Two.

If you're like me, you haven't celebrated your own birthday since junior high when you hosted a sleepover complete with pizza, the game Girl Talk, prank phone calls, and enough sugar from the bulk candy bins at Cub Foods to make your stomach ache.

But if you've ever been a parent to a toddler (or two at once), you know that birthdays are something to be celebrated. It's that date on the calendar that pinpoints another year under your parenting belt and forces you into constant reflection mode: What were things like exactly one year ago today? How have things changed? Are they better? Do I have this mothering thing down yet?

While the changes in the past year aren't as physically dramatic as when our twins turned 1, turning 2 feels just as monumental in its own way.  It seems as though we are finally starting to see through some of the fog that has been present for so long: a time when their little bodies literally needed us for every piece of their day. To feed them, to carry them, to clothe them, to change them, to help them make sense of a world that doesn't speak in baby language.

(13 months old)

It's not to say that the dust has finally settled or anything like that, but just that I can finally start to see my boys as something outside of myself. The times when I stand back and look at them from across the room and something that they are doing literally takes my breath away. You just lined up all your cars from end to end--you're so imaginative! You just unzipped your jacket all by yourself--I didn't know you could do that! Yes, that is a blue truck--you're so smart! Thank you for offering to carry your jammies downstairs--you're so helpful!

Silly boys and best friends (most days, anyways...)

The moments that stick out for me over this past year are not major milestones. They are only little glimpses into an average day that, had I not written them down somewhere, I probably would have forgotten about. The first time you hugged each other before bed. The time when we were in the process of getting new carpet, we came home from daycare and there was no carpet in the dining room; the way you both tried to explain in your limited language where the carpet went. How you would lean in to the Christmas tree to give it hugs and how Owen would wave and say "hi" to the people and horseys in our Dicken's Snow Village. How you only like singing the "choo choo" song before bed and how you both belt out "A-MEN" after we say prayers each night. How you are obsessed with seeing if there are ice cubes in Mommy and Daddy's water glass at dinner every single night. The time when our house had suddenly gone silent for the first time since the babies were born...Dan and I looked at eachother dumbfounded wondering where the boys were until we noticed that they were sitting right in front of us stacking their MegaBlocks into towers like little champs without any adult help. How Aaron says "yaaaaaa" in a perfect Minnesota accent, complete with an over-exaggerated head nod. The first time I heard you say, "yuhve you, Momma" in your angel little voices, how nothing else in the world seemed to matter at that precious moment.

It is truly hard to remember how we filled our days when "woof, woof" was the only word you were able to communicate with me for several months after just turning 1. Now, you are running out into the street after a runaway ball yelling proudly, "I ga dit, Ma-mee!" Just recently you spent an entire shopping trip to Target telling every stranger we passed who was kind enough to stop and try to decode "buh-ckle bo-ken," your story of how the first cart Mommy tried to secure you into had a broken buckle, so we had to go to a "diff one."

You now sleep with grown-up sized pillows in your cribs and are three times the size of the baby blankets we brought you home from the hospital in. You eat gummy bear vitamins and we now share our kitchen table with messy little eaters who prefer to use the same kind of fork and spoon as Mommy and Daddy. I'm convinced that wearing helmets 24-hours a day would be the best way to keep you safe from your adventurous spirits that don't quite know the limits just yet.

2 year old twin boys

And while there are glimpses of what friends warn is to come in the next year (how dare I take the string cheese out of the plastic wrapper, I forgot that you want to "doo wit" yourself for goodness sake), I do try to hold onto what each day brings. I know in just a matter of time, we will be able to play at our neighborhood park without my blood pressure spiking every time you get close to the edge when Mommy is still making her way through the tunnel. I will probably have forgotten that we spent a month (or more) of this past year sleeping on an air mattress when one little guy just needed to know that Mommy and Daddy were close by. We will forget the crabbiness that accompanied the welcoming of 22 new teeth and molars into this world in the same year (okay, so maybe we will never forget the joys of teething). But you will laugh when we tell you how much you loved to read the Superhero Potty book or how you would ever so politely say "key que" (thank you), complete with the baby sign language, just after stealing a toy right out of your brother's hands. Soon, you will no longer be asking me to carry you up the stairs to go to bed. Before long, there will be new hurdles to conquer and milestones to reminisce.

So for today, we CELEBRATE turning 2.

To read my thoughts on my twins turning 1, read my post from last year here.