We like to think of ourselves as adventurous parents, having undertaken all sorts of things the more risk adverse would not dare to do in the first year of their children’s lives. So it is not easy for us to admit a growing list of activities, to which we now hesitate to the point of inertia before agreeing, and includes baby swimming, playgroups and meeting friends with other children at play cafes. Sad to say, through a process of trial and error, we have discovered that these said activities leave us feeling all worn out for a very small amount of pleasure in return. Put simply, they are more hassle than they are worth. Our most recent of these experiences – our first family trip to the local swimming pool – perhaps shows why.

An expedition only possible because we had a friend staying for the weekend, we thought, rashly, that the adult to baby ratio (3:2) would be sufficient to make the whole trip a breeze. We had decided to take a taxi. Parking nearby would be too difficult and we did not want to take the pram nor carry the babies a long distance in the cold. A very big taxi: swimming gear for five certainly mounts up. So there we were in our very big taxi with our two babies, two baby car seats, three bags of swimming gear and three adults and now needed to get into the pool. It turns out swimming pool buildings are much warmer than it is outside at the moment. We did not have much fun carting our loot from the taxi into the changing rooms in our winter coats, nor did we have much fun realising we would have to try and store the two baby car seats in the swimming lockers whilst putting the babies somewhere else, they in their winter coats (snowsuits). But at some point we took off our coats and came up with the cunning plan to take the babies in the car seats to the edge of the pool. We also discovered the changing tables round the corner and managed to unpeel rosy cheeked babies down to swimming nappies, carefully pulled on before we set off from home. That was when the adventure blossomed into its brief moment of pleasure. Warm water, bright faces, glittering eyes, big splashes and raucous laughter – everything you expect from a happy first swimming trip. Oh, we did enjoy those full fifteen minutes. Then it was back off to the overheated changing rooms, back to balancing babies precariously on changing tables whilst attempting to get changed ourselves, the nasty surprise that we had got the car seats all wet in the process, carrying everything outside again, and waiting for another very big taxi. You might say, for want of better taste, an interactive map short of a military operation.

We could strive to refine our approach. A few tweaks (such as walking there with the pram, or wearing easier clothes ourselves) and an additional adult and I think we could have the whole affair down to something manageable. Same with playgroups and play cafes. We could, and we would be back in the adventurous parent gang. Call me a spoil sport, but anything that involves removing and pulling back on two snow suits, when it is not in our own home, is just not worth it to me for the next month. Roll on spring, say the babies.

I hear the news on the radio these days with a curious urgency. This is partly because I seldom find time for much else; other than the odd ten minutes browsing online in the evenings, I have not read a newspaper since the day before my babies were born. But if this urgency were only due to scarcity, it would not explain my intense reaction to certain news items. 

Though I have always listened to the news with interest and emotion, now whenever I hear of conflict, natural disaster, human suffering, I am overwhelmed with an empathy for the people involved like never before. And as I listen to the reporter’s words, it is a vision of a specific group of people that floods my mind and then wrenches at my guts – pregnant women, mothers and their young children. I can see women grasping their babies to their chests, reaching children into trucks, fearfully pouring dirty water, and thinking hopelessly ‘what will become of my child?’.

This may well sound sentimental to more measured types, and I know that I cannot speak for other people with or without children of their own, but I believe there is something of a kern of universal motherhood at work in me. The Berlin artist, Kaethe Kollwitz, famous for her sculpture of a grieving mother with her dead soldier son lying across her knee which now stands on the grave of the unknown soldier in Berlin, also made her living with artwork for mother and child health campaign posters. These posters show simple charcoal drawings of skinny children gathering around waiting to be fed, or of mothers, children on their hips, reaching out for bread. Her immense sculpture and the more modest drawings convey the same message of the absolute innocence of children, the hope and expectation that their lives deserve, and of a desperate parental empathetic love. It is as if she is the mother in each of her works, who cannot bear the slightest suffering for her children.

So as I sit having breakfast with my babies each morning, listening to the reports from Libya as I spoon creamy porridge into their birdlike mouths cheeping and gurgling at me for more, I am filled with overwhelming hope for their futures and a terrible sadness for mothers having their children into more troubling times.

“Will holidays ever be relaxing again?”, I thought, mildly perturbed, as I pulled our pram backwards the first morning of our holiday. The pram wheels dragged on the rough gravel of the neighbouring roads, equatorial wind and sun scorching my face, sleeping babies protected. The caravan of luggage we packed, our strenuous five hour flight and the war wounds we bore from wrestling the pram onto the roof rack of the hire car would suggest not, or at least not for the next few years. But then, even the older children scampering around the place we were staying did not appear to allowing their parents the peaceful bliss of intermittent book reading and snoozing in the sun. Oh dear.

A day or so later, and significantly more settled in – I knew now at least a good route with tarmac roads for our morning walk – we sat in a restaurant, both babies perched in high chairs, happily nibbling bits of fish from our plates. They were being much admired, I must self-flatteringly admit, by all the old ladies on the terrace and very sweetly entertained by the cheerful waiters. As the crystal blue waves lapped just below, I wondered if I had been somewhat hasty in my assumption. This was starting to feel like a holiday to me.

Of course, this easy contented time was to last for all of half an hour. No baby likes being in a high chair for that long, and ours soon wanted to be bouncing on our knees. But half and hour is half an hour and certainly long enough to eat one’s lunch. And, though we were to have many such moments as time went on, the truth about holidays and babies is that babies don’t have them. They carry on doing exactly what they need to do wherever they are – sun, sea and sand regardless. There were bound to be nappies to change, food to prepare, and broken nights. Being on holiday for us really only meant for us that we did not quite have the same resources as we have at home to meet our babies requirements. But I complain too much.

On the same trip I found myself sitting beside a young woman in a cafe. Her brow was furrowed as she alternated scrubbing suncream into her arms, staring into her novel and knocking back an early afternoon glass of wine. We fell into conversation. She, too, was a holidaymaker, with only a long weekend to enjoy what the holiday had to offer. Tuesday would see her return to London and a long day in the office. As I watched her trying furiously hard to relax in these four days allotted to same said relaxation, I began to understand what our holidays were to be for the time being.

We are no longer in the position to suspend our real lives for a few days and do nothing but lounge – children, well little babies, are not to be shelved like a job. Our pleasure and relaxation is to be gleaned in a different way, perhaps slower and more subtle, than that of holidays before children. It is in walking up the road and seeing the sea below, however early in the morning it may be. It is in washing up outside in the warm evening air, rather than in our centrally-heated flat. It is in knowing that we can travel for five hours on a plane and the babies will sleep at least for some of the flight, when we thought they might scream throughout. It is in feeding babies little titbits of fresh fish from our plates, whilst waiters charm them with cheeky pinches on their chubby cheeks. And I even managed to read my novel – for a few minutes – but I probably would have managed those few minutes at home too.

Usually a mild mannered type, it interests me to note how irritating I find other people’s comments about my babies. I am not referring to the obligatory: “He is ever so sweet!” or “Oooh, twins, how lovely!” – the other day I even drew back the hood of the pushchair for an old lady trying to peer in at the pelican crossing when she said, “I do love to look in prams but can never see anything.” No, these gentle, non-specifc remarks are not the problem, but rather the direct comments about the babies’ appearance, personality or the way in which I might care for them, which almost always seem misplaced.

At first, I linked my displeasure to anxieties about breastfeeding. Though only a few ounces lighter than your average eight pounder plus, my babies were not especially small at birth; indeed, you could go so far as to describe them as weighty for twins. Despite their relative chunkiness, however, people would often peer into the pram or look at their little pink legs swinging in our slings and say, “They are still so very small and thin; they can’t be more than a week old.” As this happened long into their first two months of life, I would always wince and think it surely must be because they are not getting enough to drink – pass me the milk bottle, quick. Looking back, I realise it had a lot more to do with the fact that (and I have said this in a previous entry) more cautious parents, with twins or not, just do not go out very often with small babies, and also that people so quickly forget how small all new babies are – our point of reference for a ‘baby’ is usually one from TV adverts well into its fourth or fifth month.

But this indignation did not stop when the babies grew sturdier and the nature of the comments changed. Two separate incidents, both at my yoga with baby group, perhaps will illustrate my point. The first example: I unpack one baby and lay her on the floor in front of me. The yoga teacher leans over her and coos, a little too loudly and a little too quickly, so that said baby is shocked and bursts into helpless tears. The yoga teacher steps back and on the basis of this short interaction says to me, “She must be much shyer than her brother.” How does she know, how could she know? It is an entirely arbitrary remark. Babies do this sort of thing all the time. The second: I unpack the other baby on another day and sit him on my knee. The mother beside me, who I happen never to have seen before and who does not know the age of my babies, turns and says, “That one likes to eat too.” I found out later that the group had been talking about the apparent ‘greediness’ of another baby, who appears quite big for his age, but out of context I thought, so what, now he is too healthy looking – a mother can’t win. There is a third incident, outside on the street this time (of plenty more with which I will not bore you). I am walking with a grumpy baby in my arms, the other is being pushed in the pram by a friend. A group of old ladies stop to look, of course, and one takes the opportunity to say to me, “You should not hold her like that whilst walking. It will be bad for her spine.” I, holding my baby in a perfectly normal and safe way, am too astounded to say anything spiky in return, but move along thinking darkly this will provide good fuel for my blog.

I suppose my irritation comes, first, from a sense of ownership. These babies, though both full beings unto themselves, are still so much an extension, physical and emotional, of myself. They are mine and their father’s, and thus ours to comment and speculate on. They are ours to decide how best to care for and love. They are ours to instinctively know better than anyone else what is good for them. There is also the element that no one likes to be told what to do, in any aspect of their lives. But I believe my feeling goes beyond ownership and pure contrariness and comes back to the idea that my babies are so clearly individuals, little people not to be judged or dictated to, particularly not by strangers. Who would dream of saying to an adult, taking off her coat, “You like to eat, don’t you?”. Or, to someone shying once from another person suddenly leaning into his or her face and shouting “boo”, that they must be shy in all areas of life. It would seem so supremely rude, and well, misplaced. Surely, babies deserve the same level of personal respect. 

Oh well, I expect we are also dealing with the novelty twin factor: it seems to me that strangers are more interested in twins than single babies and are always keener to have a good, long peer, in such a way that would be unusual in other circumstances. No matter, breath deeply and grin carefree – always an appropriate response.

I describe a scene from a recent parent and baby group. One mother cast a forlorn look at her baby lying face down on the floor, crying and tiny arms flailing. “But she has to practise,” the mother said, when the lady running the course encouraged her to pick the baby up and comfort her, “That’s what the chiropractor said,” she continued, concern in her eyes whilst she reluctantly pulled the baby onto her lap. We were then told that this very normal looking baby apparently had the serious flaw of pulling her arms behind her when lying on her tummy – a flaw only to be cured by two hour-long sessions of physiotherapy a week, which this baby, understandably, hated. 

Two weeks ago I was feeling distinctly un-Christmassy, so bogged down I was in nappies and trudging through the snow. What a shame, I thought, (I usually love Christmas) not to be revelling in the festive spirit for our babies’ first one.

And why? In pre-baby days, the pretty street lights and wafts of mulled wine promised a last day of work for at least a week, a train journey spent reading a novel, lots of feasting and even more long, lazy mornings in bed. This year Christmas posed no relief. Unlike work, babies don’t break for Christmas. Our planned six hour car journey to grandparents seemed like a marathon we had not trained for and the coming nights in a new environment for the babies were set to be even more restless. There would be feasting without the resting, snatched bites between jiggling an overwhelmed baby up and down. New Year’s Eve and its fireworks – we couldn’t even bear thinking about it.

What pessimism. Christmas transpired to be a wonderful break for us and a lovely chance to have our babies adored by all and sundry. The babies slept and babbled their way through most of our journey. There were no traffic jams on the motorway. And it turns out grandparents are happy to see babies at 7am and entertain them for a couple of hours whilst you slumber on. They are also keen to wash baby bottles and clothes because they want to provide you with relief from your everyday grind. They should perhaps be renamed Santa’s elves.

It just goes to show that life with babies is not quite as inflexible as I thought, stuck in my pre-Christmas rut. What’s more, it does you the world of good to go away somewhere for a while, where other people can cuddle your babies, tell you how gorgeous they are and what shining eyes they had when they first saw the Christmas tree (really an adult invention – babies’ eyes shine at all sorts of pretty things that have nothing to do with Christmas – but never mind). Oh and New Year was fine too.

So in retrospect, all very festive and very special because we could share it with the two little ones.

The question oft posed by childless friends is what is the hardest aspect of early parenting. In response, it is too easy to trip off an expected list of sleepless nights, the early days when you don’t have time to brush your teeth, marching around in the rain with a wailing baby in a pram, seeing poo ooze out of a nappy in the small hours of the morning, etc. But the recurrence of this question started me thinking.

It seems we approach parenthood with a sense of trepidation. This, from people who work long hours in pressurised jobs, often in meetings with important people. You would think they are used to ‘hard’. No, they suspect parenthood to be hard in a different way.

My interest in the question is not to say that I, to date, have found our babies a bed of roses. There have been plenty of times in the last seven months that I have felt so tired I could burst into tears – a point of fatigue I reached only twice before having children, and both times self-induced by staying up all night at a ball. There have also been moments when all I could do was to pass the baby into someone else’s arms, for whatever I was doing did not seem to be working. And, I have even muttered almost angrily under my breath when catching a whiff of something unpleasant through the night air. But these are just physical tests, rather like running a long race, which if you carry on plodding through mostly at a steady pace, you will do alright. These aspects are manageable, however momentarily frustrating.

This, however, is where the race analogy stops, because every other race – career, half-marathon, relationship – you are allowed to quit, and you know it, even if you don’t. Not this one. Once the babies are there, they are yours and yours to manage come what may. Recognising this is incredibly exciting, awe-inspring even, but it can also feel a little overwhelming, or, let’s say, hard.

I also wonder if our generation is making parenting more complicated than it need be. Both men and women work longer hours than ever before. Most of us, at least if we want to get on in our careers, arrange our working lives in such a way that makes a baby completely incompatible or at least very expensive (and stressful) in childcare. We tend not to live in the bosom of our extended families, those lovely (though sometimes oppressive) networks of ready help. The cities which offer us the best salaries offer hand in hand the highest rents, so that our homes are either too cramped with a child or spacious and too far away from easy public transport and our friends to make us happy. (Luckily for me, just before our babies were born we moved to a city where rents are not sky high.)

At the same time, we have huge expectations for our experience of having a family. We want our babies to be born in a certain ambience with the right music on in the background, whilst following a breathing pattern learned in a prenatal yoga class. Once there, the baby must only wear organic cotton, and every tiny chirrup will send us scouring the pages of our multiple baby books. God forbid, the precious child does not roll over before it is six months old because then we have another three appointments a week at a baby physiotherapist, which is hard to fit in around baby massage, sing time and all that book reading. And, we still want to go on exotic holidays of course, but what to do with the baby on the long flight.

I would love to ask my grandmothers (both well-educated women with interesting jobs) whether they thought having small children would be hard. I don’t know what their answers would be, but I am sure they would say that rising to the challenge was one of the very best things they ever did.

“Isn’t it strange that they are so different?” people often say to me of our twins, in response to the way they look, behave with strangers, move, eat, babble or laugh. But I do not find it strange at all. Why should twins be alike? I suppose there are some genetic reasons which we do not yet understand for why identical twins may be more likely to be alike than other siblings, but for non-identical boy and girl (or any non-identical) twins, who genetically are no more alike than siblings, this seems a significant assumption.

It is this assumption and its possible consequences I find interesting. One explanation is that when you mention twins most people think of the identical type, not remembering that this cannot be possible with a boy and a girl – an unpractised mental leap. That aside, our experience tells that most people expect any twins to be alike and, what is more, are surprised when they are not.

Do we expect siblings to be alike? When they are older perhaps and have the grooming of shared experience, but even then we do not go out of our way to express incredulity when they are not. So why then twins, and particularly as babies?

I wonder whether this will continue throughout their childhoods and what impact this may have. The natural rebel would suggest that you are tempted to try much harder to be different when everyone thinks you should be alike. So, I suppose the least I can do is never assume that they will be similar in anything, and always offer to make two birthday cakes each year, whatever their favourite may be. 

We had another set of visitors from London this weekend – a young couple, smart, professionally ambitious; he a direct contemporary of mine from university. They came filled with their stories of life before babies, of work frustrations and future ambitions, of extravagant dinner parties and weddings at which they stayed out all night. This lifestyle is less that a year ago for us, aspects of it will be ours again all too soon. But right now, it all feels far away and I cannot help but hear these stories with some envy, however much I love our babies.

This envy is linked, I think, to the sense of apprehension I had when, last year, I started telling friends I was expecting twins. My apprehension was not about the pregnancy itself, rather, curious as this may sound, that I wondered how the news would be received. As a well-educated, professionally ambitious woman under thirty, I was doing things in a slightly different order to my contemporaries and, truth be told, I was worried they would think I was about to let my career dreams shipwreck on the rocks of motherhood.

How strange, when I was pretty certain that having children would do nothing to change my desire for something interesting beyond motherhood. How strange indeed, this worry, in these are modern times when we are so desperately keen for women to feel confident that careers and children are compatible. But women having children older and older leaves you wondering whether we feel that we must achieve our professional greatness before the babies arrive, rather than with them in tow. At the root of my apprehension, and now envy, was a niggling fear that this compatability was not to be as easy as I hoped.

One option to reassure my friends (and myself perhaps) would be to leap for the first fifty hour a week job that came my way and leave my six month old babies in somebody else’s care. I meet other mothers itching to get back to their Monday morning meetings and Friday deadlines. Fair enough, if this is how they see their lives working best. To me, this would feel like a distressing limitation on my experience of early motherhood – stressful, tiring and emotionally difficult for all of us. I enjoy being with my babies, and flatter myself to think that they rather enjoy being with me.

Another would be to work part time. Having been inclined to leave a full time job long past my contractual hours each day, this would likely be as much as a hardship but not as well paid. Then there are those work places with nurseries on site – perhaps I could find a job at one of those. Would that really make things any easier? My babies out all day in a place that is not their home, oh, but in the same building as me, though I am working too hard to go and see them.

There must be a better solution which does not involve this absolute distinction between life at home with children and a stimulating career. My day-to-day may have changed dramatically over the last year, but my hopes and dreams, professional and familial, have not. And why should they? I will have to be more imaginative to avoid falling for the first big compromise that pays me well.

So I shall use the time when my babies are sleeping or whilst I march round the park for the third time that day to think of an ingenious business idea that uses my mind and allows me to be at home for at least half of the day. And when I come up with it I shall tell all my friends so that they need not fear having babies before they have that all important job title at the end of their email sign off, or before they too are granted a spot in the company car park. I may also whisper that retirement is many years away but babies truly enjoying time at a nursery school is not.

With this in mind, I realised that my most recent envy was less rooted in the desire for a standard working day, but instead sartorial, for the pretty new coat our visitor was wearing. It gleamed of young professional about town and I would love to have it, if only it were not about to be ruined with baby sick. I shall buy it next year instead.

We met a fellow twin father with his babies when taking our afternoon stroll today. This was not our usual stroll, however, as we had just changed the pram into a pushchair and our babies sat peering out at the dark, dank autumn air. A special occasion.

So, wet leaves dragging at the wheels of our respective prams, we stopped – as we do these days – to admire the new pushchair arrangements, for they too had changed theirs a few days earlier.

The two fathers stooped over the other’s vehicle, pulling metal bars and frowning at extraneous velcro straps. “What did you do with this bit?” “And how are you folding yours up?”, the questions flew back and forth. It was an engrossing conversation lasting more than ten minutes, only concluded by at least one frantic baby bored of the windswept pavement.

There would have been days when these two men shared secrets about the fine-tuning of Vespar engines. How times change. What next? How to install a high chair …