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Bad news means: A new place to explore and … a purchase!

With no warning, I got some bad news a couple of weeks ago. It certainly wasn’t earth-shattering or tragic news, mostly just yukky news that affects your ego. And maybe your stomach. For awhile. That kind of bad news.

I was upset, naturally. I had planned to meet up with a friend in downtown Los Angeles that night for a quick dinner before going to an event for online journalists at the LA Times building. It still sounded like fun even though I was feeling punky, so I went.

Amazingly, I didn’t hit any traffic at all and was driving through Chinatown when I realized that I was pretty early. I’ve always wanted to stroll through Chinatown and have literally never done it in the years that my husband and I have lived in the Los Angeles area.

Magically, a parking spot appeared and I knew the moment was meant to be. I took a couple of photos with my snappy new mobile phone camera and then went shopping.

The first store I went into had an array of the usual stuff you find in American Chinatowns, but I was so thrilled to be there that I perused everything carefully. Suddenly, along one wall, I saw an assortment of carved stone stamps.

When I walked over and looked closer, I saw that they were Chinese characters for people’s names and for special words. I started looking for my name but gave up because there were so many and they were arranged in no particular order (that I could determine).

Then I saw it. The stamp that made me feel better and more hopeful, all at once.

Here it is:

PASSION

Or, at least that’s what the label on the stamp says (if anyone sees that I have actually bought a stamp that says I LOVE FUDGE or KITTENS ARE MY LIFE or whatever, do, please, let me know.).

I bought the gooey red ink to go with my stamp and happily went on my way to pick up the rest of my life, post-bad news.

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‘The bouncy castle was for the young ones,’ says 80-year-old British triplet celebrating her birthday

three fingersOh, my gosh, this is a really sweet article, and I just had to share it.

Alice, Doris and Gladys are British identical triplets who just celebrated their 80th birthday with a big barbecue.

The article is a chatty tribute to the women, with a few terrific photos of the triplets as they grow up.

My favorite quote from the article is about Doris’ reflection on the 80th birthday party:

Doris said: “As much as we wanted to join in, the bouncy castle was for the young ones.

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Twin within a twin

Every parent of twins or multiples knows that when you’re out with your kids you get extra attention from (mostly) well-intentioned folks.

Sometimes people say nice things, sometimes it’s annoying, sometimes people even touch your kids. Most of the time, though, it’s no big deal.

But in our town we have a woman who we do try to avoid when we go out walking to the park or to the library.

She’s a twin within a twin.

She’s an elderly woman, pretty harmless-looking, and I can’t remember precisely what she looks like, which is why she has successfully snagged me more than once.

She’ll hulk after us in velcro sneakers when she sees us to ask if our daughters are twins. Then she’ll say that she has a relative with twins, a sister or something. I can’t remember, honestly.

And then, once she has our attention, she’ll lean in a little to say, “And, I’m a twin within a twin.”

There’s a beat before my palms begin to sweat, and I’ll think “Doh! She caught me again!”

“Oh,” I say, nodding and trying to think of a way to escape because now I remember what’s coming.

But it’s too late. She goes on to explain that she has an extra uterus and the doctors think that she originally had a twin sister, but that she absorbed her sister’s body while she was inside her own mother’s womb.

It’s actually very sad. I always come away from the conversation freaked out and thinking that she’s some sort of Klingon or something (from my Star Trek Next Generation days I remember that Klingons have some sort of double organ situation. You guessed it. I’m a geek.)

My husband said he successfully escaped the twin within a twin on his last walk around town with the girls, so I guess we’re starting to be able to pick her out among the local freak pedestrians.

This is the kind of thing that happens in my crazy little town, and the kind of thing one attracts by just walking around with twins.

Another day I just might tell you about the blonde knife lady. But not tonight. I’m creeped out enough as it is just thinking about the twin within a twin.

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Ode to the carousel at the mall

carousel

I wrote a little poem today about how, before I had kids, I used to turn up my nose at the thought of ever letting my future children ride the merry-go-round at the mall. I love carousels and favor vintage ones, like the carousel in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, and the mall one just doesn’t fit the bill.

Of course that was before the twins arrived.

You can read my ode to the mall carousel at my Family.com blog Mommy! Mommy!.

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Snow White and the Seven Whores, or, The Birth of My Bloggy Self

When I started BeTwinned, I wanted it to be an online magazine with feature articles. Once I got it up and running and my post-journalism school life turned out a lot different than I had imagined (and I had absolutely no time to feed this creation with feature articles), I realized that it would be better just to make BeTwinned a blog.

So, I’ve been wanting to write more “bloggy” and to create a blogroll of all the blogs I read and to do other things on the site that would be generally, well, bloggy.

But I haven’t really gotten around to it. Tho, I plan to do it this summer when I have two months off from my job. Yes, I have two months off in the summer. You can hate me, I can take it.

Anyway, something so funny happened this morning, and it’s something so random and it’s such a short story, I thought, “How could I possibly create a whole, meaningful entry about this one little thing?”

I decided that I couldn’t do all those perfect things and that this would be the day that I would start blogging at BeTwinned. Really blogging, like all the other Mommy Bloggers I read. Having fun and writing short, pithy posts if I damn well feel like it. And writing stuff that I probably couldn’t get away with on my Disney parenting blog, Mommy! Mommy!.

Here goes.

My husband’s twin sister sent my daughters a box of Disney videos, like Mulan, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, etc.

I asked them this morning if they’d like to watch a new video from their stack (they’ve been watching Peter Pan over and over), and they said yes. I offered up Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and they said yes.

Djuna said, “Is Snow White and the Seven Whores scary?”

I looked breathlessly at my husband, who looked like he was about ready to piss himself, so I knew I had heard her right.

I said, “I’m sorry sweetie, I didn’t hear you. Could you please say that again?”

Call me horribly cruel, but I had to hear her say it again.

And she did. I had to step out of the room, I was laughing so hard.

We watched the movie together in small pieces (that is one bitchy, freaky queen/witch, in case you have forgotten) throughout the day, and “whores” changed from “dwores” to “warses” to its current incarnation: “warves.”

I guess it is a pretty hard word to say for a three-year-old.

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Mother’s Day, 2007

Here’s a thought-provoking article from Truthdig, a site that recently won a Webby for both the juried award and the People’s Choice award for “Best Political Blog.” The article contains an interesting update about the so-called “mommy wars” and how mothers still face discrimination in the workplace.

Also, I’d like to link readers to my Mother’s Day post in my blog Mommy! Mommy!, which I’ve been writing for Disney’s new site Family.com.

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TwinWatch News: Tractor-trekking twins trying to raise money; twins born two months apart near their first birthdays

Twin brothers Pat and Mike Iott are planning a cross-country tractor trek to raise money for the American Heart Association. They have already raised $12,000. The tractors are refurbished vintage tractors that I think were owned by their grandfathers. The article wasn’t 100 percent clear about that.

circles

I haven’t seen another article like this one, so I thought I’d link readers to it. I had no idea that twins could be delivered days, even months apart. But, here’s an article about twins who were born over 2 months apart. The twins are nearing their first birthdays.

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TwinWatch News: Separating twins in school bill receives hearing

According to an article in the Portsmouth Herald online, New Hampshire’s Senate Bill 78 received a hearing in the state’s legislature Wednesday. The bill gives parents a say in determining whether their multiples will be placed in the same classroom. Note that the original bill gave parents final say, but the bill, in its current form, gives allows school principals a say, with an appeal process for parents.

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Finding the golden egg

Last year I wrote about the “anxiety of the mom at the hunt” and discussed my thoughts about stacking the deck for success at my girls’ first Easter egg hunt.

It turned out that the deck was already stacked by the generous fire fighters in town. No kid at our local egg hunt could possibly go away empty-handed.

This year, Dinah and Djuna are aware of what an egg hunt is, so I had to explain that in our park hunt, there aren’t really that many eggs to find. I told them that there is candy to collect everywhere instead of having lots of hidden eggs. There are actually a few golden eggs to find, but there are only a few and most of the hundreds of kids at the hunt won’t find one.

But Djuna was very excited to find a golden egg. At the hunt, Djuna really wanted to find a golden egg, and Dinah focused on gathering candy.


At one point, we passed a family with a little just-walking toddler, and they found a golden egg in the damp grass just as we were passing. I called Dinah and Djuna over so they could at least see a golden egg. This only made Djuna more determined.

As soon as we moved away from the golden family, my friend ran over to me (Auntie Lisa a.k.a. “Sleesla;” she sweetly braved the rain to come Easter Egg hunting with us) and told me that the family had actually brought their own golden egg.

Brilliant, I thought! What a fun and innocent way to let a little one have some fun than to let them find a home-brought golden egg over and over again. Parents’ ingenuity never ceases to amaze me.

I don’t think I could have pulled this over on my kids, because they knew that people were bringing the eggs up to the fire fighters at the microphone to redeem them for big Easter baskets.

But that’s OK. We went up to the head of the city’s Volunteer Fire Fighters’ Association and asked to touch one of the golden eggs. Djuna liked that just fine. Dinah shook the Easter bunny’s hand while Djuna panicked, and once again this year, a good time was had by all.