Once I experienced motherhood I realized that my well thought plans and straight forward approach didn’t work quite as well in real life as they did in theory. Not that the theory was wrong but real life is so much more complicated and sometimes I am at a loss as to how to apply the book knowledge to a certain situation.

My most recent ‘complicated’ experience started a few weeks ago. Video games entered our home. I was so not prepared for that. One night when I was working my husband had introduced Mario Karts to our oldest. Couple weeks later, when they had opened every possible new track, a package arrived in our house that contained Sky Captain. Now it’s on to the Monster Trucks.

Clearly the boy enjoys playing them. And I’m not completely against them in the lives of children. There just seemed to be ‘too much’ of it. From the beginning my husband and I talked to him how playing games is a privilege and not something he should take for granted. And there have been days when he’s lost that privilege and have had to go without playing all day, sometimes two or three in a row.

Here’s where it became ‘complicated’. I was feeling guilty for letting him play that much (what ever that much is) and at the same time I was thrilled he had found something to do that didn’t require my attention. Better yet, Beth and Joshua loved watching him race so they left me be also. WELCOME FREE TIME! But the quilt was growing as was his addiction. I had to intervene, for both of us. I was tempted to throw the games away but realized that would not address the problem. Something else would take the place of videogames and we’d be in this situation again. (And I also imagined him to grow up to be holed up in a room playing videogames all day long, not being able to hold onto a job or a wife and blaming me for ruining his life by not letting him play when he was a kid .. kinda like the relationship I have with Finnish chocolate because my parents deprived me of that when I was growing up. Yeah, totally blaming my lack of self disciple on them!). So what I needed were guidelines. I had mentioned this to a mom friend and she told me about an other mom who has her children ‘earn’ their TV time. Sounded like a good idea. After struggling to decide how much one workbook page meant in video time I settled for 10 pages (about 45min) = 30 minutes playing, usually separated in two sessions (Nathan’s choice).

Transition was much easier than I thought it would be. Nathan seems to be proud that he can ‘earn’ his game time. After breakfast he asks for his book and does the required pages. So far he has been satisfied with 30 min /day. My quilt has disappeared. A win win in my book!

(I should add that when my husband is home and he wants to play with Nathan that time does not need to be earned. That is counted as ‘quality time’ between Dad and a son. Because clearly, it is.)

How are you handling tv and video games in your home?

Hanna is a mom of ‘one and twins’ who’s trying to strike a balance between theory and real life. And to not ruin her kids while figuring it all out.

One of my favourite activities at the end of the year is sending out holiday cards. Since becoming a mother, I haven’t been nearly as good at keeping in touch with friends around the world, and our holiday greetings are an annual opportunity to remind the people we care about that we love them. For nearly six years, I maintained a public blog, but there are plenty of folks for whom the blogosphere is a huge mystery. The act of addressing and stamping envelopes, filling them with our family’s good wishes, is very satisfying. I know that Christmas cards end up being a chore for many people, and I’m very glad that I find the whole experience to be fun!

I usually order photo cards with a photo from the year. When my husband is home for the holidays, I send out a family photo, but more often the picture is of our twin daughters alone. After all, my husband and I look pretty much the same year after year. Getting nice family photos is a challenge all its own, and after the first year, I elected to leave it to the professionals. A couple of years ago, we invested in an amazing photo shoot with the talented Brandi Nellis, but most years, we just hit up the Sears or JC Penney photo studio.

Although our nuclear family celebrates Christmas’s religious significance, we have many relatives who are Muslim, several friends who are Jewish, Hindu or Buddhist, and many more friends and relatives who are altogether secular. I try to pick a winter-themed photo card rather than a Christmas one, and add a handwritten note to recipients who we know will be celebrating Christmas or Eid, if it happens to fall in the winter.

Along with the photo card, I include a family letter, describing the highlights of our year. The majority of the letter usually ends up being about the children’s interests, milestones and accomplishments. This year, I invited our daughters to make their own contributions to the annual letter, and they each drew a picture and wrote a few sentences about the holiday season this year. It was pretty amazing to see them as excited about reaching out through the mail as I am every year.

How do you handle holiday greetings, and do you include your children in your efforts?

Sadia, her husband and their 5-year-old girls, M and J, send their holiday greetings from El Paso, TX, where they have just experienced their first Texas desert snow. Sadia’s husband told her about desert snow during his first tour of duty in Iraq, but it has to be seen to believed.

But now, let’s talk about sports!

My boys played tee ball last spring, and their coaches learned which boy wore which pair of shoes so they could call them by name. Yes, their coaches were that awesome, because both sets of shoes are mostly grey and black, and just have tiny bits that are green or red.

They played flag football this summer, and that was trickier. For one thing, black cleats were pretty standard. For another, it’s not like tee ball where the kids are mostly coached one by one, or assigned a spot. The boys had big numbers on the backs of their jerseys, but from the front it was anyone’s guess.

To help the coaches (and everyone), I took to putting an X in surgical tape on one boy’s shirt. I felt so weird about this — first because I was afraid he wouldn’t like it, but he didn’t mind. But I still felt like I was branding him in some odd way. I also felt like maybe I was making a bigger deal out of this than it needed to be.

It turned out to be a good thing. Their coaches were great about remembering which boy got the X (the one who has an X in his name, which made it easier) and my boys benefited from being called by name. And I have to admit, I relied on that X to keep track of who was where from the sidelines. It saved me from a lot of, “YAY! GREAT JOB– (who was that?) – GREAT JOB, um, SON!”

When your look-alike multiples are in uniforms, what strategies do you use to help other people tell them apart?
Jen is a work-from-home mom of 7-year-old twin boys, and two girls ages 5 and 9. She also blogs at Minivan MacGyver, where she freaks out about every single thing that happens at school.

We all know that not every day is picture perfect, blue skies, happy kids, family togetherness. At the beginning of this year I began a project to take a photo a day and post it to our website. While the so-called 365 Photo Project is not my idea, nor even a new idea, it was new to me. I took lots of photos of my kids before, but this year I have made it a part of our days. My “good camera” used to only come out for special occasions like the apple orchard, now I leave it in the living room so I am always ready. So far this year I have captured one boy’s first steps, a first haircut, family vacation moments, other goofy milestones, and more. But I have also captured spontaneous brotherly hugs, candid interactions with the dog, smiles, tears and many other moments that make our lives amazing. I highly suggest doing the photo-a-day thing if you want to capture the more mundane, daily things that are also worth remembering, and if you want to be better with your photography. Exercising that photography muscle every day will really strengthen your images.

I wrote at length about safeguarding these memories on my own website, so I won’t rehash it all here, the nutshell version is back up your stuff. Back it up in as many places as possible. Hard Drives, Memory Cards, Off-site storage. I worked in a technology job for more than a decade and I can tell you I have seen the worst side of technology. This is not an idea unique to moms of multiples, everyone should back up. But since we know how fast it all goes (That first year? Total Blur.) and how difficult it can be to get out and do things, it is worth saving. I love my photos. I love looking through old ones. I have some printed on canvas on my wall, even my iPhone case has a photo of my kids. But if my kids are to be able to enjoy them and share with their kids, I need to make backup as much of a habit as taking a photo every day.

And then there are as many studios as corner stores offering many styles. There is Vinyasa, Iyengar, Ashtanga, even Chocolate yoga, and Doga (Yoga for dogs). How do you choose? And all teachers say different things don’t they?. Taking a yoga class can be costly. A single class can range from $10-$25. Multiple class passes or monthly memberships are more affordable, but depending on the studio, still quite pricey. And how many times a month can you, MoM get to the studio anyway? What’s supposed to be an ancient method to simplify and unify our thoughts and outlook has become a daunting world to join. How can you start simply, without either running for your life or falling for all the crazy marketing?

My suggestion: develop a self-practice. Do it on your own floor or on 1 good quality yoga mat (they wear out quickly otherwise). Wear comfortable clothes that you find in your cupboard. Do it any time other than right after a meal. Take ten minutes or an hour, by yourself or with your little yogis alongside. More likely they’ll end up on top of you, under you, or both.

Whatever style of yoga you do, you can find something to do on your own, it’s the premise of a real yoga practice anyway.  In Ashtanga Yoga, which is the style I chose, self-practice is encouraged from the start. Owning your practice, your breath and movement, is the basis of the Mysore- style practice. In such a class people move at their own pace, through the sun-salutations, a set-sequence of poses, a closing section, and Savasana the final relaxation. Each person’s practice grows in length and depth over time. There is a teacher in the room who guides, assists, and adjusts the postures. Depending on the teacher, Ashtanga can be taught quite militantly, and the name Mysore for the South Indian city where it was developed has often been mistaken to represent “my sore!” So it is important to seek out a teacher who feels right.

But also a teacher who can guide you to do it on your own. It’s certainly not easy to do day in and day out without the combined energy of the teacher and other students. It’s  do-able though. One of my students, a mum of two, initially held back from self-practice because she wanted to leave her brain outside the class and just do as she was told (in her words!) It was her time off. I can understand that now. Others are afraid to forget the sequence, or afraid that they’ll hurt themselves from bad alignment, all issues that can be surpassed with some guidance, practice, and confidence.

Try to remember a few things you like from a class, and take them home mindfully. Following a teacher’s instructions while your thoughts are wandering from your neighbor’s strange clothes,  to why she can balance but you can’t, to whether you’ll cook broccoli or spinach when you get home isn’t really getting us any closer to yoga.

Other than finding time for it and the random thoughts, there are other obstacles for us mums practicing at home. Except when both children are asleep, I have to deal with their fights, my hair being pulled, or face scratched. I’ve was once ambushed in an inverted posture by my two and had to call for help. They often hug my standing leg just when I am in the hardest one leg balancing posture.

I also get the adjustments though. They sit on my back in forward-folds. I haven’t gone as deeply into postures since I was pregnant.

It’s good fun when they imitate me. The first time Leila copied some of my arm movements she was under four months old. I was shocked, and realized the value of practicing with them around. Today I asked R what he was doing on my mat. “Yoga,” he said while his hands, feet and head connected to the ground in his tenth down dog of the day. Having them around lets them know my practice is for me, but that they are welcome to join in, even if it is just lying on my mat underneath me. The postures come naturally to them. If I didn’t know better I’d be jealous of their flexibility. I’m hoping that my hyper-active yogis will also  imitate me in the final relaxation some day.  Here are more of our Mat Moments.

I can’t lie, there have been times I wish I could be in a studio and not have to deal with screaming, running toddlers dropping food on my mat, not to mention the number of times I have to stop part-way through because someone can’t handle it. When we travel and there are studios around, it is my break to go to a class.  We just spent ten days in a Canadian city where the studio down the road offered a first-timer two week unlimited trial for $25. Good deal for the five classes I managed.

A friend of mine on a tight budget did that for months. She took classes by shopping the deals at yoga studios in her city. She took the discounted one-month pass at one studio, and then a holiday special price at the next one, and the free class at another…

If you are seriously inclined to start some yoga on your own, even for a few minutes a day, I’d recommend the initial investment of studying with a teacher, someone who can guide you through a self-practice that would suit you. Eventually, you know what’s best, and the cost drops.

Workshops with senior teachers if they are available at your studio are great. They’re packed with tips that you can take home and work on for months.

Or buy a DVD that you can watch and re-watch. If it’s a good one, it won’t be surprising that you catch new tips every time.

David Swenson’s “Ashtanga Yoga -Practice Manual” is a comprehensive book available at his on-line shop for $30. It has 650 photos, including variations for all poses. It is worth it both for beginners and experienced practitioners. He is one of my favorite teachers, funny, and down-to-earth.

This is the Yoga Journal’s online home-practice page.

Just a note: learning solely from a DVD or teaching yourself from a book is not comparable to having an experienced teacher visually check in with you.

Your self- practice could be an hour of asana, 15 minutes of sun-salutations, a session of breath work in a seated position, or a 5 minute Savasana lying on your back. Whatever it is, it’s yours and it’s worth it.

Do you do your activities at home around your little yogis? How do they react? Do they participate?

Related articles: Little yogis  by Wendy Altschuler (www.yogachicago.com)
My children and yoga  by Paul Dallaghan (www.yoga-thailand.com)
What is “Mysore Style”?  by Paul Dallaghan (www.yoga-thailand.com)

Natasha, mum of Leila and Rahul was an Ashtanga Yoga teacher until her little yogis became the teachers.

Our family just arrived home from our second trip to the Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, OH. Last summer we attended a wedding in Philadelphia with our 9-month-old twins. We packed the car for a road trip from Chicago but had to divide our drive into a few days. Looking for a half-way point we saw Twinsburg, OH on the map and thought, “Hey, we should stay there, it’s a town named Twinsburg.” A quick Google search revealed Twins Days Festival, a record-setting gathering of twins from around the world which just happened to be the weekend we were driving through Ohio. We had to go. How could we pass it up?

We enjoyed our first Twins Days experience so much, we decided before we even left Ohio we would try to go back every year. It is an experience unlike anything I have seen. The sense of community and camaraderie among twins from all over really is amazing. Among the many activities, our favorite has been the Double Take Parade, which encourages any and all twins to join in the themed parade. This year’s theme was Circus, a truly fitting theme for a gathering of twins. My boys were dressed as Human Cannonballs, with their wagon outfitted as a cannon. There are also lots of research studies for twin participation, and mingling with twins young and old. The youngest set there was 8 weeks, the oldest was 96 years old! There are lots of contests, carnival rides, food, and fun. Friday night is a Wiener Roast for twins and their families, Saturday night there are fireworks and Sunday morning is a pancake breakfast. For older twins there is a golf tournament, a 5K and lots more.

So much I have read and heard since we were expecting twins focuses on the challenges: the high-risk pregnancy, the bleary-eyed, soul-crushing sleep deprivation, the expense, every-rough-patch-times-two. Dress them alike. Don’t dress them alike. Separate them in school. Keep them together. Everything I read seems to threaten all the ways I am destined to mess my kids up. Plus, as much as strangers are fascinated with and willing to offer up comments about twins, they are almost always negative. “You’ve got your hands full!” or “Double Trouble!” or “Better you than me!”

It is easy to lose sight of how wonderful it can be raising twins. We have twice the giggles, twice the hugs. My boys are growing up spending every day with a best friend. I get to watch my two tiny infants as they grow into little boys. My boys are 21 months old, racing from milestone to milestone, growing noticeably each day. I wonder every single day how they can possibly be cuter than they were yesterday and how did I get so lucky to be here for the ride. The truth is that while my boys are fraternal and are very different, they were born a pair. Twins Days is such a unique celebration of twinship, I want my boys to grow up appreciating how truly special it is to be a twin. In Twinsburg for that one weekend a year, they can be among people who know what it’s like to go through life with a doppelganger, with a relationship unlike any other. They can be part of the community and celebrate being twins.

My boys are often subject to lots of attention when we are out and about, and sometimes I feel like they are a spectacle. (I imagine it is nothing compared to identical twins or even triplets or quads!) I want them to feel proud that there are two of them, and love that they came into this world as a set. Twins Days Weekend is always the first weekend in August in Twinsburg, OH. For more photos and information about our trip, you can check out our rundown of our weekend as well as photos form this year and last. You can read more about the adventures of our family at goteamwood.com

Actually, it was my son. For a kid that doesn’t always seem to have a lot of body awareness, he has a real love for trying out different sports.  When we were up in Wisconsin over the summer, he got my aunt to try and teach him badminton.  Not to mention beach tennis, fishing, sailing, and swimming in the middle of the lake.

I told him he had to be able to swim with his face under water before he could try skiing.

But most recently, he has developed something of a fixation on soccer.  Neither my husband nor I are remotely athletic, and we both skipped that suburban childhood rite of passage that was the kids’ soccer team.  But wherever it came from, Daniel has decided that soccer is the thing to do.

Our local YMCA does an Introduction to Soccer class for three-to-five-year-olds.  I don’t hold any illusions that my son will learn much more than where the goal is, but it’s not too expensive, and I figure he’ll get a kick out of it.  The sheer mention of the class is enough to get him bouncing with excitement.

Here’s the thing.

My daughter? Not so interested in the soccer.  What she has latched on to is the idea of dance class.  She mentions it nearly every day.  “Mom, can I take a dancing class?”  I think it has as much to do with the outfit as the actual dancing. (She’s also Little Miss Arts-and-Crafts, and no, I don’t know exactly how I ended up with such gender stereotypes for children.)  But again, there’s a class at the Y, the price is reasonable, and I’m happy to let her explore her interests.

Two kids. Different classes. They aren’t even at the same time, nor on the same day.  And this is where it begins, apparently, shuttling my kids to and from school and activities.  Mark it: age three years, three months.

This is the first time I have ever even considered signing my kids up for different classes.  For the last three years, it has been all three of us doing the same things.  I sign them up for music or gymnastics, and we ALL go.  I already started to be cut out of the equation when they started solo swimming classes in the summer, not to mention once they started preschool.  But at least they both go to swimming at the same time, they both attend the same school.

While their separate activities are on different days, they’re both weekend days. I’m hoping this can turn into not only a fun class, but an opportunity for weekend one-on-one time.  I’m a little concerned about feeling over-scheduled, but the class is only two months long, so it’s not forever.  But it seems worth the experiment, both in terms of the kids’ interests and in terms of our own time management.

So, what about you, moms (and dads)? Have you done separate activities with each child, or are you holding out? If you have, how old were your kids? What was that experience like?

The Twins Days Festival is really geared toward TWIN MOMS and their offspring. I’m more of a twin mom. Lower case.

We attended at our twins’ request. As we pulled into the parking lot, my boys were excited to see sets of twins in matching outfits. Attendees had decorated their cars as well. “What’s so special about being twins?” my 8-year-old singleton grumbled.

Oh, that’s a fun one to answer at Twins Days.

As we entered the high school where registrations were being taken, I was overcome by a wave of emotion at the throngs of identically dressed twosomes and threesomes. I was excited for my boys. In our quest to treat twins as individuals, I think we often go overboard and treat them as though being a twin is somehow a weakness that needs to be hammered out of them. We frown at sets of twins with rhyming or alliterative names. We tsk-tsk parents who dress their twins alike. We want them in separate classes, with separate friends. It felt good to be in a place where all the pressure to prove I’m fostering their individuality is removed, and their sameness is accepted for what it is.

The sameness is not just accepted, but celebrated. It seems a lot of effort is put into looking identical at the Twins’ Days Festival. These twins all matched completely – haircuts, clothing, shoes, glasses, hairstyles, purses, jewelry, etc.

I’d made a terrible mistake. Two terrible mistakes, actually. First, my boys were not dressed exactly alike. (This is because I am a twin mom [lower case] and just felt proud that I had the same shirt in two different colors clean at the same time.) Second, my boys have very different haircuts, due to a series of unfortunate attempts at saving money on haircuts. (Lesson learned.)

My hope that the boys would be recognized as twins was washed away by a river of candied apple slobber.

There weren’t many sets of twins or trips whose parents had made my mistake(s). Or if there were, they blended in with all the other non-twins. I was asked if my older three were triplets. I was asked if Miss A and P were twins, when G was standing right there next to them. The boys were not obviously twinnish enough, and I felt like I’d short-changed them.

This event highlighted how very lower case I am.

For most of the evening my kids’ social anxiety kept them very calm and well behaved. I received compliments. But as the kids got more comfortable with their surroundings, things escalated until they were having a four-way chasing/wrestling/punching fight that resulted in multiple minor injuries. As the violence progressed, I thought, “If there’s any public place where this probably won’t be unusual, this is it.” Based on conversations with the moms of multiples I know in real life, face-punching is sort of twinspeak shorthand for “hi, how’s it going?” But the whole evening, I only saw one other set of twins punching each other in the face. I have no explanation for this.

So, Twins’ Days made me feel inadequate. It made my daughter feel jealous. But it made my boys feel fantastic. Don’t mock me, but I’ve shed tears over how much they liked being there, and how they clearly identified so closely with all of these other people who sprang to the earth paired with another. It was such a powerful experience that it made me want to convert to TWIN MOM. Whether we subject the whole family to the festival in the future, we’ll definitely take the boys back each year, for as long as they want to go.

My kids, before G shunned his older sister for having failed to split after fertilization.

Aside: I had the pleasure of meeting up with Kim Schmidt, a HDYDI reader and mother to an 8-year-old singleton and 3-year-old twins, all daughters. She’s writing about the Twinsburg festival for American Way magazine, and I hope she’ll let us link it here when the piece is published. She blogged a bit about the festival here.

Next year, HDYDI meet-up in Twinsburg, Ohio!

Jen is a work-from-home mom of 5-year-old twin boys, and two girls ages 3 and 8. She also blogs at Diagnosis: Urine, where she examines the finer points of potty training failure.

All this in the last six weeks!

It’s like all of a sudden we can finally do things we haven’t been able to do and we actually have fun while doing it and we’re not always scared we won’t ever get to sleep ever never again, and we’re actually able to relax (a little bit) while the kids entertain themselves instead of living our public lives in a sweaty, running in opposite direction mess.

And it only took TWENTY SEVEN MONTHS!

Any breakthroughs, milestones, realizations for you this summer? Anything you long for? (I long for a margarita.)

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Rachel’s family is breaking new ground over at Motherhood.Squared .

I recently bought some pop molds that I’ll use to make fresh fruit and yogurt popsicles, we do fruit smoothies year round, and I busted out a batch of homemade oatmeal raisin pecan cookies last week (and the two mom’s in the household are guilty of finishing them off), but the easiest shmeziest snack of all has been a combo of yogurt and fresh berries that I’ve been serving up with homemade granola.

Well, the granola was actually meant to be granola BARS, but I’ve yet to perfect the recipe, and they’re more crumbly than intended. But crumbly delicious works!

Here’s what we use:

MMMMMMM, dee-lish! And just the kind of snack that the parents can enjoy alongside the kiddos, too!

Okay, now your turn to dish on a favorite spring/summer snack!

___________

Rachel is a work-out-of-the-home mom who is most recently managing the uncertainties in her life by taking control in the kitchen. She also writes about her family at Motherhood.Squared