People never cease to be amazed, or at least interested, in my children’s back-to-back birthdays. I think it’s cool, too–except, most years, the week when it’s actually happening. Then, it’s too much at one time (especially the year we had one birthday party on Saturday and one on Sunday). The to-do list grows and grows, and I worry that neither birthday gets the attention it deserves.

Then again, these two have never really known different. I think they enjoy those “oh wow!” responses too. They, knock wood, are pretty good at sharing, and that goes for special days too.

(And here’s one showing how it all began.)

(Look at that! His hair hasn’t changed in six years.)

And for those who have been anxiously awaiting the answer, the animal is a cheetah. If you voted for that, or wanted to but were confused by my intro, you win. You also win if you picked leopard, because I concede that those two can look quite similar. The overwhelming answer we get out in the world is … tiger. Stripes, spots, what’s the diff?

J (indignantly): I kissed him and then he wiped off his face! Watch!

She kisses him on the forehead, he dramatically applies his sleeve to the area.

O (oh so smooove): I’m just making room for more!

I love this picture for many reasons (hello, knee socks!) but the dog has to be the best part.

Twelve hours before we were due to leave for my sister’s wedding, as I was packing like a crazy person, Opie desperately needed to put on his ninja Halloween costume (foreshadowing of things to come at the rehearsal dinner, apparently; see left), which was somewhere in the depths of the dress-up box in the basement playroom, where he refuses to go unaccompanied. So I grudgingly took him down there, and soon realized that something was amiss. Something was, in fact, really smelly. Opie confessed to having spilled something or other on the area rug recently, but I soon realized the entire 5′x7′ rug was soaking wet. As were the two beanbag chairs sitting on it, and the fabric-covered storage bin nearby. Oh, and look, way over here! A giant puddle on the linoleum! I started mopping, and sopping water up with towels, and cranking up the dehumidifier, and actually, I was pretty glad about the ninja costume because at least we found the leak before we left town for eight days, and not after.

The next morning, we got up before 5 a.m. to go to the airport, where we then sat until after the far more civilized hour of 9 a.m. In the end, after lengthy sojourns in both Minneapolis and Salt Lake City, we arrived in California more than 12 hours late after 22 hours of travel (and only one tantrum, in the hotel room at 2 a.m. when Opie felt completely persecuted by our refusal to let him watch a little TV before bed. “Just one show!” he wailed).

But the wedding–the whole vacation, really–was totally worth it. My sister lives in Pennsylvania but spent most of high school and college  in northern California, so she wanted to be married there. The ceremony was held on the side of a mountain in California, with pine trees and a stone patio and an incredible view.

The view

We stayed in a small inn nearby, where we–the wedding party, family, and other attendees–were the only guests. I loved being able to spend a few days with normally far-flung family members (my own, and my sister’s new in-laws too. Jo was completely taken with the groom’s 11-year-niece–I mean, how cool is an 11-year-old when you are 8!). The inn had a lounge/game room on the ground floor, with a huge Rock Band/kararoke set-up, another Wii, pool, ping-pong, air hockey, and a poker table. So fun!

Jo and I spent most of the day of the wedding getting purty, while Opie entertained the groomsmen with his best joke: What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup? Anyone can roast beef, but no one can pee soup (thanks iCarly!). Here we are all dolled up.

With bonus EAR

Doesn’t she look amazing?!

Minutes after these pictures were taken, at the inn, we went to the ceremony site. There Opie proceeded, accidentally, to FLING the wedding rings right off his little ringbearer’s pillow–at the exact moment that my sister’s car pulled up. So basically I greeted her at her own wedding with the words “WE LOST THE RINGS!!” Thankfully, we were inside a small tent when this happened, so at least the rings did not go flying off the side of a cliff or out into the wilderness. My cooler-headed brother recovered them quickly from the corner of the tent.

After that, the hitching proceeded without a hitch and so did the party. Jo and I danced until the DJ packed up at midnight. “Party in the USA,” indeed! Congratulations Susan and Andrew. Happy almost 1-month anniversary!

I don’t think too many (white, Midwestern) 8-year-old girls sit down to a homecooked Indian meal on their birthday and eat it with gusto.

I don’t think too many eight-year-old girls accidentally open their younger brother’s birthday present and really wish they could have those boys’ size 5 plaid Bermuda shorts for their own.

I don’t think too many eight-year-old girls give away 99% of their Easter candy, cheerfully, because they can’t eat it thanks to their recently installed orthodontic devices.

I don’t think too many eight-year-old girls want to spend part of their birthday building a Lego spaceship with their uncle.

Then again, I don’t think too many eight-year-old girls are as great as you are.

I came back from visiting my sister with a new pair of jeans. And she also picked herself up a wedding dress. That right there is some successful shopping, wouldn’t you agree? If only one of us had bought a bathing suit: trifecta!

I spent the whole day on Saturday with my sister, my mom, and my sister’s future mother- and sister-in-law, looking for my sister’s wedding gown. My sister surprised us all by rejecting many dresses for insufficient bling. This is a woman who wears steel-toed boots to work every day and who, even when she’s not working, is extremely practical and down-to-earth (ha! because she’s a gardener! I kill me). She is most certainly not without style, but she’s never been one for frippery and bows. Plus, she’s getting married outdoors, on the side of a mountain, in August. That didn’t scream “20-foot train” or “lace, crystals, and lacy crystals” to me.

So she kept trying on ruffly, lacy, bedazzled dresses. They were all beautiful and she looked beautiful in them. But she didn’t start crying until she put on a simple dress that made up for its lack of sparkle with its understated elegance and delicate details. The. One!

Given the nature of our errand, we five spent the whole day talking about weddings. My mom recalled the time she had to wear a super-fitted silk sheath for a bridesmaid’s dress … days after getting a thigh-high cast off her leg. I remembered having a velvet bridesmaid’s dress that I couldn’t sit down in all day before the ceremony, because otherwise I’d get a crushed velvet butt-print on my back side. My sister’s future sister-in-law and her then-fiance reworked her grandmother’s wedding dress together, including hand-sewing beads and lace on the hem. How cute is that?

What’s the story you end up telling and retelling about your wedding, or one you attended? (The other one I trot out often is The Time the Caterer Ran Out of Food–and then accused the guests, of which I was one hungry one, of eating too much.)

(You can read about me geeking out over my smartphone during the trip over here, if you like.)

Edited to add: Magpie Musing and Painted Maypole played along at their blogs … don’t miss their tales of Weddings Gone Wrong.

(That’s not a reference to a certain Disneyfied pop star, BTW.)

One of the quirks of our old house is the second-floor layout. At the top of the stairs, there is a wide hallway with five doors visible: two on the left, two on the right, one straight ahead. On the left is the bathroom and one bedroom. On the right is a little storage room (we have no attic) and another bedroom. If you open the straight-ahead door, you enter an odd little anteroom where you’ll find another three doors. To the left, there is a small bedroom/office. Forward is another odd-shaped closet, and on the right is another bedroom which adjoins, via a connecting door, to the adjacent bedroom (the one on the right from before, you follow?).

When we first moved in, Jo was just turning two and of course Opie wasn’t born yet, although we hoped we’d have another child in the next few years. We were a little stumped, at first, about how to allocate the bedrooms. Except for the office, they are all about the same size. The stand-alone one was already painted an incredibly girlie shade of pink. Of the adjoined rooms, one is a bit brighter (it has two exposures) but its closet is outside the room and doesn’t have much hanging space. Also (see below) it had this crazy coral-with-white-stencils thing going on which mayyyyybe could have worked for an adult room but not a kid’s. The neighboring room–it was yellow then–has some nice built-ins and a good closet. We thought about making it the master and giving Jo the pink room, and turning the tangerine!! room into some kind of den or sitting room. But then what would happen if/when we had another kid? Or we could give Jo the sunny room (who cares if a two-year-old has a closet) and keep the yellow one for ourselves. We’d be right next to each other, but could still close the adjoining doors, and we’d save the pink room for another child.

In the end, we took the pink room for ourselves (but painted it pronto) and for a year, Jo had herself a two-room suite. The yellow room, equipped with closet, became her bedroom, and the sunny room became a playroom.

I told you the paint job was wacky.

These days, that yellow room is–surprise!–pink. Opie has the adjoining, once-coral playroom (and no place to hang his clothes, but that’s yet to become an issue). You can see part of the set of connecting doors at that pink link. The kids get to be very close,  but still have their own separate spaces. Tonight, we’ve dragged one of the mattresses from his trundle bed onto the floor of her room, and he’s sleeping in there. When we first put up that trundle bed, Jo slept in it for months, alongside her little brother. Lately, they’ve designated the spot behind the big armchair in his room their “office”; they sit back there and read books together and eat contraband candy. They haven’t yet learned to hide the wrappers.

I don’t know what we’ve done, if anything, to foster their closeness. Maybe they’re just different enough not to grate on each other too much: one boy, one girl, three years apart in age. Maybe we said some magic words once upon a time that have kept rivalry largely at bay, thus far (universe, please notice my caveats). Maybe they were just born with compatible temperaments. Maybe we’re just lucky.

Or maybe it’s that double door, the one that lets them have their own special relationship, different from any other they have with parents or teachers or friends or other relatives. They’re a team within a team, and they have the clubhouse to prove it.

My brother and his wife love to hike and bike and do crazily outdoorsy things like sleep in tents and wash their feet in icy mountain streams. They also like to take pictures of each other posing atop terrifyingly high rocky ledges and outcrops. Once they realized how much this raises my mother’s blood pressure, they of course began making an extra effort to record all of their death-defying stunts on film.

So when I showed my kids their last batch of pictures, I mentioned (like a fool) how Uncle Steve and Aunt Amy like to take pictures just to freak Grandma out.

Guess who took that ball and ran with it? (Can you find her in this picture?)

On an entirely different note … I’m giving away a copy of EA Sports Active for Wii at The Full Mommy. Today’s the last day to enter.

The other day I landed (as you do) on an article from some newspaper about a family with seven children who had just adopted three more. The three new additions, plus one of the original seven, had Down syndrome. Okay, so that caught my eye but if that’s what they want for their family, more power to ‘em. But there was an offhand comment in the story that stopped me for a minute. Something about how one of the newly arrived children had developed a strong attachment to an older sister, to the point where the older child sometimes had to hide or switch places with her twin in order to get a break from the clingy toddler. My train of thought chugged along the track something like this:

ME: Well, that seems excessive. Should that really be the older kid’s responsibility?

MYSELF: That’s how the Duggars do it. All the older ones take care of the younger ones while the parents, like, blow-dry their hair or or something.

I: That’s also the way it’s been since time immemorial. Siblings did the child care while parents hunted/gathered/farmed/riveted.

ME: Yeah, but this is now. Aren’t the parents right there? I can see a child being required to help, but how much is enough?

MYSELF: How is it different from having to mow the lawn or scrub the kitchen floor?

I: Dude, that’s a totally different kind of outsourcing.

ME: Let’s ask the internet.