Chapter 13 Sharing the Wealth
THE YEAR THREE
Andrew's Story
I've got so many balls in the air I wonder when they are all going to fall on my head. My business is going great guns. It's unbelievable what some simple little programming can bring in when applied in the right places.
IAM has finally gotten off of the ground. I've built several websites for various people to access: different strokes for different folks. We are getting regular hits from twins all over the country, as well as more than a few male geniuses who are interested in getting their rocks off. Hey, you've got to start somewhere.
We've done several mailings to the twins' database. That was a chore β loading forty thousand names, addresses, and family histories from the records Doris was maintaining. And Doris is no prize in the handwriting department. Maybe when she was young, say seventy, one could read her writing. But now her writing looks like the marks made by a lie detector. Try figuring that out.
So I created a SQL Server 2000 database added on a visual basic front end and away we went! I created some nice websites that interfaced with the same SQL database we were using locally and we were ready for business.
Do you know what it costs to mail things to forty thousand people? You do the math. We aren't a charitable organization, you know. The IRS might not look kindly at some of my websites if we claimed to be a non-profit.
We've got to pay for all of this. I let Donnie and Deirdre take care of the money end of things. They arrange for whatever dirty tricks they can come up with to minimize our costs and maximize our profits. What the hell do I know? I'm a lowly computer geek. I do my job and that's it. Let the big brains do the heavy lifting, business-wise.
My computer room is state of the art, or at least as close as we can afford it to be, out here in the boondocks of east Georgia. We've got redundancy built within redundancy. We backup like there is no tomorrow. Actually it isn't mission critical that we stay on-line all of the time. If our T3 line goes down for a while we can live with that.
We had our second batch of kids last year. This really was a 'biological clock' kind of decision. Donnie and Deirdre were thirty-seven at the time and we just didn't want to push our luck by waiting any longer.
Besides which, it may be a bit crass of me, but I really did want to see if we could get pregnant a second time as a kind of experiment. None of the twins of any family had ever gotten pregnant twice, to the best of our knowledge. And our knowledge is the knowledge of the entire institute, such as it is.
It's kind of a key to the next generation's future that our match-ups be able to procreate without the restraint of a single birthing per female after long attempts at pregnancy.
I don't want to brag, but I am one potent guy. We've only tried to get pregnant four times (two times per girl, after all) and I'm batting four for four. No blanks being shot here.
The big news, the really big news, is that our second batch wasn't twins and it wasn't girls either. I knew by the seventh month. The twerps knew too, I might add. I made them promise on pain of death to keep their pretty little mouths shut.
Emma keeping her mouth shut is a physical impossibility. I detailed Elle with the task of watching over Emma. Her job (and she was glad to accept it) was to make sure that Emma didn't spill the beans to Donnie or Dee Dee.
I threatened physical violence, though they never take me seriously about those threats for some reason. But Elle was more than happy to tackle Emma, and then sit on her until she agreed to keep quiet. That's what it took on more than one occasion.
So when we made our trek down to the hospital in Savannah this time, the girls were expecting the same old thing: four adorable little girl babies. Instead they got two little boys. I didn't tell them because I wanted it to be a surprise.
Was it ever! I thought they would never stop crying! Not the babies, they didn't cry at all. Donnie and Deirdre were beside themselves. They wanted to hold those little boys and never let them go.
And we didn't have any boy names chosen. I thought I might have given it away when I insisted that our next batch of girls would include Edith and Ethel, two names that I totally despise.
I actually scored some points with Deirdre early on. She wanted a girl named 'Eve' but I told her we couldn't have an 'Eve' since she was already Eve to my Adam. I can be romantic sometimes, given the proper incentive.
So that's how Eric and Ethan came to be. I wanted 'Elvis' but Deirdre decided to be stubborn. Same story, different sex. The eBoys have the self-same capabilities as the eGirls. Trouble waiting to happen is six kids who can communicate with each other without words.
The twerps love the babies. Em can make the boys laugh just by looking at them. My theory is she is telling them things a one year will find obscenely funny; toilet humor probably. She's good at that. She can come up with a hundred different uses for the word 'fart'. I mean, the boys aren't one yet. If Deirdre thinks I was a bad influence she hasn't seen nothing yet. Em will take the cake.
I am not looking forward to them trying to keep a straight face during a solemn event when there are other people present. Em just won't let it happen.
But now they are only eleven months, just toddling a little bit, learning to walk, laughing all of the time. It's the best time for babies as far as I'm concerned.
Donnie's Story
It's a well known fact that the early years of childhood are the best for learning language. Until the fifth year or so the brain is very receptive to languages of all kinds. Dee Dee and I decided to take advantage of that fact.
Well, we have a little money (Andrew is doing quite well in his business ventures), we have the time and the little ones are very intelligent. We decided to see how far we could push the envelope.
A language teacher comes each day to the house and teaches our girls a language. To rephrase that, each day of the week, a different teacher arrives to teach the girls a different language. Monday is French, Tuesday is Japanese, Wednesday is German, Thursday is Chinese, and Friday is Swahili. We want to see if language does come easily especially to our precocious little girls. Andrew insisted on French. He wanted someone to help him with the menu when we go out to eat.
I feel confident when I say that Emma is the only three-year old in the world who can say 'fuck you' in six different languages. How she got that information out of these very conservative teachers is beyond me. Andrew isn't a bit surprised.