All grown up... & then some.

Dino & Theo, 1995

Tomorrow, just after 3 pm, the boys turn 21. Where have all those years gone?

Some things are printed indelibly in the psyche: my normal weight is around 7 stone; I reached 13 1/2 stone with the twins. Dearest joked I needed a wheelbarrow for my tummy. By 8 months it wasn't funny. Getting up a flight of stairs required more breath than I had to spare. And sick! I was so, so sick. My poor mother went frantic trying to get food in me & keep it there. I was past caring. Everything tasted horribly metalic! I ended up in hospital, as so many mothers of twins do, on bed rest to try & keep them from arrivaing far too soon. That was so not a good idea. I had far too much time to worry about what was going on inside me & all the terrible things that could happen to identical twins sharing a food source.

Imagine a galleon in full sail with a following breeze. That was me.

By the time I was due there was a small tear in the placenta ~ no, not fun ~ & my contractions were ambling along pleasantly. Everyone from Dearest to the Doctor was worried about my condition. I began to bake a chocolate cake. I was going nowhere until that cake was out of the oven! I'm like that. I never did like hospitals & labour wards are the pitts. Besides Jossie had already lost me for several weeks once already with this pregnancy & was unsettled. At not quite 4 he was a big boy yet, although trying hard. Besides I fully expected, since I didn't feel labour was well under way, to arrive at the hospital & be sent home again. Only Dearest's insistence made me even pack my bag. What I hadn't counted on was hospital hystronics. Once there no~one was letting me come home again.

They took just two hours to arrive & looked like skinned rabbits. They grew into gorgeous babies with big blue eyes & blonde curls. At 13 they were *chick magnets*. Where do they pick up such language? They were fishermen, long distance runners, soccer fiends & they have grown into lovely young men but I do not know how the hours & the days, became the weeks & months of the years it took to raise them. I embarrass them but they can never grow so big that they stop being my babies.