one another in their playroom… no crying, no tantrums… nothing. You are at the dining room table, grading papers, you get up, go into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. One of your daughters comes in, asks for a drink of water. You get out a cup, but she doesn’t want that cup, she wants her Dora cup… but not that Dora cup, she wants the other Dora cup.
You get the cup out, find the lid, pour some water into it, and give it to her. She drinks it up, says ‘All gone’, looks behind her, hands the cup back to you, and walks back to her playroom. You put the cup in the dishwasher (not the sink with me… no… directly into the dishwasher, I’m a little anal when it comes to dirty dishes in the kitchen, but I’m getting off the subject)
When you get back into the dining room…
Oh.
My.
God.
What am I talking about? Well, it goes by many names…
Planning
Imagine if you will, twins… playing quietly with one another in their playroom… no crying, no tantrums… nothing. You are at the dining room table, grading papers, you get up, go into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. One of your daughters comes in, asks for a drink of water. You get out a cup, but she doesn’t want that cup, she wants her Dora cup… but not that Dora cup, she wants the other Dora cup.
You get the cup out, find the lid, pour some water into it, and give it to her. She drinks it up, says ‘All gone’, looks behind her, hands the cup back to you, and walks back to her playroom. You put the cup in the dishwasher (not the sink with me… no… directly into the dishwasher, I’m a little anal when it comes to dirty dishes in the kitchen, but I’m getting off the subject)
When you get back into the dining room…
Oh.
My.
God.
What am I talking about? Well, it goes by many names…
Planning
Conspiring
Plotting
Helping
Scheming
Conniving
The list is endless, but the best way to put it (especially the best way to put it to people who have younger twins, or multiples, or are expecting twins, or multiples) is “cooperating.”
When you get back into the room, the girls are playing in their playroom, but the papers you had been grading are strewn about the place, everywhere, on the floor, under the table, ‘on top of Ol’ Smokey’… EVERYWHERE. You see a trail of papers leading to the playroom… so you cautiously follow them, picking them up as you go.
You reach the playroom… and your two daughters look up at you with those adorable bright eyes… and they smile… and they say ‘Hi Daddy’…
And at that moment… you realize that you have just been played by a couple of Master Conspirators. These two put Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder-Plot co-conspirators to shame.
These are my children, The Peanut Butter and The Jelly. Those were my papers I was grading for an Intro to Marketing class I was teaching last January (unfortunately, none of the papers disappeared, so I had to grade all of them… which is another post in itself…all I’ll say about that subject at this moment is that college kids of today can not write ONE properly constructed sentence to save their life…not one. And forget grammar and punctuation… they don’t exist in their world…but I digress as I am, once again, getting off-subject)
You think to yourself… “They couldn’t have done this on purpose could they? Yes, they were trying to get the papers earlier and you said no, but… one of them wouldn’t say they need water while the other…nah, couldn’t be.”
Yes. It could be.
This has happened before. And with their own ‘twin-language’, they could be planning it right in front of you and you and your spousal unit would have no clue.
They conspire (even if they’re not near a fire), they plot, and they scheme. They devise ways to make our lives… interesting (for lack of a better adjective)
Already, at the age of three, they conspire about telling people that they are their sister.
Or… one time, my wife and I heard them talking to each other about whose turn it would be that night to get into ‘Mom and Dad’s” bed. ‘I did it this morning, so it’s your turn tonight.’ ‘Ok, sissy.’
Another time, when they were still in their cribs, The Jelly dropped her baby doll out of the crib and as I bent over to pick it up, The Peanut Butter, speaking in their twin language, said something to The Jelly who then proceeded to drop a book onto my head. When I looked up at them, they both smiled at me., yes as soon as I turned away, they laughed.
So, take this as fair warning all you twins/multiples parents out there. This… is what you have to look forward to.
The list is endless, but the best way to put it (especially the best way to put it to people who have younger twins, or multiples, or are expecting twins, or multiples) is “cooperating.”
When you get back into the room, the girls are playing in their playroom, but the papers you had been grading are strewn about the place, everywhere, on the floor, under the table, ‘on top of Ol’ Smokey’… EVERYWHERE. You see a trail of papers leading to the playroom… so you cautiously follow them, picking them up as you go.
You reach the playroom… and your two daughters look up at you with those adorable bright eyes… and they smile… and they say ‘Hi Daddy’…
And at that moment… you realize that you have just been played by a couple of Master Conspirators. These two put Guy Fawkes and his Gunpowder-Plot co-conspirators to shame.
These are my children, The Peanut Butter and The Jelly. Those were my papers I was grading for an Intro to Marketing class I was teaching last January (unfortunately, none of the papers disappeared, so I had to grade all of them… which is another post in itself…all I’ll say about that subject at this moment is that college kids of today can not write ONE properly constructed sentence to save their life…not one. And forget grammar and punctuation… they don’t exist in their world…but I digress as I am, once again, getting off-subject)
You think to yourself… “They couldn’t have done this on purpose could they? Yes, they were trying to get the papers earlier and you said no, but… one of them wouldn’t say they need water while the other…nah, couldn’t be.”
Yes. It could be.
This has happened before. And with their own ‘twin-language’, they could be planning it right in front of you and you and your spousal unit would have no clue.
They conspire (even if they’re not near a fire), they plot, and they scheme. They devise ways to make our lives… interesting (for lack of a better adjective)
Already, at the age of three, they conspire about telling people that they are their sister.
Or… one time, my wife and I heard them talking to each other about whose turn it would be that night to get into ‘Mom and Dad’s” bed. ‘I did it this morning, so it’s your turn tonight.’ ‘Ok, sissy.’
Another time, when they were still in their cribs, The Jelly dropped her baby doll out of the crib and as I bent over to pick it up, The Peanut Butter, speaking in their twin language, said something to The Jelly who then proceeded to drop a book onto my head. When I looked up at them, they both smiled at me., yes as soon as I turned away, they laughed.
So, take this as fair warning all you twins/multiples parents out there. This… is what you have to look forward to.
And I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
