So, my cell phone did not go off Saturday morning with a text message from my close personal friend Barack Obama revealing his vice presidential choice as expected. I had to get the news from CNN.

Joe Biden.

To be honest, I wasn’t crazy about the pick at first, but he’s been growing on me. If anything, Biden’s a real guy. He goes home every night the Delaware, and he’s a far cry from McCain and his rich socialite sugar mama, or likely GOP VP Mitt Romney whose vast personal wealth is only outmatched by his magic Mormon underwear.

Evan Bayh or Tim Kaine would have been sunk the ship. But Biden could be okay.

Of course the PUMA’s are grumbling. “It should have been Hillary!”

Man, if football teams were such bad sports — could you imagine the Redskins screaming about losing to the Dallas Cowboys 3-0. “We’ve been robbed! Robbed! Robbed!” You’d think the Hillary deadenders didn’t understand that their candidate lost. Seriously, she fucking lost. Howard Dean lost in 2004. I didn’t cry, I didn’t switch to Bush — I voted for John Kerry.

Grow up, folks. Seriously. Hillary Clinton wasn’t owed the Democratic nomination by blood right. She had to win the election. She came close, but in the end, she was outplayed. That’s how elections work. In my adult life, I’ve never had my candidate win.

Of course, it becomes pretty clear that the cult of personality is a lot stronger than party allegiance. So they’re all going to vote McCain so Hillary can come out again in 2012 and save us all. I can imagine the yelling and screaming if the rolls were reversed, and the Obama supporters went McCain.

The girls are now in the other room with their mother, who is trying to get them to fall asleep. Every few moments, Rachel stirs from near slumber and shrieks, “I can’t sleep! I want to play!” It is a harsh sound, filled with anger and pain, like a knife blade jabbed in your back. Meanwhile, her sister babbles happily, not at all close to falling asleep.

No, I really am not going to get any rest tonight.

It happens like this often. We go to bed about midnight, and one or both of the girls wakes up shortly thereafter, screaming bloody murder. The only thing that calms them down is coming into the living room and turning on the television. After that, they’re wide awake, and won’t be asleep again until 4:30 - 5:00 am. But the crying stops, which does our neighbors a serious favor, even if it ensures that we’ll never sleep.

So I’m looking at maybe not quite two hours of sleep tonight. I don’t know how I’m going to function at work tomorrow. I don’t know when I’m going to sleep again.

A long time ago, I held onto the fragile belief that this gets easier over time, but it doesn’t. It gets harder. And harder and harder.

It’s times like these, when I wonder what it must be like to be in normal family, with kids who sleep the night.  Do such families exist?   You have to wonder.

So, the girls both had bouts of asthma last night that kept us up all night. You enter this strange state when you’re up every two hours administering breathing treatments — the night stretches on into infinity and you are neither awake or asleep, but somewhere in between.

Now, the girls are so doped up on Albuterol Sulphate, that they can’t sleep. They just talk and talk and talk, while my body cries out for rest. Is it any wonder they didn’t sleep when they were getting breathing treatments every four hours around the clock as infants? There’s got to be a better way to control breathing disorders that doesn’t require a stimulant like Albuterol, or steroids.

If there’ s a hell on earth, its two toddlers who can’t sleep, but need to, and two adults that can’t stay awake. And I’m expected to go to work in the morning?

Anya and I have a new game in which I pretend that I’m a monster. Being a monster consists of saying, “Yarraggh, I am a monster!” which she thinks is absolutely hilarious or “silly” as she calls things that amuse her. She also thinks it’s ridiculous and silly when I tell her that Nana is my mother. Daddy’s aren’t supposed to have mommy’s of their own, and quite logically, Nana cannot be Daddy’s mommy.

Sometimes, Anya will pretend that she’s a monster, too. Rachel sometimes joins us in our monsterdom.

Yesterday evening was spent running around their room, shouting “Yarraagh!” and being fed fake food, like plastic ice cream and wooden sushi.

Being a parent is surprisingly amusing.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about the girls.

They’re now almost two. Rachel is a tank, bulldozing her way through life. She climbs anything that’s taller than she is — the more challenging, the better. We have to watch her closely now, for fear that she’ll kill herself. She’s so small, so petite compared to her sister, but also incredibly strong and determined. Whenever we come back from Target with supplies, she grabs the biggest bag she can find and drags it down the hall to the apartment. She loves to help.

Anya is more complicated. Although her sister is smart, Anya is another league of awareness and language ability. She asks what everything is, even things she already knows, and plays with the words we give back until she’s mastered them. We have this joke when I’m changing her, when I sing the theme to “Elmo’s World,” but substitute “Elmo” with “Daddy.” She thinks this is terribly wrong and funny, exploding with laugher while correcting me: “No, Elmo’s World!” There were a few weeks there when she didn’t want anything to do with me, but that song has been a breakthrough. Now she brings me books and insists that I read them over and over. And she calls for me when she’s in the bath.

Her sister used to call for me. Now she’s more interested in climbing.

I never thought during those hard early months, that I would soon find myself — now more or less free of that intense responsibility — striving to gain my daughters’ attention, and yet, here I am, thinking up games I can play with them, new books to read. I think I understand my father more clearly, now — and how much like him I am. I want to spend time with my children, and I’m saddened when they brush me off for other things. My dad struggled to get me to do things with him, but he always tried to engage me in the things he liked, never what I was interested in. So compulsory games of “catch” ended in frustration, him throwing the ball at me, as did all those Sunday mornings he woke me up to help him work on his car, and furiously sent me back inside after I was clearly bored.

But I’m trying to reach out to the girls through their interests. I understand that they are their own people, and to have a good relationship with them means finding common ground, something we both like, or even, something only they like. So I sit with them and watch Dora the Explorer, and read the same books about animals over and over again, because it clearly makes them happy and it helps forge my relationship with them. Because I’m their father, not their mother — I didn’t carry them, I don’t that connection. Our relationship is not automatic, particularly considering the complexity and strength of the twin bond, or the special mother-daughter bond.

Love for fathers must be earned. That’s the lesson my dad never quite got, and the reason why I never quite loved him. I can’t let myself make the same mistake with my girls.

I haven’t blogged about parenthood in awhile. Mostly, because Tina does such a good job of it, herself, that anything I write feels inadequate in comparison to her experience.

The girls are about 21 months old, and they are really coming into their own as people and as opposites. Rachel frequently defines herself by what she’s against, while Anya defines herself by what she is for. It is not uncommon for Rachel to be telling someone or something to “go away,” while Anya spontaneously blurts: “I love babies!” I often wonder how they will get along when they’re older, when at the moment the contrasts in personality are pretty significant.

At the playground, Anya is bold and adventurous. She rushes up to the top of the biggest slide, and sends herself down the ramp with speed and gusto. Meanwhile, Rachel is more timid, preferring to sit at the foot of the slide, scared of climbing. She likes swings, though, and smiles and laughs as she soars through the air. Anya will swing if you strap her in, but it’s not her favorite thing.

It’s also weird to note how different my relationship with each of them is. Rachel and I are very close — some mornings, she will wake up shouting, “Daddy, where are you?!” when I’m actually right next to her, just obscured by a sheet or blanket. Some nights, I rock her to sleep in my arms just as I have since she was little, often by request. Anya won’t let me rock her at all — she prefers to fall asleep with her mommy. These bonds formed when they were tiny, and Tina and I spent more time individually with one over the other — now, despite all the trading off we’ve done, they seem more or less permanent. I’m saddened that Anya and I aren’t as close as Rachel and I. I love her dearly. But it seems that what they say is true — each twin does favor one parent.

This morning, Anya and I watched the Arcade Fire’s performance on Saturday Night Live. As always, we danced around the room, and I dipped her and twirled her to the music, much to her delight. Everything was going well until the end of “Intervention,” when Win smashed his accoustic guitar. This sudden act of violence sent Anya into a fit. She buried her face in my chest and wailed miserably.

I tried to dance with her during the second song, but she produced no smiles or giggles. She watched the screen with seriousness, convinced that something bad would soon follow.

Some days it’s so difficult, that by the time you reach that magic moment when the girls are asleep and it’s time to clean up the huge heaps of mess they made, you don’t know what to do. Freedom beckons, and it is easy to ignore the mess. I feel like that today.

The terrible two’s have come early. Today, I pulled Rachel out of the dishwasher possibly four times. Yesterday, no less than seven bites were exchanged between the girls, typically in response to the theft of a toy, control of a toy, or because biting is “funny.” It’s amazing how fierce their competition is — even when I come home, they fight over who I will pick up first. On Thursday, when I put Anya down to pick up Rachel, Anya screamed: “HE IS MY DADDY!”

Television is watched in fits and starts, paused to break up a fight, put a leash on a stuffed dog, or give someone “nummies.” Dinner is spent trying to hide pools of ketchup on my plate — the girls are obsessed with “dippy.”

I need a nap.

One year ago today, Tina and I woke at 4:30 in the morning and drove to Georgetown University hospital. There in Labor and Delivery, a department Tina had been admitted to three times before, we started the long process of inducing labor. We would spend thirty-six hours in one of the special delivery rooms, waiting for magic to happen. But labor stalled, and a c-section became the only option.

By the time the girls were surgically extracted from the womb on July 28, Tina was on the road to serious infection and pnemonia, and we were about to embark on a 10-day journey through the depths of hell and despair. With twins, I always expected complications, but what I never expected was for Tina to hover near death. The irony was that the girls were healthy, and before I was ready to become solely responsible for their care, that role was handed to me. As our stay stretched beyond the three day standard, I began to believe that we would be in the hospital for months, and that Tina would never recover. Scenarios played out in my head as I tried to keep myself from unravelling under the stress of it all. What would I do if I lost Tina? How would I take care of my daughters, who I barely knew and whose constant needs and desperate vulnerbility terrified me?

I ate and drank very little, as the days became a blur of feedings and diaper changings and the desperate hope that Tina would recover. Relief came fleetingly — my mother had her own surgical procedure that kept her away for several days, so for much of the experience, I was the only one at Tina’s side who could walk and get up to change the girls. But I wasn’t really alone. There was Eileen, a dear friend of Tina’s who always had a somewhat distant relationship with me, but who I grew to love very much as she was a constant source of companionship and support. I never knew how much I would miss her until she went home to Chile. And my old friend Michael, who came to visit on one of the lowest days, despite having a job interview — a visit that came at just the right time, as I was unsure I could continue. And my creative collaborator and good friend, Jake, whose voicemail message the night before we left for the hospital is perhaps one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. My mother, despite her surgery, was also a source of great help, and when she came down to help while recovering from her own wounds, I felt more grateful than I’d ever felt in my life. Without any of them, I don’t think I would have made it.

In the end, we returned home. Not triumphantly as we had imagined, but tired and half-dead. We limped into the apartment carrying our children late on a Saturday evening, and it was from that low place that we began our family. If only I had known then how fast it would go by. How I would grow to love the quiet moments — the late night feedings, the early smiles, infant Anya’s sleepy involuntary laughter. How everything would start to come together.

I remember sitting in our solarium, watching the sunrise behind Malcom X Park, a cool breeze blowing in through the screened windows and a sense of calm, an understanding that the worst was behind us. And I am nostaligic for all the half-delirious 3:00 AM feedings watching Dave Chappelle on DVD, or a late repeat of Conan O’Brian, the Comicon episode of Entourage, or making fun of the History Detectives. Once, there was even a four-hour documentary on the history of videogames, which I watched straight through, shrugging off the 15-minute naps between feedings. Television, as reviled as it is, provided a relief and escape from all the hardship that had come before. And comedy most of all helped Tina and I make it through those difficult first weeks when we became parents.

But most of all, I remember how my dear little girls took me by the hand and lead me out of the darkness of depression. And how together, as a family, we survived asthma, more pneumonia, two hospitalizations, three stomach flus and so much more in that terrible, beautiful year.