I squat near the bottom of the slide, camera at the ready, grinning up at my wife and twins.
"Ready?" Monica calls, her smile nearly splitting her face in two, and I just nod, putting my finger on the shutter, holding William against my hip with the other. He bounces up and down with joy, laughing happily every time someone comes flying down the slide at us. Monica rocks back and forth gently, readjusting her grip on the twins. "One…two…three!"
Jack and Erica yelp with glee as the three of them slide down to us and I try to snap pictures around my own laughter. The slide isn't very big—the top of the handles almost come up to Monica's eyebrows, but as far as the kids are concerned, it's the greatest thrill ride to exist.
As soon as they hit the ground, the twins come barreling at me, arms out, both yelling, "Daddy!" I hold out my free arm, wrapping it around them as best I can, kissing their heads before they scramble away from me, running back to the stairs for another turn.
For whatever reason, every time they land, they want a hug. I think they just need to share their excitement with someone. Whatever the reason, I won't say no to it.
Monica grins at me as she runs to climb back up with the twins, and I swear she's having a better time than they are. She laughs just as hard as they do every time they slide down, racing them to the ladder, tickling them to get them to squeal, and I can't help but take a moment to be overwhelmed at how perfect my life is right now. We're not doing anything monumental; we're just at a local park playing with our kids, pushing them on the swings, helping them on the monkey bars, and it's better than anything that used to qualify as a "good time" back when I was single.
A moment later, they come flying at us again, the twins squealing as they run at me, but this time Monica catches them before they bolt again. She smoothes down their hair as she pants, both of them grinning up at her as they wait for the go ahead. The twins had their first haircuts just a couple of weeks ago, which wound up being not nearly as traumatic for the two of us as we thought it would be. Practically overnight, they each had a wild, unruly mane, and neither of were sorry to see it tamed. For now, Jack's hair is still long-ish, with bangs sort of sweeping over his eyes, and he looks a lot cooler than I did at that age, and probably cooler than I ever have since then. Erica's hair is just a little longer, and Monica managed to finagle it into two, teeny-tiny braids. I'm always marveling at it, but they look so much like people instead of babies now, it's almost sad.
But they are really damn cute little people.
With the way William's going, though, it'll probably be a long time before we have to worry about his hair—he's still mostly bald with only a fine layer of light brown hair coating his head. Sometimes I put him in my glasses and Monica calls him the professor. It's a fairly apt description.
Monica squats down with rest of us, putting her arms around the twins' shoulders, pulling them in like she's telling them a secret. "What do you think, guys? You think William wants to slide?"
This is just one of the many things that make her a great mom; she knows that if she tells Jack and Erica that it's their brother's turn to get a ride on Mommy's lap, they'll probably, at the very least, pout and stomp. But, if she makes it sound like fun and their idea, they'll watch William with the same unbridled joy he has while watching them.
"Yeah!" Erica exclaims, her smile growing wider across her chubby little cheeks.
"'Lide, Liam," Jack adds, hopping up and down a little.
Monica leans over their heads, giving me a quick peck as she grabs William and goes back to the slide, carefully climbing the stairs with him. The twins watch happily, their joy coming off them in waves. When Monica gets to the top and situates the baby on her lap, she grabs his tiny hand and waves it at us, making the other two call out, "Hi, Liam!"
I see Monica whisper in William's ear—I can only imagine how much luck she'll have trying to convince our fifteen-month-old son into whatever it is she's suggesting, but he suddenly calls out, "Dada!" I feel a tear prick the corner of my eye, but my grin nearly splits my face in half.
"Hey, buddy," I call back to him before I point the camera at the two of them. He's been saying "Dada" for a few months now, but not unlike with the twins, it hasn't gotten old. The little stinker is stringing together words all the time now, at least more than I'd like from someone his age. Naturally, the first sentence he managed to piece together was, "Where Mama?" Even if Monica only disappears behind the refrigerator door, he asks where she is. He asks, "Why?" all the time, too, but that's because Jack and Erica are always asking that. He doesn't yet seem to understand what he's asking, just that it's what his siblings are doing.
"Here we come," Monica calls, pushing her feet against the edges of the slide so they come at us a little slower. William doesn't seem to notice; he just shouts with glee, clapping his hands.
"Yay, William," I exclaim as I snap a few pictures, and the twins follow suit.
"Yay, Liam," they yell in tandem, and I marvel for a moment at just how twin-like they're becoming. I don't know if all twins do things at the same time, honestly—before these two, the only twins I was really familiar with were Phoebe and Ursula, and they're not exactly typical siblings, never mind typical twins. But Jack and Erica seem to be on the same wavelength most days lately with the exact same sentence falling out of their mouths at the exact same time, walking side by side at the exact same pace, sometimes Jack handing something to Erica that she hasn't said she wanted or vice versa. It could be a fluke; it could be something all kids who spend time in close quarters in a close age group do. I don't really know. All I do know is that it's a little eerie at times; when they start finishing each other's sentences, I'll know we're in trouble.
Monica and William reach us and the twins rush at them, throwing their arms around their brother. Monica grins at me broadly over their heads, letting the cuteness unfold. Their sweetness toward each other at times is too much, but when the twins aren't in the throws of their cranky, terrible-two-ness, they're cuddliest little kids anyone could hope to meet. When it comes to their brother, though, they're almost always ready with a hug and a kiss, finding ways to encourage him and trying to teach him something. I'm sure a lot of it comes from the fact that Monica and I are always gently correcting the twins, fixing words for them or helping to phrase something correctly, but they're always right there with William, helping him when he's pronouncing something wrong. He's getting close to their names, too, which always startles me. He can't say "Jack" yet, but he can say "Jah" which always gets a response from his brother, and most of the time, he can actually say "Eri." Sometimes it comes out more like "Ewwee," but she knows he's talking to her.
"Jack 'lide, too?" Jack asks suddenly, looking back and forth between me and his mother. We're not quite sure yet how to get them to understand how to words like, "I" and "you" and "him" and "her." We try to use simple sentences for them when it comes to those, but they still seem baffled. At least they understand how to express when they want something, even if it is by using their own names in the sentence.
"All right," Monica agrees. "Mommy will slide with Jack and Li—William." We both shake our heads at each other, fighting back grins. It feel like a never ending battle of wills between us and the twins with that one. "Then with Erica and William."
Erica looks up at me, eyes wide. "Eri slide Daddy?"
I grin at her, realizing she said "slide" instead of "'lide," something she's only done a few times before. "Eri slide with Daddy," I answer. She looks at me doubtfully and I give her a little nudge. "C'mon, honeybun…try it. 'Eri slide with Daddy.'"
"Eri 'lide wif Daddy?"
I kiss the side of her head enthusiastically. "That's my girl!" I look at Monica happily. "Genius," I tell her.
"Jack 'lide wif Mommy," Jack answers, waiting for his praise, too.
"You are brilliant, Jack," I tell him, leaning over to kiss his forehead. It does seem that twins can be insanely competitive, too, along with working incredibly well in tandem. "But Eri, I think you should slide with Mommy. Daddy will catch you at the bottom."
"Pease?" she asks, looking up at me with her big eyes, and it's not that I want to refuse her, it's that I've tried the slide with them and I'm too big to go down it successfully with the kids. I stretch out my legs and they reach almost all the way to the bottom. When they're a little bigger, I'll happily take them down the big slide.
"Daddy'll push you on the swings in a bit, okay?" I ask, hoping that she'll stop with the guilt trip.
She makes a face at me for a second before grinning at me, tiny dimples forming in her cheeks. "'Kay, Daddy."
Monica stands, holding William with one arm and holding a hand out to Jack with the other. "Come on, buddy. Let's ride."
I watch as he climbs the ladder, Monica close behind, amazed as holds the baby as if it's nothing. They settle in, Monica placing William in front of his brother, holding them both steady as they come down to us again. And still, Erica cheers—to the kids, seeing people come, more or less, hurtling down to them must be exhilarating in its own way. A few moments later Erica's being whisked away for her own turn with her little brother, and Monica, though still looking happy, is also started to look winded. Chasing after two two-year-olds and a one year old is exhausting. Fun, but exhausting.
Erica barely hits the ground before she starts running full tilt toward the swings, only stopping when Monica's voice rings out. "No way."
She turns to look at us, her eyes wide once again, as the four of us head toward her. "Hi, Mommy," she says, giving us her best innocent smile. Monica's not buying it.
"We don't run off. You hold Mommy or Daddy's hand all the time."
Jack holds out his hand, saving the day. "Here, Eri." Monica shakes her head as we find an empty set of swings. Children running rampant is just another horrifying aspect of parenthood. I somewhat naively expected my kids to just naturally hold our hands at all times. Oh, no. No, they like to run free like little hooligans. They'll hold our hands if we remind them, but it's not at all an instinct like I expected it to be.
Fortunately, the swings is something we can manage to do with the three of them at one time, and it's another thing that makes them squeal with laughter. Getting them strapped in is no easy feat, especially because their little bodies start to wiggle with excitement as they get closer to the seats. The moment we start to push them, they all laugh with glee. We don't push them very hard, but it doesn't seem to matter. The motion thrills them.
Once we settle them into a rhythm, I finally feel comfortable enough to barely glance at my wife out of the corner of my eye. "You talk to Rachel at all?"
"Yeah, for a few minutes earlier today," she answers, giving William just a little nudge. "I think she wanted to talk longer, but Andrew's been colicky and he got fussy, so it didn't last long."
I wince sympathetically—it really wasn't all that long ago that William was the exact same way.
Ross and Rachel's baby, Andrew Geller—no hyphen—was actually born in the middle of August. Despite all her calculations and worries, it seems that Rachel was actually already pregnant when they went on their Christmas trip to Florida. All of her concerns over how she got pregnant turned out to be for nothing, though I suppose it's ultimately for the best that she told Ross the truth about it. But Rachel being Rachel insisted, even after her doctor told her that the baby looked bigger than the couple of months she thought she was, that she knew exactly when she got pregnant. She was positive she was due in late September. When she delivered a perfectly healthy, full-grown boy in August, she finally conceded that it was possible she had the dates wrong.
Seriously—only Rachel.
Still, he is healthy, and that's the part that really matters.
"They tired of being cramped in that little apartment yet?" I ask, chuckling at the thought of their expanding family trying to get by in two bedrooms.
"No, of course not," Monica answers, sarcasm dripping from her voice. "Actually, if you believe Ross and Rachel, everything is just fine. I suppose it will be for a few months while Andrew spends most of his time in their room, but I don't think Ben wants to sleep on the couch just to spend time with his father, and they can't exactly make Emma share a room with the baby, you know?"
I sigh, but shake my head. "Their lives," I say.
"Their lives," she agrees. We decided to stay out of their business as much as possible after the whole pregnancy fiasco. If they want us to help them with something, we're more than happy to, but beyond that…it's their lives.
"Besides," I say, tuning my attention back to my own kids and life. "We more than have our hands full with you guys, right Jack?"
"Yup," he answers, laughing as he flies through the air.
I laugh with him, smiling at my wife, who looks completely unconcerned with her brother and his life for the moment. And why should she when the life we have right in front of us is so amazing?
*A/N…I need to apologize for this—it rambles and I know it. I'm really trying to find my way with this story, though. But what IS really amazing is the fact that this sucker is just ten reviews off from 600. Holy crap! I want to make sure this story is worthy of each and every review, though, so I'm going to keep trying. Unfortunately, you might have to deal with a few really crappy chapters before I can get this back to where it needs to be. Just bear with me, please!