Overachievers

From first grade through, like, yesterday, a period covering everything from finger painting through medical school, your mother has literally been a perfect 4.0 student. We're talking wheelbarrow of awards, chief resident, someone please stop her, type overachiever. Given that, I now feel stupid for thinking she would produce anything other than twins. Really, I'm lucky there's not going to be a litter of you. I was aware of the sense of inferiority and self loathing that came with marrying a Type A wonderbrain, and frankly, I'm cool with it. I just didn't know her competitive spirit extended to her ovaries. Apparently all her body parts are strivers.

Unfortunately for me, it looks like you're a pair of gunners yourselves. Turns out, the fact that there's two of you means that you're going to graduate the womb early. If you were boys I might have some faith that my lazy DNA would more than counteract this, but since you're shaping up as girls I think we have to discount my contribution (thank god) and prepare for not only an early arrival, but the possibility that you'll come out doing differential equations faster than I can calculate the tip on a ten dollar check. I've been told I now have almost one month less than I thought in which to live out my meager dreams. This is going to call for some changes.

French is going to be a problem. I can finish my course ahead of your new due date, but to be honest, when it's over it's unlikely that I could navigate my way down a French street unless it contained nothing but cars, horses, and numbers under thirty. This seems like a limited vocabulary with which to try to raise you bilingually. A friend in Boulder tells me they start teaching foreign languages (including Mandarin!) in first grade. Perhaps your school will offer such things while you're still young and sponge brained. Or we'll just send you to live with these other people. Either way, I'll finish out the course, but I think we have to take 'learning' a foreign language off the table.

And we're going to have to increase novel production. Here's how the chapter a week is going. By Thursday I usually have like four paragraphs. Then by Saturday I have a chapter. Clearly there are some days at the beginning of the week that aren't pulling their weight, so we're going to try to wring a chapter out of Wednesday and another out of Sunday. At that rate I will successfully complete the world's worst book before you're born. See, I can do exceptional things too.

If I had any doubt about how impossible these things would become after you two made the scene it's gone now. In addition to at least 1000 people giving me some variation on the line 'a pair of twins are four times the work' I've somehow ended up nursing that kitten I mentioned finding right after you two made yourselves known. I took it to the shelter, but they said they'd have to kill it because they don't have the manpower to bottle feed it. As I previously mentioned I have a soft spot for small furry animals, so guess who's warming milk and feeding it to a little poop machine every few hours. I have no idea why they bother giving high school students bags of sugar and lectures about birth control. If someone had given me a kitten to nurse and then told me that babies are even harder I wouldn't have had anything more than a pen pal before I was 25. In fact, remind me to have you girls nurse kittens right about the time you hit puberty.

Novel - Double time!
Dunking - Wk 2 complete
French - Lowering expectations (don't worry, I've done this before)