Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

SITBB Vault: Birthday (Faux) Guest Blogging

This week it's all about The Girls! Who knew last year when I posted this that a year later I would be finished with my dissertation (well, I had hoped this but did not "know" it for sure) and working as a postdoc with data from the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research (though actually I am working with adoptive family and not twin data). Twins, twins, twins: Move to the Twin Cities, give birth to twins, work with MC-Twin-FR data! I guess you never really know where life will lead you, or what strands will emerge as consistent themes. Maybe that is one of the reasons why we hold onto remnants of the past (like the photos below): to help us keep hold of the unfurling thread in some attempt at control. Speaking of which, we recently cleaned out our garage, and the stairway gate in the background of the last pic below was still in there. Why? I do not know, besides concluding it is an example of what I just talked about. Anyway, happy birthday, ladies!

Hi! Thanks for stopping by our Mommy's blog today--on our birthday! We are her daughters. Actually "we" are our Mommy, speaking in our voices (or, what she imagines might be our voices). She calls this type of thing adults' (mis)appropriating the voices of children to say things they (the adults) would really like to say themselves but feel, somehow, that it is better/easier/more clever to say through their children.

We have no idea what any of this means.

Our Mommy is in Graduate School and she lotsa times says stuff like this that doesn't make any sense.

Anyway. This is one of our first pictures:

Actually that is only one of us. (We were just "Twin A" and "Twin B" at this point.) It is a picture of one of us in you terro. That's Latin. That means we were in our Mommy's you-terrus. We were not in our Mommy's belly. Mommy hates when grown-ups tell children stuff like that instead of giving them the Proper Terms for things. Saying that babies that aren't born yet are "in their mommies' bellies" makes it sound like their mommies ate them. Which is not true.

(And, actually, is a little bit scary.)

We do not have many of these pictures from before we were born. Mommy says these types of things are part of the medical-lie-zation of pregnancy and childbirth. That's another one of those Things that Mommy says when she's been reading too many of her school books.

Here's an early picture of us. Lots of people ask us "What's the best part about having a twin sister?" The best part about having a twin sister is that you always have someone to talk to and play with.

Now, here's a picture of one of us with our first baby doll. Most of our baby dolls (like this one) are brown. That means that they are African American. (That's the Proper Term for some brown people who were born in the United States.) Mommy has been meaning to write something for this blog about Images and Children and Diversity. Before she wrote about this kind of thing and TV. (You can read it here.)

Here we are again:

This picture shows something we do a lot: Hug each other!

We are all grown up now (six years old). But it is really fun to look at pictures of ourselves from a long, long time ago. Thank you for spending part of our birthday with us!

Posted by perry032 at March 12, 2007 09:01 AM | TrackBack
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