If you have any of my blogs in the past, you probably know that I have five kids, and that the last two came as a matching pair two years ago. Now my twins are not identical, (they are in fact fraternal) but they look awfully similar. In fact if they are not standing side by side together, I have to be no further than five or six feet away to tell them apart. Even then, if I am looking at the first twin Emily, I’m not really sure who it is that I’m looking at. If the other twin, Laura, is standing there alone, I am more certain of who she is.
Usually.
Often.
Sometimes.
Anyway, my point is that if the twins are not standing together, then it can be really hard to tell them apart. My wife, however, is better at telling them apart than I am. This is the background needed to tell a story about what happened at dinner tonight.
Now the other three kids are older, and we expect them to be a little bit more disciplined during dinner. The twins are young, however, and we let them get up and leave the table and return during the meal. At one point late in the meal, both the twins had gotten up and left the table. This was not unusual at all. It happens all the time. After a few minutes, one of the twins returned to an empty seat and began scarfing down the tastiest thing on the plate, a cobbler my wife had made with fresh strawberries. The child was really going to town, wolfing down the cobbler. My wife is a really good cook, so I didn’t make anything of it.
A moment later the other twin came back to the table and immediately started to whine. “Emily, stop complaining and go back to your seat.” She continued to complain. The twins aren’t talking perfectly yet, so I didn’t realize what the problem was at first. The twin who was already sitting, began eating even more quickly. “Emily, please go back to your seat and finish your dinner.” I said as the standing twin whined again, even more urgently. I was about to tell “Emily” a third time to stop whining and go back to her seat when I did a double take. I finally saw what the problem was.
I looked back and forth carefully between the two girls. Uncertainty crept into my voice. “Is that your place to sit?” I asked the first twin as she took the last bite of the strawberry dessert. She turned and looked at me with a mischievous little grin. “Emily! Don’t do that to daddy!” I laughed. “Please go back to your seat.”
We had to do some creative rearranging for poor Laura to get her fair share of strawberry cobbler. All I know is that I am in big trouble. If she has learned to take advantage of Dad when she is only two, I have a bumpy road ahead of me. If only they would use their powers for good, instead of evil.
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