Summertime...and the livin' is

wonderfully frantic. As the school year approaches, I'll always remember this summer, the "first" summer with the twins that didn't involve checking in at a reception desk.

Up until the summer of 2008, the months of June, July, and August were met with open arms and were, for the most part, very good chapters of relaxation, traveling, and just hanging around. Last summer will always have that mental asterisk by it as I'll remember it for the birth of the twins (my baptism through fire into fatherhood,) and the flood that destroyed 500 square blocks of Cedar Rapids.

Now, I love my children, but last year wasn't really a summer. It was get up, go to the NICU, parent, come home from the NICU, parent some more, and then worry. A lot. Then get up again.

This summer is a "first" summer with the kids because we're all home and we've had the luxury of staying here for consecutive days. My day starts at 5 in the morning when I realize that Allison is getting her pre-dawn breakfast. Half an hour later, I'm carrying her back to her room where she'll sleep until about 8 a.m.

Now it's 5:30, maybe 6 o'clock, and we shift our focus subconsciously to Ethan. Or rather, Ethan's monitor. As he slowly rousts awake, his various leg movements set off the beeping and very quickly gets one of us to go shut it off in an effort to coax a few more minutes of sleep for anyone who'll take it.

Now, I love my wife, but I have to shut down the little voice in my head each time that it's my "turn" to tend to the insomnia electronica as my body still wants to be curled up in the fetal position; I think Red Green said it best with, "now I'm not saying you should lie to your wife, but there are times when it's best she doesn't know the whole truth." The real truth is that she's much stronger than I am on little sleep.

After getting about 20 more minutes of dozing in, Ethan is ready to rock and lets us know by pulling on his foot probe which then sets off the buzzer. He's a smart cookie as he will rarely cry, knowing that all he has to do is to make the white box talk and people will come running from all directions. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is pure fiction.

The mornings where you could just "ease into your day" are brutally over as Ethan's regimen includes a new diaper, new outfit, breathing treatment, medications, and an oral feeding followed by a tube feeding of the leftovers.

All the while, there's little Ali-bear who has just successfully picked the lock on the strong box and is ripping a passport to shreds while finding fun things to jam into the one electrical outlet I haven't put those plug covers on, and that's in just 2 seconds of being put down to crawl while I get a diaper.

The rest of the day follows suit, and every time I wonder if I'll ever get to finish anything I've started, I just look at the kids and discover a hundred new expressions and giggles that I haven't seen before and everything is going to be okay.

No more trips to dude ranches or Europe for us for a while. Nowadays, we take walks, play with our Little Tikes swing in the backyard, read books, take drives to pick up a new toaster, and go for our first swim.

At night, Lisa and I run around trying to get the kids ready for bed, only to be dead tired ourselves when they are asleep. We once watched the sunset on the North Shore in Hawaii, we once marveled at the Parisian lights beneath us as we stood by a railing on the Eiffel Tower, and I once chased Lisa on our mountain bikes on a descent through the Tahoe Rim Trail, all during one summer or another, but it's this one, right at home, that I'll remember for a long time.