Rabbit Holes, Hurricanes and Baby Jesus - Update #26

Three completely unrelated things, that until a month ago had no relation to each other, other than they were words in the English language. December 10 the perfect storm started brewing. Now you may think ‘perfect storm’ that sounds negative… well in our case it was completely the opposite. Perfect because after long wait my girls were home and ‘storm’ because that is the adjective to describe the craziness that ensued. All of which was fantastic. Ill get back to the unrelated items as we go.

Joanna and I survived the first number of weeks and Christmas was approaching quickly. We ventured out to North Vancouver to be with my mom and had a wonderful day celebrating the birth of baby Jesus. The girls behaved and didn’t embarrass me… j/k, the only small blip was the car ride home at which time Marika expressed her displeasure about being strapped into a car seat. Joanna’s parents made the trek up from Seattle and we had another fantastic day with them on Boxing Day, our family being all in one place has been a special treasure that we will not soon forget. The girls continue to surprise, our cautiousness with how we expose them has paid off in spades as the girls now seemingly sleep well after visiting family and friends. We haven’t travelled a whole lot as it would be nice for the girls to have spent more time at home than they have elsewhere, which isn’t the case yet. It will be very exciting for us to over the course of the next couple of months for the rest of our family and close friends to be able to meet these gifts.

I am not much for sayings but this is one of my favourites that has become apparent both in my work and parenting life; ‘don’t chase more than one rabbit.’ What I mean by this is find something you want to achieve and go after it until you’ve grabbed it. For us it has been easy to see one thing with the girls and then another and then another, in the New Year we have become much more diligent with our habits, this way once we get them used to something we can move on and master something else. Work; well that’s been another story. I feel like I am staring at a field of rabbit holes and I have no idea which one to go down. It feels slightly odd that I am more confident with having twins at home than I am in expanding my company. Right now the formula is simple for the girls, feed, clean their diapers, keep them healthy, spend as much time with them as possible and repeat. Work, well the formula is not so clear. I am super excited to have brought on team members to work for Coastal Fitness, thus allowing my company to be in two places at once. I love working in teams maybe that is why being a Dad with Joanna as my teammate has gone so well. I can only hope that I can foster that same environment within my business.

Here’s one for yah, ever tried to be productive in a hurricane? Stupid question I know, my point is why do we ask the most of ourselves in times when we realistically only have about 25% to give to the situation. Settling in with twin girls you think would be a good time to take a step back and soak it all in. Nope not me, New Years, new clients. Three significant business projects all requiring my undivided and a dog with a patient spirit the size of Texas, but even he needs to get out to the park. So how to progress? No, correction, how to hold batten down the hatches? How to enjoy the girls, keep clients happy and stay married? Here have been a few of my effective coping strategies:

Coffee
Less frequent but better quality napping.
Stay up later
Delegate
Ignore personal hygiene, just kidding; seeing if you read this far and didn’t just skip to the pictures
More coffee
Pray
Watch less sports, (Oilers are having a terrible year anyways)
And finally be super duper grateful for the people that have been lending us a hand during our time in the hurricane.

Watching the girls get bigger and doing new things is something that I will never take for granted. As silly as it sounds often when they are crying we are laughing because, well A: they are so darn cute even when they are howlin and B: you don’t name your kids ‘Wished for, Wanted one; and Beloved’ if they weren’t truly just that. The girls are rolling over now, Marika looks as if she is ready to crawl out of the room. She and her cousin are going to be quite the active pair. Kyra is the analyzer and content one, unless of course she’s workin on a big one. The smiles that they are now able give when we tickle them has quickly faded the memory of tubes and incubators. I don’t think it is too bold of a statement to say we are living with miracles. I like that, ‘living with miracles’, a good little reminder for us all to appreciate the blessings in our lives.

We have started to be able to have people over to help with things around the house as well as meet the girls of course. This has been super helpful as I found out when mom went out for 3 hours and I thought I was being productive by kicking some laundry closer to the back door on its way to the machine….. The meals have been a life saver, not to mention tasty, some really good soups have been consumed in the last number of weeks. We have been very thankful that the girls for the most part sleep during the night. It is not unusual for us now to only get up once between 11 and 6-7 am. If these girls were less cooperative this update may well have been pushed to Easter. My apologies that things haven’t been updated sooner, I know many of you have invested in our lives and I do appreciate that, its just 2:34am blog updates tend not to get proofread and quite frankly get downright incoherent. Thanks for the prayers, enjoy the pictures.

Ryan

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