Happy 1st birthday, Ziv and Lev

October 14, 2009 - 9:57 PM by Jessica · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life 

Lev, Ziv and the rest of us

Lev, Ziv and the rest of us

Hard to believe, but yesterday was my twin sons’ first birthday. I’m realizing that I probably didn’t write this yesterday because I was, in a sense, too overwhelmed to even think about contemplating the passage of this year. But now that they’re one year and one day, I can get sentimental. So, here goes:

Ziv and Lev are a year old, and 365 days have passed since they were born, at 2 and 1.2 kilos each, respectively. We’ve gone through learning about the Hadassah NICU, how to nurse (me and them), bath and feed. We’ve figured out the tag-teaming that is twin-care, from lifting two at at time and feeding with one spoon (it’s a lot simpler) to figuring out who really needs you when both are crying and not worrying so much about favoritism issues.

We’ve become friends with our Tipat Chalav nurse, Nira; have become accustomed to the grins, smiles, stares and well-meaning strangers who constantly stop to ask if the two similar-looking boys sitting side by side in the stroller are twins; and now know that in Israel, red is considered a color for baby girls, not boys. We’re into the park and playground circuit, and despite our ‘advanced’ age as parents (and grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins), it’s kinda fun to hang out with all sorts of people at the playground. Turns out that when you have kids, you have a lot in common with anyone else who is or has ever been a parent.

Which means that if you can hack it, there’s a lot of good advice out there, which I’ve been wise enough about taking so far, and hopefully will continue to do so. If it wasn’t for my sisters and a good friend, I never would have sleep trained my boys, and consequently, wouldn’t be getting good nights of sleep for the last four months. And almost everyone, when you’re the parent of twins, has something to tell you. It can be the guy at Aroma the other day, who showed me the video on his cellphone of his 15-month-old twin girls, and he also has an older daughter, similar to our blended family situation. Or the friend who’s also a mother of 19-year-old triplets, who gave us a photo album for each boy, with a designated page for each month of their first year. Better get working on that. (Thank god for Mac and iPhoto, which separates your pics into months.) Or the neighbor who has six-year-old twins and told me — when I’d had a particularly harrowing day around five months — that things get much easier after they’re six months old. She was right.

But all in all, it’s been a fantastic year. And we’re looking forward to many, many more. Happy birthday, Ziv and Lev.

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Twins at Tipat Chalav

December 19, 2008 - 9:47 AM by Jessica · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness 

Laura and Aliza at Tipat Chalav

Laura and Aliza at Tipat Chalav


Well, we’re nine weeks and counting on this new life as a mother of twins, and I’m sure that as many of you could have told me, it’s a very different reality. They should be using sleep deprivation as a torture device on ‘24′, and then maybe I would have had an inkling as to what it’s like to live without sleep.

But this is a blog about the reality of life in Israel, and I’ll stick to the subject. There are many stories to tell when you’re a new parent in Israel, and even though I’ve been here 14 years, this latest turn of events has turned me onto a whole new slice of Israeli society.

Because our twin boys did not both come home at the same day — Ziv came home at 10 days, Lev more than five weeks later — we were more than a bit frazzled. We were told by the good people at the Hadassah Ein Kerem NICU to bring Ziv to our local Tipat Chalav, translated literally as a drop of milk, one of the national chain of Well Baby clinics, a few days after we brought him home. The clinics are well-known; everyone has to bring their babies, particularly for innoculations. And the nurses are always slightly curmudgeonly and old fashioned, badgering nervous new mothers about their baby’s weights. This was true 20 years ago, and it’s still true today.

We got there at our allotted time, little boy in tow. I was post-partum and nervous, he proceeded to poop upon arrival. Whereupon we realized that we had no diaper bag of any kind; forget diaper bag, we didn’t even have a diaper or a wipe with us. Not a great way to impress Nira, our assigned Tipat Chalav nurse. She borrowed a diaper for us, and I felt she threw a look of disapproval at us for being so unprepared.

We sat in her office, while she poked and prodded at her computer, letting us know that the ‘machashev‘ (a sort of old-fashioned way of referring to a machshev, the word for computer), was on the blink, as usual. While we waited patiently, worrying that Ziv had lost weight since coming home, Daniel jiggled Ziv on his arm. He was trying to calm me down, and told me that she was probably going to tell him to stop jiggling the baby. Sure enough, she looked at him sternly and said, “You know, it’s really not a good idea to jiggle a baby; they’ll expect to be jiggled all the time.” Daniel looked back at her, and said, with a smile, “Well, I have two other daughters who are 17 and 11, and I still have to jiggle them.” She looked at him quizzically, didn’t laugh in response, and went on with the checkup.

Luckily, Ziv hadn’t lost weight — although Nira said her scale was always a little off — his color was good, and she was impressed that I was nursing a preemie. (I had had suspicions that she would press me on feeding the boys formula, another Tipat Chalav tradition.) She gave us at least a dozen pamphlets on baby health, told us to pay our Tipat Chalav fee before the next visit, and made us promise to bring him back five days later to be weighed.

We went out and rented a scale instead, but I won’t be able to avoid these Tipat Chalav visits forever. After all, they’re a rite of Israeli parenting, and hey, why would I want to avoid any part of that?

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