Dinner Tonight: Another Twenty Minutes with Twins

Musical chairs.

Every night before the four of us sit down to eat, we play a game of musical chairs. Well, not really. There is no music nor is there a shortage of seats. Where we sit each meal, however, always changes. Vivian and William seem to delight in determining this nightly seating plan, declaring where they want to sit and which parent they want beside them. It all sounds lovely enough: I could philosophize about there being no head of the table or giving children choice or blah blah blah. Ultimately, though, it’s a pain in the butt: we shift and re-shift while the pasta grows colder.

India.

Perhaps tonight’s musical chair experience exhausted Vivi and Will, because their dad and I actually managed to have a five-minute adult conversation at the dinner table. We reminisced about our trip to India twelve years ago. It was our first vacation together; we figured if our five-month-old relationship could survive three weeks in India it could withstand a lot. We have a thousand stories to tell, from the man with no nose who was our rickshaw driver, to the monkey squatting on top of our buffet table shoveling rice into his mouth while he looked at us. But the biggest lesson by far is that tea and toast make any crisis better.

Dancing.

Our micro-conversation ends when William scoots off his chair-du-jour and starts doing the Chicken Dance. He flaps his way through a round or two, then switches to The Macaroni (which vaguely resembles The Macarena). Next, he starts disco-dancing, shouting out four not-so-random letters: Y-M-C-A.

If my kids dance the YMCA instead of eat at the dinner table, this will be them.

Vivian soon realizes she’s being upstaged (she’s still trying to make up for the fact that she was born two minutes after her brother). To get our attention, she stand on her chosen chair and continues the YMCA, complete with the move where one hand rests behind her head, while the index finger on her other hand points around the room. I object when she starts to step onto the table.

William, thankfully, is rarely bothered by Vivian’s hyper-competitiveness. He just dances to the beat of his own drum – sometimes literally. Instead of hopping onto the chair or table to compete, he says, “I’m just going to do my own dance.” He launches into his signature William-dance. Imagine a five-year-old doing the Running Man and cross it with Pulp Fiction. The boy’s got a bit of groove, the kind that emerges when you don’t give a crap what anyone else thinks.

William’s dance ends, Vivian climbs down from her chair, and the kids go off to tidy the living room.

“How’s that cleaning up going, Vivian?” my husband asks.

She looks up from the flashcards she’s studying for the umpteenth time. “Going fine,” she says. She settles more into the sofa cushion.

William is nowhere to be found.

And that, my friends, is another twenty minutes with twins.

Photo Credit: (cc) bogdog Dan, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License