Double Vision

Yesterday, my oldest son and his wife Skyped with me for Mother's Day.  I got to see my two adorable granddaughters cruising all around the house, stopping every now and then to check out the crazy lady on the screen and give her a heart-melting grin before getting back to their job--which is, of course, making sure that their poor parents never get to sit still for more than a nanosecond.  (God bless parents of multiples!)  Bonny and Kewpie are definitely becoming seasoned walkers!  It was so much fun to be able to watch them, in real time, as they toddled here and there.  That was a great Mother's Day gift for Grammy.

What in the world did we do before Skype?  I know it would have been so much harder for my husband and me when our boy was on deployment in Iraq for a year, and then again for a year in Afghanistan, if we hadn't had it.  (Not to mention how hard it would have been for his fiancee and then pregnant wife.)  It was always such a joy--and a comfort--to see his face on that computer screen; somehow, through the miracle of modern technology, he didn't seen so far away.  I would have loved to be able to see my husband's face when I was the mother of a one-year-old (the twins' daddy) and pregnant with baby #2, and my man was away on a Navy cruise to the Indian Ocean.  We didn't even have phone calls to look forward to, except on one rare occasion when the ship was in port; back then, we just had those archaic, oldfangled* things called handwritten LETTERS.

So the next time I complain about technology and say that I wish I'd been born in the olden days, when life was simpler, ignore me.  Or remind me of how much I love to Skype these days; that'll bring me back to reality.

After we'd been Skype-ing for a while yesterday, my youngest son, who was sitting beside me (and like all males can't resist playing with the buttons on machines), started fiddling around and adding graphics to our picture: pop-up images of a hand doing the thumb's up sign, a punching fist followed by the word "BAM," a bird flying across the top of the screen...well, you get the idea.  Then my oldest son retaliated by making it so that the images coming to us from his end kept morphing into bizarre shapes, the way they would in front of one of those fun house mirrors.  After that stunt, he made it so that the images from his end appeared to be doubled.  While this was happening, I took this picture of the twins, who are already mirror images of each other...and here it looks like they have mirror images of those mirror images.  (You can see their daddy's head doubled in the background as well.)**

I thought this made a pretty interesting shot, and I'm glad I was able to capture it on film.  Woops, I dated myself there; I mean I'm glad I was able to capture it on my memory card.  I guess a roll of film is about as obsolete as a letter these days, isn't it?

It's wild enough to feel like you're seeing double whenever you look at these girls.  But this picture made me think about what it would be like to have quadruplets all learning to walk at once.  Yikes!  Can you imagine?

I'll say it again: God bless parents of multiples!  I think there are crowns waiting for them in Heaven!

*Oldfangled is really a word, believe it or not. (My computer doesn't; it keeps putting a red squiggly line under it. But I found it in my thesaurus, so I'm sticking with it.)
**In the little box at the bottom, inside the double image of the babies, you can see that I appear to have an identical twin, too--because as soon as my youngest son saw how cool it looked when his brother did it, he just had to double us.