The Birthday Post

It has taken us a while to do this post. Several factors contributed to this. First, I am in denial that my babies are not so babyish anymore. Where did this year go? And I have a bone to pick with all of the baby products and websites that automatically start calling them toddlers when they hit one. They aren't toddling yet! And I'm very ok with that.

Second, we were going to do a nice reflective, lessons-learned from parents of twins type post. But it would have taken us forever and I'm getting requests (more accurately - demands) for a birthday post.

Third, we didn't personally take a lot of photos because we were busy hosting a party, so I've been waiting to steal photos off of other people's cameras.

So even though I am in denial, the birthday party was a blast and the girls seemed to have a lot of fun. Given how shy they usually are, I thought they would hate 20 people staring at them and passing them around all day. But they were appropriately ham-ish, opened a few gifts and dove into their cakes like one-year-olds are supposed to on their birthday.

Ok, time for the sentimental part - what an amazing year it has been. It was rocky at first but everyone more than survived the first year. We could not possibly have lucked out any better - we have the two cutest, funniest, happiest babies two parents could ever wish for. Thank you to everyone who helped us out all year - the grandparents, aunts, nannies, and friends that visited us all in the hospital, came to spend the night in order to help save Chris and my sanity when the girls weren't sleeping, and came at a moment's notice at 8 o'clock in the morning because someone was sick and I couldn't do it alone. And thanks for sharing in the first birthday celebration. We probably won't be having a big party on December 26th every year, but it was important to us to cap off this year in that way, and be able to share our precious gifts with you.

And now a word from Chris...

So, the two most common questions we get from people seem to be (1) Do twins run in your family? (actually, identical twins do not run in families) and (2) Do you watch Jon and Kate Plus 8?

The answer to the second question is yes (it makes our life seem so calm by comparison). Well, at the end of one of their episodes, Kate talks about why she throws such big birthday parties for the sextuplets. She explains that it was far from a given that all 6 would be born, so it was really a miracle when they came into the world, and they celebrate accordingly. I know we didn't have 6 (thank God!), but I still feel very lucky and blessed. There were plenty of times when we just didn't know that these girls were going to be born and turn out to be the amazing girls that they are. 29 days in the hospital, a 5 day stay in Tampa to see a specialist, and twice-a-week visits to the department of fetal medicine at Brigham and Women's, and then on Dec. 26 there they were: two perfect beautiful girls.

So thanks to everyone for coming or helping us celebrate the big day from wherever you are. It really was more than just a birthday for us.

So without further ado, here are the pictures!

Birthday girls in their birthday shirts. Riley on the left.

Having a twin moment. I have no idea what they were pointing at. Probably a grandparent.

Diving into their beautiful "present" cakes. I had to cut them open so they could get to the inside. Hailey is on the left.

Yum!

Hailey was a disaster after cake and went directly into the bathtub from here. Notice the nice big chunk on the right in her hair. She loved every second of this.

Riley was slightly tidier about the cake process, she's usually a little less messy than Hailey. What was funny is that Riley kept crying between bites (I think she was getting tired) but would stop crying every time she discovered there was more cake to shove in her mouth!

I'll post some video soon too. Also, all 70 or so birthday (and Christmas) pictures are available on our Web Gallery for your viewing pleasure.