The Wargo Blog

I’ve always had pet names for the twins. We started out calling them by their given names although we struggled for the first couple of weeks saying ‘August.’ Over time I started mixing in different names for them, to the point where the kids really aren’t sure what we’re going to call them.

In general, I started calling August G-Man – in an effort to educate him that some people will ultimately call him Gus (although we don’t, my brother does).  I call him Dude a lot too.

Because of the whole g-man thing, I started calling Elizabeth E-girl. It seemed to make sense. Over time we have called her a bunch of other things: doodle bug, bug, punkin’ and more.  My brother? He calls her Spike – I’m not quite sure why (nor am I sure that he knows why).

Anyway, the other morning I was having some trouble getting out of bed. I was just lazing around trying to find a reason to not get out of bed. Elizabeth came up and we spent some time talking. August came up later and for some reason I called him punkin.’ He immediately reminded me that punkin’ was Elizabeth and he was g-man. He immediately Tooted (what Anna calls farting) so I decided that for that day, his name was going to be g-stink instead of g-man. August thought that was mightily funny and it became part of our banter for the remainder of the week.

Don’t let the g-stink get ya!

I’ve been pretty sick for the last couple of weeks – I’m not going to go into what’s wrong with me, but I have been pretty miserable. I’ve been sleeping a lot and when this all first started, August and Elizabeth were really cute in the way they tried to help take care of me (August especially). As I lay in bed, trying to recover I heard something happening at the bedroom door – it sounded like something trying to make its way underneath the closed door.

When I finally got out of bed, there was a wrapped package from August (he’d wrapped it weeks ago and put it under the Christmas tree). When I opened it, I found two paper plates August had decorated – here’s pictures of the plates:

I’m pretty sure the first one is of me and August together.

Very cool – made me all misty!

So, I’ve had to wear reading glasses for the last couple of years. As I’ve gotten older, they’ve just not been working very well for me lately. At the same time, August has been bugging me over and over and over again about wanting his own pair of glasses. I told him that once I got new reading glasses, that I’d give him my old ones. Well, because of the nature of AT&T’s benefits, I’m going to have to wait until next year to get in to see my eye doctor, so he was having to wait a long time. I finally decided yesterday that I just couldn’t wait anymore – so we all headed over to Sam’s Club to pick up a 4 pack of stronger reading glasses (I need 4 pair – one for the master bathroom (reading room), my travel bag, my workshop and my office).

Well, the kids couldn’t wait for me to open them and I quickly opened the package (very hard to do without breaking the glasses inside) and distributed the new ones to their hiding places. I pushed out the lenses on two old pair and gave them to the kids to wear. I think August has been wearing these lenseless glasses for a full 24 hours, Elizabeth not as much. Here is a picture of August wearing his:

August in Empty Reading Glasses

And here are some blurry ones of both of them (they just wouldn’t sit still for the photo).

The Twins in Empty Reading Classes #1

The Twins in Empty Reading Classes #2

Oh what fun it is to be a parent of twins!

Anna and I just played a game of Trouble with the twins. It was a lot of fun and interesting as the tables turned on each of us as we played. For a while, August was the clear leader but in a few quick rolls, he was effectively out of the game. Anna’s relentless when it comes to sending people back home and Elizabeth amazed me with her calm demeanor as she got stuck home with all of her pieces for most of the game – she never gave up and didn’t get frustrated at all.  August finally got tired and started acting ugly and what was a fun evening ended up being kinda a pain.  Oh well, they’re 6.

Whenever I’m home alone with the kids on a Saturday (Anna’s out of town this weekend) I always make sure I get caught up on the laundry. As soon as the kids see the water in the tub, they start their regular water play. First they dig out this ‘thing’ we have that’s supposed to get cobwebs out of stuff – the poke around the ceiling and get it all cleaned up. Once that’s done, they get mops, squeegees and other implements of cleaning and start dumping water from the tub and cleaning the laundry room floor. It’s so funny to watch and they love doing it – just mopping the floor like they have no cares.

Pretty soon the clothes start to come off (theirs, not mine) and they start slipping and sliding across the wet, concrete floor. Today, they got buckets of water out and dumped copious quantities on the floor then took running starts and slid all the way across the floor on their bellies (half naked of course). They’ll do that for hours if I let them, it’s way too funny – I’ll try to film it next time they do it.

Things sure are different here now that the kids are in school. Let’s go through some of the changes:

• The kids are going to bed at about the same time they went to bed a year ago – any creeping of bed time was erased when we realized they had to be at school by 8:15 AM.
• The house is empty the majority of the day – really weird.
• Anna’s actually able to get things done around the house and quite a few responsibilities have been removed from my shoulders

Now that Anna has some free time

• I no longer have primary responsibility for doing the laundry.
• I no longer have to take my clothes to the dry cleaner’s – she has agreed to take care of that again.
• She’s even doing the ironing – something neither of us have had the time to do since the twins were born.

It’s really so cool – the kids all of a sudden seem…older. I dropped them off at school this morning and it was so weird to pull up, open the door and say ‘see ya later’ without any worry. I really like this.

I went camping a few weeks ago with a couple of buddies and we had some beer left over (actually pretty hard to imagine if you think about it). Rather than bring a bunch of beer home (I really don’t drink Beer at home – allergic to it) I suggested I leave the cooler for the next batch of campers to drink.

Well, I got the cooler back this weekend and it had a few beers I liked in it still plus a few I would never drink. I asked August to put the ones I liked into the basement fridge and cautioned him to be careful – that if he dropped one, it would explode. His immediate response was ‘can we explode some?’  I said sure, as soon as you put those in the fridge.

So, with 5 Coors Light (yuck) in hand we headed outside. I showed the kids how to shake up the beer and throw it way up in the sky to crash on the driveway. Big exploding beer cans – too much fun.  So, the kids each took two and threw them as high as they could and watched the beer mayhem that followed.

Of course, we had to hose off the driveway to clean up the stanky beer – and that caused another kind of mayhem. I was quickly soaked and about 20 minutes of water play followed. In all, a good time was had by all.

We took the kids to their new school yesterday for open house. When we got home, Anna told me an interesting story I thought I’d share.

The school offers free lunch for the students. We looked at the menu and saw that while they had some healthy food, most of the stuff was fried or very fatty (chicken nuggets, peperoni pizza and so on). Anna’s probably going to pack a lunch for the twins and one of the things we learned last night was that if you eat the free lunch the school provides, Milk is included. If you pack your own lunch, you have to pay for the Milk. It’s all or nothing – how rediculous is that?

The twins are starting Kindergarten in a few weeks, so Anna and I have been trying to shift their bed time to accommodate. August is a late sleeper, and we’ve rarely woken him up. Now, with early morning school – he’s going to have to start getting up at a regular time. It’s not going very well – Elizabeth is doing OK, she’s been an early riser all along, but August is trying to be a trooper in the morning, but fades at the end of the day and ends up being pretty fragile by bed time. Hopefully he will be all recovered by the time school starts.

The kids are crazy about Duct Tape – they’re constantly asking to get the roll out of my workshop to use for something. August is so proud of the fact that he knows how to say it right – It’s not Duck Tape, it’s Duct Tape, used to seal Ductwork in your house. I’m probably going to buy each of them they’re own roll – separate colors with specific instructions about what and what cannot be duct taped.