Twin pictures

The babies are starting to think about crawling (let's just hope they're as slow to crawl as they are to sleep). They were exercising on their blanket after the big boys were safely in bed and out of stomping range last night, and I got these pictures. They're really starting to notice each other, and so far they seem to like each other. While we're wishing, let's wish for that to keep up, too.

This picture was cuter in the view finder, when I couldn't see the giant slobber in girly's mouth:














Girl kept leaning on Boy when she got tired. So cute.














I guess I'll keep them, after all.

Always two there are [...], a master and an apprentice

It is probably a testament to my unfunctioning brain that I am beginning to think almost exclusively in quotes from movies and songs. I'm sure my husband will be thrilled when he reads this and learns that he has infected me, at long last, with Star Wars. The master and apprentice quote popped into my head this morning while I was recapping the (long) night's sleep (or lack thereof). My daughter is malleable and bright - after only two days and nights of the new routine, her sleep is measurably improved. She is starting to get tired at the "right" times, is not sleeping in cat naps all evening, went to bed peacefully, and only got up once all night long. I love her. She is beauty and grace and light. My son. Well. Not as bright. Not as malleable. He was pretty much up all night again. It is so fortunate for him that he is cute and did not come with a gift receipt.

Another phrase rattling around in the wasteland of my brain is "I get by with a little help from my friends." I know I bitch a lot, but by and large I'm very happy, and I'd be utterly miserable if it weren't for the incredibly generous people in my life. I have friends checking on me every day, friends taking my big kids so they don't have to endure house arrest with me (and so I don't have to endure them enduring it), friends bringing food. A big part of the reason I can't wait to get some rest and rejoin society is so I can pay it back and (cheese alert) pay it forward. When I worked full time, I rarely came in contact with this side of human nature, this generosity of spirit, and now I live in a world of it and I'm so grateful.

Back in a minute with cute twin pictures!

My house

My house will be 100 years old in 2012. Here are some of the great and not-so-great things about living here:

THE GOOD:
1) There is a special place in our over-stove cupboard just for Oreos, even though we rarely have Oreos (and when we do, they don't last long).
2) There are two parallel staircases, even though the house isn't that big. It's fun watching new people get confused about where they've landed.
3) The old owner was a carpenter, and did many odd customizations to the house (some less charming than others, as when he drove a nail through a steam pipe and didn't repair it, leading to water damage in that wall).
4) The porch is fantastic and large and airy, and I have dreams of one day using it for socializing instead of just for storing crap.
5) The stairway to the attic is in one of the bedroom closets, making it seem like a secret passageway (and again, surprising newcomers when my mother appears to emerge from the closet).

THE BAD:
1) Water is no friend to this house. When it rains, the basement floods. The roof won't hold patches properly any more. The radiators leak to the ceilings below.
2) Storage - although the house is plenty big enough for our family, it lacks room for our stuff. The closets are so narrow hangers don't fit in them properly. Just my luck, buying a house designed by ascetics.
3) Stairs. We're by no means a family of athletes, but you'd think we'd all be rail thin, since we live in the housing equivalent of a StairMaster, with stairs everywhere you turn. Perhaps the Oreo cupboard mentioned above acts as a counterbalance.
4) Neighbors - the woman behind us is stark raving mad and has, in the past, called the police on us for shoveling snow, blocked her driveway with posts so we can't get into our driveway with trucks, and stood in the road in front of our car to yell at us for putting trash out for the trash collectors. The people across the street have now mercifully been evicted, but for years sold crack at all hours of the day and night and threw an ungodly amount of crap in our yard, including dentures and a shopping cart. The people next door are just odd - they work from home, never leave their house, and once said to my son "we don't like children" (he was not doing anything at the time). The people on the other side just moved in, so they are not yet on my list.
5) The yard. Baltimore is not, last time I checked, in the tropics, but our weeds grow so fast you can almost hear the crackling. Within two weeks of the start of spring, it looks like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, all overgrown and just waiting for a prince with a sword to come hack away the brambles.

On balance, it's been a great house for us (and will have to continue to be, as we can't afford to move). Please note, this post is not about sleep! And, once again, does not have pictures, as the twins always start fussing before I get that far. Better go feed them. And eat some Oreos. I love me some Oreos.

I won the nap battle, but...

I was on a roll. I was firm, I was determined, I was focused like a frickin laser. The babies got up at 8 (their preference after a hard night of getting up every hour is to sleep in while I get up and take out my exhaustion on their brothers and grandmother). I kept them awake against their will until 10, when they both napped in their cribs. After they woke up, I kept them up again until 2, and again! they both napped in their cribs. I let them be for the most part after that, and they each of their own accord took a brief nap in the early evening. All signs pointed to a good night. And god. knows. We need a good night.

It is now 10:57. Girl twin fell asleep at 10. I put her in her crib. She slept for ten minutes. She screamed. I patted her. She screamed. I nursed her. She screamed. I turned on her CD. Her brother screamed downstairs. I nursed him while my husband patted her. She is now, 57 minutes later, still screaming. I hate that I hate her right now. She is small and soft and sweet and such a good baby in every other way, but the noise she's making feels like it may actually kill me. I swear, I need sleep in some deep and desperate way and it feels like if I can just express how deep and desperate the need is, somehow the universe will relent and I will get it. I keep thinking "I can't go on," but I haven't figured out an alternative, so on I keep going.

I am as tired of the self-pity as any reader must be, but I have nothing else in my head right now. Hopefully, I'll have something more promising to report in the morning.

Not that there's anything wrong with that

My five year old is having a play date with the love of his life. They met in preschool two years ago, and although they see each other infrequently, their love is true and persistent. They have been playing blissfully for 6 hours, and then the little girl came into the living room and had this conversation with my mother:

Girl: Does Justin have any father?
My mother: Yes, his daddy will be home from work soon.
(long pause)
Girl: Are you his mother too?
My mother, trying not to choke: No, I'm his grandma.

OMG I'm dying laughing. I have now been suspected of being in a lesbian relationship with my own mother.

Editing to add: try doing a google image search on "lesbians" sometimes (preferably not while working on a monitored network). Ha! I love it when what I'm looking for and what google thinks I'm looking for are not in sync.

I'll be staying in for a while...

There is just nothing like motherhood to teach you about the cost of things. Not the financial cost, although that is also brought into sharp relief once you add family members and remove breadwinners, but the fundamental truth that having one thing precludes having something else. You can't be in two places at the same time, and resources are finite. These truths may seem self-evident, but I'm still getting smacked in the face with them over and over.

Take sleep, for example (no! gasps the viewing audience, surely she's not going to talk about sleep!). My babies, you may be shocked to learn, are absolutely abysmal sleepers. I have had a heaping helping of truly good advice, using which I have devised not one but several plans, none of which I have implemented consistently. It is unsurprising to note here that I have always been a really awful dieter (hence the overstuffed upholstery look mentioned in yesterday's post). As with dieting, as soon as I see a glimmer of success I call it a day and am then simply stunned when the progress does not continue after the abandonment of the plan.

Specifically (yes, please, what in the hell are you talking about anyway?), I started putting the twins on a daytime routine a month or so ago, and it was really helping their nighttime sleep. However, putting two babies on a sleep schedule really cramps my not-so-stylish style, so as soon as I got a little bit of sleep, I resumed my regular round of friends and kids' activities and general schedule anarchy. This was (here come the excuses) exacerbated by the holidays, but I know I'd have done it anyway, because that's the self-defeating kind of person I am. So here we are, back where we started, only I'm a little more harried and desperate for a light - hell, from here I can hardly see the tunnel.

The moral of this rambling and oh-god-so-tired post is that I need to sacrifice all external activity to the sleep of the babies. I worked outside the house when my older children were babies, so I didn't really realize how restrictive it is to have to sit home essentially all day so the babies could sleep properly. So, good-bye world. I hope to see you again some day, when the babies and I are all much older and much better rested.

What was I saying?

I just logged onto Blogger and discovered that I never actually posted the 3/4 finished, mind-numbingly dull post I started on Christmas. I will spare you all the post itself and recap briefly - Christmas was really good. See how easy that was?

It's hard to post when everything in my head is either too murky and deep (to me, anyway) to nail down concretely or so utterly the opposite that I get bored while typing it, as in my original Christmas post. The babies (and I) are still not sleeping, I am still obsessing over knitting and (though the obsession is waning) cloth diapers, I still do not know what I want to be when I grow up. Over in the deeper end of the thought pool, I am slowly coming to the realization that this adulthood thing is not just a phase, that my bad hair, no makeup, overstuffed-upholstery look probably no longer counts as temporary after several years, and that I may have to actually take steps in the direction of my goals and dreams (whatever those may be) if I ever want to realize any of them. I seem to be lying in the road, waiting for life to come and run me over, rather than choosing a direction. Or something along those metaphorical lines. This all sounds rather depressing typed out, but I'm feeling contemplative about it all, not despairing. Right this minute, anyway.

Oh look, something shiny - my husband just put in a movie. I begin to suspect that part of my lack of direction stems from a chronic lack of focus.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

I got a lot more sleep last night. My fabulous friend Cole gave me excellent advice regarding the wretched lovely babies, my fabulous friend Karen brought me food, and my fabulous husband and mother cleaned the whole house. Everything is pretty much ready for Christmas, and so I am, finally, getting into the spirit. So much so, in fact, that I just made homemade hot chocolate for the boys and their friends, because they're watching Polar Express.

Wow, it's harder to write a post when I'm not grumpy. That probably says a lot about me, but I'm not going to go too introspective right now. I'm just going to enjoy the twins napping, the boys getting along, and the ability to read 3 straight pages of a book with minimal interruption.

For sale: two slightly used babies

The babies aren't sleeping. I know, babies don't sleep, especially. It's not like it's unexpected. However, this week they're taking it to extremes, and I'm discovering that sleep is like water - go without it for a surprisingly short time and you're done for. Every day without it is exponentially worse than the day before.

The longest I've slept this week is one two-hour nap in the middle of the day. At night, each baby is getting up every one to two hours, resulting in 8-10 interruptions per 8 hours in bed. I lie in bed, hating life, doing the math of my exhaustion. I dream in sharp shards, broken from the whole, in which I scream and scream. I wake up angry that I didn't get the chance to scream for real and fall back to sleep searching for the thread I keep losing. I dream of dying creatures, of blood and danger, of fury and desperation. During the day, I feel my thoughts slow to a crawl and my forehead crease several times a day as I try to remember what really happened and what was just a dream fragment. I search for words and come up with nothing and my sentences trail off into futility.

And now, I have to stop writing so I can go grocery shopping and clean and decorate. Happy holidays!

They like me, they really like me

I know this makes me a dork (like it's the only thing that does, ha), but I'm always a little surprised when my kids show a really strong preference for me over other people. I mean, I love them more than anything, but why do they love ME so much? There are definitely nicer moms out there - my kids even know some of them - but still they choose me, to show off their block towers or Christmas songs or silly faces.

For that matter, why do I love them so much? I'm sure there are other kids in the world who are smarter, prettier, quieter (god knows) than my kids, but I like mine best of all the children in the world. You really do just jump through the looking glass when you have kids, to a world where logic and reason take a back seat when they make it on the bus at all.

I really, really, really need to clean my house. Stupid dirt.

Another baby video

Boy twin just cracks me up.

I love my husband

Cleaning out the basement today was like being an archeologist. We peeled back layers of baby crap, bigger kid crap, and our own crap, and under it all were lingering remnants of my ex-husband, with whom I formerly lived in this house. When my current husband and I moved here four years ago, we had to rent a dumpster just to clean out my ex's crap - and I actually do mean crap, there was dog shit in the attic AND the basement, among other horrors of housekeeping that make me look very Martha Stewart in comparison. After I left him, he took in a series of seriously sketchy roommates/boarders, some of whom kept pit bulls. Mercifully, no one was ever grieviously injured, since I was still on the deed and mortgage.

Back to today - the last evidence of my ex's trashy friends' scary dogs was a giant rusted dog cage in the basement. We didn't dispose of it when we moved here because the dumpster was too full, so today seemed like a good time to get rid of it. I assumed we could just collapse it, but when I went to take a closer look, I discovered that the top was held to the body of the cage with no fewer than four locked padlocks. What kind of beast were they caging down there??? And what is the appeal of having man-eating pets anyway? And who keeps a pet in the basement? Oh, right, my ex.

Which reminds me. I really, really love my husband.

Ah, memories

We rented a dumpster to clean out the gigantic dump our basement has become, and we are spending the day emptying the house into it. It would be much more efficient just to tip the house on its side and let everything shake out, but we haven't been able to design a mechanism. This is the most physical labor I've done in ages, and I'm unsurprised to discover that nope, I still don't enjoy exercise.

During breaks from the gulag, we're watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (for roughly the 9,349th time). My husband's favorite part is when Johnny Depp (doesn't just his name give you shivers? I loooove him) says "don't touch that squirrel's nuts!" I proceeded to explain the double entendre to my five year old. You may think five is a bit young, but I have two scarring memories centered around not knowing slang, and I'm not going to let my children be similarly scarred.

Memory 1: 4th grade. Ms. McKinley's class. Jesus, how did I remember that? Anyway, the boys had a daily routine of coming into home room and proceeding to pretend to kick each other, all yelling "don't kick me in the nuts!" Wanting to join in, one day I ALSO yelled, "don't kick ME in the nuts either!" The whole class fell silent, then began laughing at me as one. It was so mortifying, this only started being funny to me sometime around last week.

Memory 2: Whenever Like a Virgin came out. During gymnastics class (my most vivid memories of gymnastics, by the way, have to do with having to do my stupid vocabulary homework while my sister had her class. Doesn't it seem cruel and unusual to make children copy entries from the dictionary?). With Madonna singing overhead, the cool girls in the class started giggling and saying "are you a virgin?" to everyone. When they got to me, I said "NO!" very emphatically, as I had no idea what a virgin was but knew it sounded like something I wanted no part of.

There is some life lesson I learned from these awful blunders, but the family is gearing up to go back outside, so I'd better wrap it up. I so do not want to be a garbage man when I grow up.

One year ago today...

I used to do this borderline-OCD calendar thing in my head, where I constantly calculated where I was and what I was doing yesterday, last week, last month, last year, etc - it was a little tiring, but I always had sort of a handle on the relative timing of things. I still do it to a smaller extent, for big stuff. One year ago was a big stuff day - it was the day of my first ultrasound, when we saw not one but two little peanut shaped babies. I was not yet 8 weeks pregnant, but I saw the two sacs with their bitty little residents as plain as day, even before the technician turned to us and said "twins?" As if we already knew and could confirm it for her. I can vividly picture my husband's face as it drained of color, and I remember saying "fuck. oh shit, sorry, damn it," as I tried to process what she was saying.

Sometimes, it still feels strange that there are two of them. I don't know if it would seem more or less strange if they were identical. They are as different as they can be, both physically and behaviorally, but I can't imagine having had only one of them. I'd better stop now before I wax (more) maudlin. It's just hard to believe it's already been a year.
















Incidentally, are these not the cutest diapers alive?

Bulimia by proxy

I weighed myself this morning and discovered that I've lost four pounds since Thanksgiving. This seems incredibly unlikely, since my evening food routine involves dinner, then dessert, then a snack, then another dessert, and sometimes another snack. Then I realized that boy twin has been eating a LOT lately, and is a huge vomiter, so it's really like he's having bulimia FOR me - he takes all my calories, then pukes them up. I knew I liked him (although the vomit smell is a bit much at times).

The Sound of Music - a comedy

We are introducing the children to The Sound of Music. I do love this movie, but haven't seen it in a while and did not fully appreciate how much laughter it would generate. It started yesterday, when my husband told the five year old that the man in this movie "has a TON of kids." I pointed out that the Captain actually has only one more child than we do, and my husband actually paled as he muttered something and left for work.

Then, we were just watching it again (we go in movie streaks around here) and were on the wedding scene, which prompted this conversation between me and the 5 year old:

Boy: Are the children going to laugh?
Me: No, why?
Boy: Because they're going to kiss.

Okay, mildly funny. But then there was this, apparently prompted by the multitude of wee von Trapps:

Boy: If you don't want to have another baby, you have to give me real money, and it better be $55.
Me: How are you going to keep me from having another baby?
Boy: (pause) I don't know. Okay, you'd better not marry another man.
Me: I don't want to marry another man, I want to be married to Daddy forever.
Boy: (pause again) Well, you'd better not use daddy to put a sperm in you.

I believe I choked at that point, ending the conversation. I swear, the word sperm is the silliest thing ever, and it's even funnier coming from a little kid.

Incidentally, did you know that the real-life von Trapp descendents are a singing group? I saw them on The View the other day (much to my husband's horror, I watch The View occasionally now. So sue me, I like Rosie O'Donnell).

Today, I love my children

I got sleep! Eight blissful hours with only three interruptions. Love, love, love my children. I was up and showered before 8:30 and I feel human. I'm even planning on leaving the house today. I love sleep. Really, really love it.

I'm so rested, I decided to venture into the world of YouTube and share this video of boy twin attacking a doll. Boy cracks me up. Enjoy!

Iraq - not going so well, after all

I've been watching the Iraq Study Group report and feeling just the tiniest smidge of optimism. At first blush, it seems that the group really looked at the situation in a bipartisan fashion without preconceived notions. And shockingly, their conclusions are pretty much the polar opposite of what we've been hearing from the Bush administration as recently as this past election - we are not winning, it is not almost over, staying the course is not going to work. Yes, most people watching the news probably already knew all that, but it's reassuring somehow to hear official-type people acknowledging it.

That rambling, inarticulate paragraph was prised unwilling from my shutting-down brain. My thoughts are doing a kind of reverse evolution. Watching the report, I was thinking "ooo, good. Good man. Good report." Short words, unembellished reactions. I feel like a cave person, intent only on survival. At some point, some day, I must. get. some. sleep. My friend asked how I was this morning and I burst into tears. I'm not proud, but I'm not ashamed either, as that's too complicated an emotion for my cavewoman brain. My only emotion right now is tired (yes, it can grow into an emotion), with an occasional side of hungry and at least one daily round with despair. Don't I sound like a hoot? Tell me you don't want to come party with me.

My husband is a genius

In other news, my husband FIXED THE VAN. I can't tell you how impressed I am. Hurray for him!

I know, the obvious thing would be to have sex with him, but I'm afraid that's still pretty unlikely. I will, however, make a very nice dinner.

An email from my father-in-law

My father-in-law, in an obvious (and successful) attempt to scar me for life, just sent me the following email:

In a recent article in the New England Medical Journal, it was confirmed the negative impact a lack of sex (LOS, as we call it in the other households) has on family life. In an earlier post, I think you compared SEX to SKYDIVING - OK for nuts like your F-I-L, but not for you. In this article, the confirmed ramifications: no sleep; kids get on your nerves; a heavy and ongoing appetite and breast infections. If I would have read the entire article, I might have found the part about Chevy Venture electrical car failure! Advice: Do what you have to do to take one for the team - happier husband, cure your 3 year old acting like a terrorist, twins content at the breasts - and lower food budget. Do what it takes to resolve this untenable situation! Also, give some props to the Rav-4.

I laughed until I had tears in my eyes, but how am I supposed to face him at Christmas now??? And do you the last sentence means that he thinks I should have sex with the RAV? And what the hell was he doing reading medical journals, anyway? So many questions, so little opportunity to erase this from my memory.

I am a shadow of my former self

Not physically, of course - physically, I am my former self plus like a linebacker or something (and not one of those fit linebackers - one of the ones who eat for whatever football people do instead of spring training - I only know baseball, but those guys aren't fat enough for this comparison). But whatever is actually me - personality or whatever - that seems to be fading into greys and blacks. My poor three year old just said "mom, laugh at me," instead of the more traditional "mom, look at me," because I'm about as flat and lively as a pancake. Mmmm, pancakes.

So, since I'm whining anyway - my car won't start this morning. I hereby officially advise you to never, ever consider purchasing a piece of shit Chevrolet Venture minivan. I loathe our van, and the loathing began four years ago in just this fashion. It wouldn't start when it was cold. After only 3 or 4 times, the crappy fixit people figured out it was an electrical problem. They fixed it and boom, our windows no longer rolled down. We lived with that until spring, decided we needed fresh air, and had it fixed - boom, no more TV. That damn thing was expensive and our children are wretched on car trips, so we got it fixed and (you guessed it) BOOM, no brake/reverse lights. We tried several times before the warranty ran out to have those repaired, but no luck. Just last week, we made one more effort - $365 later, the lights work! And now...the car doesn't start when it's cold. Tadaaaaaaa. Naturally, Chevy says there has been no link between all of these electrical problems, and that it is mere coincidence that something breaks every. time. they fix something. Stupid American cars. I think we should prop up the car manufacturers with tax breaks! Oh, wrong topic.

Also, my three year old has become a violent terror and I may be getting a breast infection. And, just in case you could not tell from my perky demeanor, I'm still not sleeping.

The toughest person on my Christmas list

We are pretty low on cash these days (translation: bordering on panic at our financial state), so we're trying to do Christmas frugally but while still enjoying the togetherness and joy, blah blah blah. We've had our tree up since October, actually (because that's when Tivoli visited and I always make her put it up), and I've almost finished all of our shopping, courtesy of a sharply curtailed list. All I really have left to do is provide our wish lists to my husband's family for their name draw, and for some reason this has me stymied. How is it possible that I am the hardest person for me to buy for? How is it possible that I am not correcting that atrocity of a sentence? Truly, I am exhausted.

My friend very kindly made me buy some clothes for myself last week (and none too soon, as the hem is ripping out of one of my two pairs of yoga pants, and the world does not need to see me naked these days), but that was the first time in ages that I've bought something for myself. All I can think of that I want is cloth diapers and yarn to make things for the kids. When did I become this person who doesn't want anything? It's very strange. All I buy for myself is food, and I buy altogether too much of that. I need to start channeling some of my eating money and energy into a healthier hobby. Like exercising. HA. My doctor actually asked me at my annual physical the other day if I've been exercising regularly. I guess my physique fooled him. I'm cracking myself up. The dumb shit even has twins himself, and still asked if I'm exercising. I'm barely breathing these days, I'm so beat. Idiot.

But back on topic - what the hell do I want for $40? Any suggestions? Anyone who knows me better than I do?

This really dull post took forfreakingever to type

Wow, I haven't posted in days, who knew? Does it help that I've written oodles of posts in my head? That I, in fact, already mentally wrote this one, with a catchy title I can not now remember, and pithy wittiness that now escapes me? Pithy is a goofy word, and makes me feel lispy when I say it. Pithy, pithy, pithy. Also, I can't type it properly - instead, I type "pity" each and every time and have to go back and edit. See, this is not the post I wrote earlier, as this one sort of sucks.

I'm still on the loopier end of sleep deprived. The Geneva Convention definitely does not permit this kind of torture (or at least it did not before the current administration decided it doesn't so much apply to us), and I think someone should come charge my twins with war crimes. I had a couple better nights, but last night was the worst yet, and I have not even the slightest thought of getting dressed or trying to operate heavy machinery today. I did foolishly undertake a redesign of my boys' room, since my husband is here to help, and I have two smashed fingers to show for it. I am also planning to roast a chicken later (my dreams are lofty), and I just know I'm going to end up burning the crap out of myself. I'm clumsy enough without being exhausted, and I'm at the stage now where I can't remember which conversations I've had in real life versus those in dreams, I'm jumpy and paranoid, and I'm seeing colorful spots. And apparently I really can not type, as I've had to use the backspace more than the letter keys during this post. It's really annoying the crap out of me, so I'm going to stop writing now.

I am laundry impaired

Usually, my mother does the laundry. This is only one of many reasons I should be grateful for my life and stop bitching already. Today, however, I got a wild hair and decided I would pitch in. Everyone likes a break sometimes, right? And after a year solid of my poor mother doing every load, I thought I'd be magnanimous and do a couple loads. Plus, I love the word magnanimous.

I actually do wash the diapers usually (sometimes. occasionally.), so I did those first. Having drawn first blood against the laundry onslaught (bear w/the bizarrely exagerrated metaphors here, I'm very, very tired), I got cocky. I moved on to adult clothes. And forgot to add detergent.

Ha ha, right? As I moved my wet but not clean clothes to the dryer and realized my mistake, I had enough grace to laugh at myself. Since I'm fairly dangerous these days, mood-wise, I think self-mockery is big of me. I had already moved most of the clothes when I realized I'd forgotten the detergent, and I decided just to go ahead and dry them. It's not like WE poop in our clothes, you know? And there's certainly some detergent residue or something in the washer. And they were already in the dryer. I put in an extra fabric softener sheet, so we should be good, right?

Then I moved on to my next mistake. Having screwed up the adult clothes, I decided the babies would feel left out if I didn't screw up their clothes. I put the clothes in, then reached for the special no-real-soap-in-it baby laundry soap. It looked a little strange when I poured it out, but full speed ahead, man, I can't be bothered to pause when there's a chance I can compound a mistake! After dumping in the giant capful of liquid, I looked at the bottle. Dreft? Um, no. Liquid fabric softener. What the fuck. I swear to god, I've never used liquid fabric softener. I've never even bought liquid fabric softener. And why the hell is it in a pastel-ly girly looking dreft-like container, anyway? Stupid deceptive fabric softener people, dressing their bottles like detergent and secreting it into my basement while I sleep. Once again, I decided to just roll with the mistake - I added a capful of actual dreft for good measure and started the machine. Those are going to be some soft clothes.

Sometimes I consider that I'm missing, a bit, that sense of accomplishment that can come from an out-of-the-house job with regular feedback and performance appraisal. And then something like this happens, and I'm just grateful there isn't anyone to appraise me, after all.

The whiniest post alive

My posts seem to be tapering off. It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's that everything I have to say is whiny. Seems bad enough to inflict that on my long-suffering family, so I've been trying to avoid dumping it on the world at large. I can't tell if I'm really depressed or just hideously sleep deprived. Just when I was thinking this twin thing was manageable, my good sleeper stopped sleeping. So that makes, for those of you who, like me, are having trouble with basic math these days, two little people who don't sleep. At all, really. Parents aren't supposed to have favorites, and I don't, really, but I have a couple least favorites right now. Bet you can guess who they are!

I seem to be full of half-baked ideas. My mental dialogue (shouldn't one, in the ideal, have a mental monologue? I mean, how crazy do I want to be?) is on overdrive, skittering from one thing to another and thinking nothing through. I go from what's to lunch to what's for Christmas to an idea for a twin invention (I think this one might actually be something, can't lose it among the mental chatter) to the nagging list of things that must be done at some point to the imperative NOT to knock my kids' heads together even though they richly deserve it to the growing, desperate need for sleep. It always comes back to sleep. Without sleep, the rest of the noise is just going to have to remain noise. I'm actually losing the power of speech due to exhaustion, so energetic parenting, Christmas preparation, and tackling the to-do list will have to wait until what, 2009? when I'm a little rested.

Aren't you glad I broke silence? Are you not entertained???

I'm thankful for...other adults

I do truly lead a charmed life, a fact that is being brought home to me forcibly at the moment. I have a truckload of children, but I also have an incredibly helpful mother and a very supportive husband right here on site, as well as wonderful friends, so I almost always have assistance. At the moment, however, my mother is taking a well-deserved nap and my husband is at the store, and the four youngest children and I are engaged in a Lord of the Flies style battle for survival. I'm bigger, but they have the numbers advantage. I think I'm toast.

So, I'm thankful for the other adults in my life - thank you!

I suppose I'm really, deep down, also thankful for the children. I got the twins gussied up today for a very amateur photo shoot. See how cute they are? (Note: girly has a disgusting cold, she's not usually quite this pink or puffy).

I have a hot bottom

I was sitting in my usual position like a lump on the couch this morning until I was rudely called away by one of the twins (it was hungry or something, they're so demanding). My 3 year old scooted immediately into my vacated spot and declared, "Mom, I love your hot bottom!" I guess my gigantic ass has found its purpose - as a seat-warmer for the boy.

Don't be a jerk!

The people at M&T Stadium must be my kind of parents, and they definitely have a handle on crowd control. My husband and I took the twins to a Ravens game today, courtesy of free tickets from his company. During the opening ceremonies, or whatever the hoopla before the game is called, there was a long lecture about how to behave ourselves. We were informed that disruptive people would be ejected from the game and that second offenders would lose their season tickets. Then the lecture was summed up with a giant "DON'T BE A JERK," which all of the regular attendees shouted along with the announcer. I so want to ingrain that in my kids, too.

Unfortunately, some of my fellow attendees must have been late to the game and missed the reminder. I took girl twin to the bathroom for a diaper change, and no fewer than 4 people took it upon themselves to tell me that my daughter was not dressed appropriately for the weather. For the record - it was 55 degrees out with no wind or rain, and she was wearing a long-sleeved, long-pants onesie under fleece underalls under a hooded jacket plus socks and slippers and a goddamned blanket. Frostbite was not a danger. Oh, and? NOT YOUR BUSINESS. Seriously, what is wrong with people??? I wish I had had the presence of mind to repeat the Ravens' advice and tell each of them "don't be a jerk." Jerks.

Other than the jerks, I had a wonderful time. I have only recently (read: since I started winning the football pool) become remotely interested in football, and it was a lot of fun sort of understanding the game and feeling the energy of all the insane fans. It was all the more surprising because the day didn't start so auspiciously. We spent an hour looking for parking, during which we drove by "lots" that looked to be temporarily converted industrial driveways with obvious ex-cons (not all that ex, either, from the looks of things) holding handwritten, misspelled cardboard signs advertising parking for only FORTY DOLLARS. Over half a mile from the stadium. In a neighborhood so bad it has been largely responsible for Baltimore's reputation for violence. One of the "lots" had an OPEN FLAME leaping from a rusted tin of some sort directly in front of the cars parked there. I'm guessing the "not responsible for valuables left in cars" warning is implicit here. We parked over a mile in the other direction, but for only ten dollars.

I would like to point out that I had a nearly perfect day and still managed to post almost exclusively about the two things in the whole day that pissed me off. That, my friends, is dedication to one's craft.

My emotion chip is busted

Spike TV reran the entire Star Trek: The Next Generation series while I was on bedrest and maternity leave with my eldest, and I saw every one, plus the movies. This may qualify as another odd-thing-I-love, so technically my overabundance of posts this evening are thematically linked. Anyway, one of my favorite TNG moments is when Data the android's emotion chip breaks, and his emotions go haywire. If you missed it in the movie, I could set up a webcam now and you could see my live reenactment, as I have run the gamut today and am currently laughing to the point of literal tears.

The cause of the hilarity is my five-year-old's sudden realization that getting a big fat man laden with toys down a chimney could be problematic, logistically. The conversation went something like this:

Boy: How does Santa get inside with the toys?
Me: He comes down the chimney.
Boy: Where does the chimney go?
Me: He comes out the fireplace (at this point, my mouth was already starting to twitch its impending betrayal).
Boy - runs to front room to inspect fireplace, is gone easily three full minutes, comes running back: There's no WAY Santa can get in there!

At this point, I glanced at my husband and promptly burst into gales of laughter, complete with tears. Boy proceeded to speculate that Santa may have a "pull up thing" and asked his father repeatedly to show him "where the chimney is in the fireplace."

This is almost certainly not nearly as funny to you all, but I'm still in hysterics. Kids are so dumb.

What weird things do you love?

As I was typing about my love of stationery, I noticed that boy twin's bib is embroidered and realized that I also love embroidery. What other weird things do I love? I decided to try to compile a list. I keep evaluating my mother's sanity (unasked and unwanted though my evaluation may be), so it's time to turn the lens on myself.

I love:
Stationery (not just the stuff itself but its quirky spelling)
Embroidery
Yarn
Batting (I didn't realize just how strong this was until I went through the attic recently and discovered no fewer than 8 bags of the stuff. I could upholster a....hey, a room. A padded room. Well, there's MY next home improvement project.)
Cloth diapers (there is a LONG post on these brewing, I warn you now - best of all, naturally, are embroidered cloth diapers)
Old timey photos
The Importance of Being Earnest, the old film version (we used to watch this and Anne of Green Gables every year at Christmas, so I think of them as Christmas movies, is that weird?)
Pottery (but I never know what to do with it once I have it)
Baskets (ditto the above)
SkeeBall

That's all I can come up with off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are more. Maybe it's not a good idea to look too closely inside one's own head. Oh, hey, that's my blog name! I knew that phrase sounded familiar.

I'm going to go knit now and contemplate the possibility that my keel isn't entirely back to even just yet.

ETA: Doing taxes, paying bills, and lace! I knew I was forgetting some!

I love it when bad things happen to bad people

I only truly hate two people in the whole world. Okay, three if you count George Bush, but a) I'm not sure he's really so much a person as an evil creature whose corporeal being has been trapped in a painting in exchange for his immortal soul, and b) mercifully, I don't know him personally. So, I only truly hate two people I actually know. I can't go into details, because I don't want to unduly offend people I DO like who just have a blind spot where one or both of these two blights on humanity are concerned, but one of them has been painting him/herself into a corner in a way that makes me a real believer in karma, and new evidence of said corner-painting has just come to life. And it makes me very, very happy. Schadenfreude, thy name is - well, me.

In other news - my violent mood swings seem to be dying down a bit, and everyone in my household is still alive and speaking to me, so I should begin a public speaking tour on self-control immediately. I actually showered, dressed, and left the house today. Yay me! The tutoring thing isn't working out after all, as the company in question has decided to require teacher's certificates for tutors they pay peanuts (even by teachers' standards), and my education came to an abrupt and almost certainly permanent halt the moment I had my bachelor's degree in my hot little hands. I was never really cut out for education and all the focus it requires. Focus is not my strong suit. What the hell IS my strong suit, anyway? Oh well. So, I'm exploring other avenues. I sent in an application today for a part time job in a soon-to-be-opened stationery shop. I love stationery (which is odd, as I kind of hate writing letters), and the pay is decent, and the job starts after the holidays, so this is promising. Also, the children are not bugging me lately. I'm not sure whether to credit their actual behavior or lower standards on my part, but I'll take it.

Most of all, though, I'm just unseemingly gleeful about the bad-things-to-bad-people development. Take that!

Bite me, AdSense

I have discovered the secret to generating traffic to one's blog, and the secret is...liberally sprinkle the word (?) weffriddles throughout your entries. It's a world gone mad, especially since the mean forum moderators over at weffriddles (that's right, I said it again, come to me, weffriddles searchers) deleted all the help threads and started them from scratch. Mercifully, they did so after I lost interest (read: gave up) in the game. I am happy to report that I have helped TWO people with their weffriddles woes just today. What can I say? I'm a giver.

So, why do I hate AdSense? Because I, like so many others, dream of an income with no work. An income generated from the comfort of my couch, on my own schedule. This is the true American dream, money for nothing (and chicks for free, the voices in my head insist I add, although I am not a lesbian. Not that there's anything wrong with that.). Blogger tells me (lies, all lies) to add AdSense to my blog for fun and profit. What it does not tell me is that my husband accidentally clicked one of the ads on his own blog a year or so ago and got himself banned from AdSense. Himself...and everyone he knows. Or at least me. Because AdSense, my friends, does not know that more than one person can live in the same house. Did YOU know that more than one person can live in the same house? So many people live in this house, in fact, that I can go days without so much as seeing my husband, and I promise I was not complicit in his conspiracy to rob AdSense of $.00001, or whatever the going rate is for a click these days.

This leaves me with no alternative but to find actual gainful employment, as our property taxes conveniently coincide with Christmas. I submitted a letter of interest to an actual publishing company to write an actual book (!), but as I have zero published clips with which to convince them of my brilliance, I'm going to put just the one egg in that basket and the rest into a much more promising part time tutoring gig. Look at me, earning my keep. I've already been online, looking at all the new cloth diapers I'll be able to afford. It's a sickness, really.

While I'm on the topic of writing (I'll have to do a whole separate post on the addictive glory that is cloth diapering), I just realized I really need to wrap this up and work instead on notes for a term paper on women's labor in Latin America and the Caribbean. Don't ask.

My mental health: questionable

I seem to be doing another round with the hormones of fury these past few days. I've battled them before (after my other children were born) and, in retrospect, sort of had my ass kicked, so I feel qualified to self-diagnose the special kind of crazy post-partumness brings. It's sneaky - I truck along, feeling more and more normal, rejoining regular life, fine...fine...fine...oh, shit, I've been run over by a giant hormone truck! And then it's too late. Though never too late for melodrama, clearly.

On the bright side, people all around me are doing stunningly well. Cole just got into nursing school (yay Cole!). Girl twin has rolled over three times in the past 24 hours (and is therefore obviously on her way to genius). Best of all (for me), my husband verbally wrestled the rat bastards at Cavalier to a defeat in which they agreed to write a letter to their assorted collections minions verifying that we do NOT, in fact, owe them money, that they, having actually sent us a flipping refund check, simply have no functioning accountant-type people on staff. Yay, husband! God, this doesn't mean I have to do something unnatural, does it?

That reminds me, I promised Cole I would post this. She and I were (naturally) discussing sex the other day. I said I'm not opposed to it on principle, it's like sky-diving - fine for other people, just not for me. Isn't my husband just the luckiest man alive???

Offer: Weffriddles assistance

I see from my friendly neighborhood statcounter that a lot of people are coming here from a Google search for Weffriddles. Now, if anyone can relate to the desperate red-eyed late night search for weffriddles help, it is I, so I hereby offer to help with levels 1-53. I'm afraid that on level(s) 54, I met my match, and the difficulty outweighed my own obsessive nature (if anyone wants to help me with 54, that is more than welcome!).

So, if you need help, just leave me a comment with the level number and your email address, and I'll get back to you (probably quickly, as I am never far from online - think that has anything to do with the lingering baby weight?). I am nothing if not a giver.

Strange things are afoot at the...dollar store

And for my 3rd post of the day...

So...I went to the dollar store just before it closed, on an emergency laundry basket run (the emergency being that now *I* am doing some laundry - when my mother was doing all of it, another laundry basket was more of a when-I-get-around-to-it shopping item). When I walked into the store, I saw some of the employees clustered around the front door chattering sort of excitedly, but I ignored them and went looking for the baskets. I shopped for a few minutes, then got in the checkout line and started eavesdropping in earnest. When I heard the clerk tell the woman in front of me that the police were on their way, I interrupted to ask her to take it from the top.

Here's the story, as told to me by the dollar store clerk/manager - shortly before I arrived, a man came into the store with a bulge under his coat and was acting odd. The manager followed him to the back of the store and asked if he needed help, and he said that he had a gun and was a police officer (at this point in the story, I asked why on earth a normal person would volunteer that he had a gun and said "I'm wearing underwear, but I didn't tell you that" - I am so amusing to myself). The manager, acting with much more presense of mind than I'd have had for sure, asked him for a badge, which he said he must have left in his car.

The manager went back to the front of the store, presumably to call the police, just as a cop car pulled through the parking lot on patrol. She asked the officer to come in and check out the weird guy, which he did, even patting him down but finding nothing. The cop left (if I were the manager, I'd be thinking 'thanks, cop! for leaving me with a psycho!'), and the weirdo filled a cart with stuff and came to the front. The manager rang up everything and gave him the total, and the guy reached for his wallet, couldn't find it, and started yelling that the cop had stolen it. He got loud and aggressive with the manager, so she called 911 and he fled.

By the time I heard this story, the manager had been waiting over 10 minutes for the police, and the guy was who knows where. Perhaps the police were busy fining errant trash bags. All I know is that I skittered back to my car with as much haste and alertness as I could muster, and that I am not going to the dollar store at night any more.

The end.

I am the best stepmother ever

According to my stepdaughter, shown here, who also said "I love you from here to the sun and back again."

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I had just given her the large super-cool homemade (not by me) dollhouse shown in the background of this picture.

I'm on a roll with the children. Yesterday, I asked the 5 year old, also shown here, what he would wish for if he could have anything at all. His answer? "I don't need anything but you to be happy." I actually teared up.

More recent pictures, since I finally remembered to upload them:

Girl twin, aka the prettiest pretty princess, age 4 months:











Boy twin, sporting his fancy diaper and tattooed stomach:















3 year old, aspiring soccer star:














The 7 year old seems to have avoided the camera this round, I'll be sure to target him for next time. Back later with a story of my evening's adventure to the dollar store - it was more eventful than I had anticipated.

Who, exactly, is ANTI-health

Here's some more insight into my own singular screwiness (or maybe I'm not alone in this after all) - one of my small but profound joys is opening a new tube of toothpaste. I prolong the excitement for as long as possible, squeezing out the last smidge of old toothpaste so I can feel like I really earned the new tube. Okay, this sounds even nuttier written out, so I'm going to move on.

This morning was a new toothpaste morning. Not only did I get to open a new tube, but it was even a new kind of toothpaste, since I buy what's on sale and refuse to get brand loyal about something we spit out. Today's variety? Crest Pro-Health.

As I brushed (and I must say, there's something gritty in this paste that makes your teeth feel dentist fresh), I mulled over the name and the subtext of calling one's product or politics "pro" anything. It has always annoyed me that the anti-abortion faction calls themselves "pro-life." Rendering the rest of us, I suppose, anti-life. I don't know about the rest of you choicers, but I rarely go about like godzilla, wiping out cities and civilizations (though god knows, it sounds appealing some days, specifically when I am stuck behind someone going TWENTY-FIVE on the freeway, but I digress). I am not anti-life, I am anti-you-not-minding-your-own-business. So there.

A-HA! you thought this was about toothpaste, but it has morphed into still more politics. Even I'm surprised this time, I really did think I was writing about toothpaste. I appear to be still in the getting-to-know-you phase with myself. How troubling.

Wow, this is a boring post

What did I find to write about before the election? I'm just sure I'm capable of other thoughts than politics and other emotions than jubilation, but it's hard to remember what, exactly. Things in my own life carry on as normal, hardly note-worthy - two kids on antibiotics, one twin not sleeping, far too much sugar being consumed by me. We went out of town for my husband's reunion and I wore the shirt my fabulous friend Cole got me and it was just right, and we had a lot of fun. I didn't think someone else's reunion could be all that entertaining, but I met another wife who was a complete riot and just glommed onto her all night. This week, we went out to dinner with another couple, then the next night had a friend over for dinner, and tonight I'm meeting friends for drinks with no children. It's been a year now since I got pregnant with the twins, and I'd nearly forgotten the ordinary pleasures and irritations of regular life.

I've started two other posts, but both have fizzled before launch. I don't seem to have much focus. I'm happy but vague, and obviously not incredibly interesting. I have to post something, though, or I'll get in a rut, and I don't want to deprive you all of this level of excitement.

Did I say I was done blogging about politics?

Whoops, my bad.

I was up until 1 watching returns, then got up from 4-5 with a variety of urine-soaked children (when it pees, it pours) and watched the returns again. I'm so hopeful about the senate I could wet myself and make it a pee trifecta. They just called Montana for the Democrats and Virginia's just waiting on a recount. Yay!

AND, Rumsfield resigned, and Bush's rambling inarticulate press conference had undertones of intentions to cooperate with the new legislature. I'd better check the calendar, I had no IDEA it was my birthday.

One more rant, before the election is over

I wish I'd found this article sooner, although who knows what good it would have done me. It's long, it's slanted, it's written colloquially, but it's still worth reading. It gives a lot of information about how badly Congress has been failing to fulfill its obligations these past six years, and a lot of reasons why it has gone well beyond business as usual. I don't see how anyone really looking at the evidence here (overlook the tone if you can and just look at the verifiable facts contained within) can say that both political parties are the same. This particular batch of Republicans is unique, and not in a good way.

One brief excerpt, although I really do encourage everyone to read the whole thing:

[The ranking minority member of the Government Reform Committee has produced a] lengthy document detailing all of the wrongdoing by the Bush administration that should have been investigated -- and would have been, in any other era. The litany of fishy behavior left uninvestigated in the Bush years includes the manipulation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees, the leak of Valerie Plame's CIA status, the award of Halliburton contracts, the White House response to Katrina, secret NSA wiretaps, Dick Cheney's energy task force, the withholding of Medicare cost estimates, the administration's politicization of science, contract abuses at Homeland Security and lobbyist influence at the EPA.

This is not to say that I believe there are no good Republicans - I think there are. Unfortunately, I believe that the good ones have been just as marginalized by this administration and this Congress as the Democrats and Independents (and the American people, for that matter). I am writing this as a form of virtual nail-biting while I wait for election results, hoping that a lot of good conservative Americans looked at the facts of the past six years and voted against party and in favor of democracy.

I promise, I will try very hard to stop now, and return to stories about my children and the special brand of idiot that I encounter every time I leave the house (I think I emit a special idiot-attracting phermone). Thank you all for your patience (especially you, Meg!).

Please Vote!

I have a bunch of life-update posts in my head - my weekend (good), boy baby's health (better), the joy of taking 4 children to a 2 hour doctor appointment (predictably, none). I have new thoughts about my personal lack of life-direction and on parenting and on knitting (okay, that last one is slightly less deep, yet infintely more entertaining to me). However, it is the night before election, and all I'm really feeling is a fervent fearful hope.

I've been making some get-out-the-vote type calls for MoveOn.org. It's nice to feel like maybe I'm helping a little, and it's interesting to discover regional differences. In Ohio, they listen before they hang up on you. In Pennsylvania, they curse at you before they hang up on you. In Florida, they are 95, named Bessie, and talk your ear off until you're ready to hang up on them. I don't know that I really affected anyone I spoke with in any way, but one thing that encouraged me is that everyone I spoke with said they were planning to vote.

The US typically has abysmal voter turnout. If everyone voted, and the consensus was that people I loathe are the best ones to run the country, I would at least have the comfort of knowing the bastards were duly elected by the actual people. In 2002, only 39.7 of eligible voters even bothered (according to these guys), which means all the egregious abuses of power in the past 4 years weren't even really sanctioned by most of us. So, while I would love to say "vote for change!" or even "vote for anyone who will not just do whatever Bush wants!" I will instead simply say "vote." Please, please vote.

This midterm election is one of the most important in my lifetime. Traditionally, the whole checks and balances thing between governmental branches works pretty well, because a) the sitting President's party usually takes a hit during midterms and b) the Executive branch usually opts to observe existing laws. This is a different day and age on both counts - the Republicans have had control of Congress through both Bush administrations, and the Bush adminstration has, as a result, become really bold in its disregard for the law. For the government to function as it's designed, we really need to have a better leash on the Executive, and tomorrow's our chance.

There are two schools of thought about how to vote (if not more - this is likely a gross oversimplification). One school votes for the candidate whose platform they support most, even if that candidate is an unelectable dark horse. The other votes not so much for one candidate as against another. As is my Piscean way, I ride the fence, usually following school B but wishing for two votes so I could devote one to the poor underdogs who I would love to see in office. This year, I'll be sticking mostly with Plan B, so great is my hope for change and fear/loathing of the status quo.

I have been trying to write this for over an hour, through interruptions that only small children can imagine and through the fog of my own beleagured brain. I wish once more for eloquence and a bigger podium. I wish, above all, that I had valium or at least some hard liquor to get me through the next 24 hours. Despite myself, I have allowed hope to creep in, and I fear the letdown I'll feel if I wake up Wednesday to the prospect of two more years of unchecked dictatorial Presidential rule.

Anatomy of a breakdown

I've been trying to hold it together, honestly. I strive for an extra level of self-awareness to compensate for the wacky post partum and breastfeeding hormones that are trying to kill me. I try to compensate when I feel like clubbing baby animals or hiding in the closet or driving into walls, and so far, all animals, closets, and cars are accounted for, so I can't be doing too badly, right?

Just this week, I have had to deal with several sick children, court for stupid environmental fines, and my 5 year old hating school. Yes, I know, there are many worse things happening to many (most) people in the world, but through the lens of my looming post partum nuttiness, this has all felt really overwhelming. But! Until today, I've been carrying on, however gracelessly. Now I believe I have met my Waterloo in the form of my own fat.

After twin B's doctor appointment this morning (more on that later if I ever tire of whining about my own sorry self), I ran out to Target to make one last attempt to find an outfit for my husband's reunion. My friend Cole already found a lovely shirt, but I'm apparently looking for an outfit with magical properties that will transform me into my own mental self-image, which seems to be stuck around age 23 and size 8.

So, I went shopping. I tried on much and liked little. I found a suitably non-hideous skirt, but by then my three year old had tired of the fitting room, so I grabbed a shirt off the rack without trying it on. I came home and tried everything on, and it all fits and feels good, and doesn't even look terrible in the mirror. But. Then. I couldn't convince #4 to take my picture, and I don't remember how to do the time-delay self-portrait thing, so I put the camera on video and then hustled to get in front of it, then back to turn it off. And oh my god, the horror. Not only do I look like a badly upholstered piece of furniture, but I positively WADDLE.

I'm going to change #3's name to Gilbert and just eat fried chicken until my heart gives out. And I don't even like fried chicken. Halloween candy, on the other hand...

Okay, now that that embarassing outpouring of self-pity is behind me, an update on the aforementioned challenges of the week.

Environmental fine hearing - This was surprisingly entertaining. The hearing itself was so-so - I got the fines reduced but not eliminated, but at least the judge and cop were pleasant. The entertainment came in the form of the other people waiting for hearings. While we waited, we compared notes on our fines. One woman explained what she had learned from a city employee, that ignorance of the law does not excuse breaking the law. Logical enough, right? Another woman, who was already quite animated by this point in the discussion, did not appreciate being thusly enlightened. Her response (and imagine, if you will, a rather large woman, encased in chenille and velvet, with 3" long green fingernails, a cluster of hairs erupting from a mole next to her mouth, and gold lipstick), accompanied by wild gesticulation, was "you ain't gonna call ME ignorant, okay, just because, okay, I didn't KNOW, okay, what the law was."

Okay.

I had to actually turn my head away and do the fake cough thing to keep from bursting into gales of laughter or replying that the only time you may call me ignorant is when I don't know something. I wish I could have recorded the whole exchange, it was absolutely hilarious.

Plague - We are all (minus my husband, who daily flees the house like the coward breadwinner he is, and therefore gets regular doses of germ-free air) suffering to some degree from a cold. I haven't bothered mentioning it, because a) I've been in too much of a funk to post much, and b) after the strep and rotavirus of 2 weeks ago, a cold barely merits my attention. Until today, when #6 woke up gasping for breath, coughing hoarsely, and wheezing. We went through this with #4 when he was little, so it's a little less alarming than it would otherwise be, but generally speaking, I like my children breathing, so it's still a bit nerve-wracking. I took him to the doctor, but the tricky part of this kind of thing is that it always gets worse in the evening, after the doctor is gone, so we may end up in the ER. Never a good time.

So, things here sort of low-grade suck, and tomorrow we're off to Delaware for the reunion, if #6 is well enough and I'm not either naked or in an asylum (or naked at an asylum). I know you'll miss me and my rays of sunshine!

Walking in the shoes of an addict

Not that I didn't believe in addiction before, but I have now encountered a force more powerful and compelling than blogging, eating well, paying attention to my children, obsessing about election fraud, even sleeping. If you value your sanity and your free time, do NOT click this link:


http://www.weffriddles.com

Curses to you, developers of weffriddles and enablers Megan and Keith. Curses.


In other news - if I can tear myself away from the internet-crack that is weffriddles, I have to go to court in the morning to contest our most recent batch of environmental fines. I'm pretty nervous about it, as I'm guessing that shouting "the cops aren't a homeowner's association, how about they stop harassing me and work on fighting actual crime" will not get me off the hook for the fines.

And in case I wasn't bitter enough about the Baltimore PD, today when I picked up my son from school, there was a police car in the usual pile-up of double-parked assholes in front of the school. I thought, "Oh, good! The cops are finally doing something about this street being totally blocked twice a day for 30 minutes!" But no, as it turns out, the cop was himself picking up a child, and the police car was just sitting there like the others, hazards on, blocking traffic, while he did so. Must be nice to be above the law!

Back to the riddles...

ETA: Lest you think this time has been totally wasted, I'm up to level 43. I fucking rock.

Look Who's Talking

The Look Who's Talking movies may be symptomatic of our collective mental health issues, but I do sometimes look at animals or my own small children (and really, how different are animals and small children?) and imagine what is running through their heads. I don't usually use celebrity voices in my mind, though, as I'm low budget all the way.

I first noticed this propensity in myself when I lived alone. I had ample time to observe my insane ex-cat Clio and project mental dialogue onto her, like so:

Clio (walking from the living room to the kitchen): I think it's time for a snack, or maybe I could find a nice plastic bag to chew on [one of this cat's more annoying features was a plastic fixation].
Clio (walking immediately back into the living room, having already forgotten about the quest for food): HOLY SHIT, there's a living room here! And a woman! And a TV and a couch and a plant and oh my god oh my god ACK!

Whereupon, the deranged animal would leap laterally about three feet, all fur extended outward cartoon-like, and streak from the room, only to return moments later for a repeat performance.

My now-husband and I had a boss at the Company of Suck that we likened to Clio. Every day was new to this man. He'd walk into a meeting and have that same baffled look on his face, like "where did all these people come from? what am I doing here? where did this coffee in my hand come from?" I took to communicating with him exclusively in emails, so I could refer back to our discussions in writing instead of reinventing the conversational wheel every single day.

All of this leads me to my actual point, which has to do with my husband (isn't it always such a pleasant surprise to find that I do have a point?). He is very energetic and works hard both at his job and at home, for which I am very grateful. However - he is prone to unrecoverable interruptions while working, which results in him leaving little tableaus of unfinished crap all over the house, which in turn prompts me to imagine, Look Who's Talking-style, what went through his head to lead to whatever pile is currently in front of me.

For example - this morning, I walked into the downstairs bathroom, and directly into the stepladder. Each step of the ladder contained its own pile of detritus, arranged in variously precarious positions. On one step, a hammer, dangling just on the edge of balance, waiting for a bare foot to trigger its fall and then pause just in its path. Two steps up, two nearly-full and partially-open (for maximum scattering, presumably) plastic boxes, one of screws and one of nails. Scattered among and between these primary perils, random papers with still more random scrawling in my husband's handwriting. The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" just popped into my head - at the rate I'm rambling, that may be literally true, but I'm too lazy and tired just now to take a picture, sorry.

So, here is the mental conversation I imagine my husband having that might have led to him leaving such a cluster of hazards in such a high-traffic area.

Husband (wielding a hammer, inspecting the creeping progress of the shower enclosure): This is really coming along! I think we're almost ready for the rest of the plumbing! Just think, a sink in the bathroom. Such decadence. I hope my family appreciates all this (looks out the window)...ooo, look, there's a squirrel in the yard. Shoot, that rotting pumpkin is out there (wanders toward the back door to confirm). Hope that squirrel doesn't eat it. Or a rat, I wonder if there really is a rat. I bet it was just a mouse. But the dog killed a mouse, maybe they're gone now. Oh, I bet the dog is hungry, better feed him (changes course, opens the bag of dog food. Catches sight of the thermometer in the mud room). Wow, 50 degrees in here, wonder what it is in the house? (Goes back inside, walks toward front room to check thermostat, sees the dishes on the kitchen island). I think I'll give my mother-in-law a break and do the dishes! (Opens dishwasher, puts away 3 forks and a cup). Mmm, I'm getting thirsty, wonder what we have to drink. (Opens fridge, sees that there's less than a full glass left of soda, hears the Amazing Race theme song). "Honey, pause it, I'll be right there!" (Seats self in ass print on couch, settles in for the long haul).

And so, I imagine, it followed logically that all of the tools of the bathroom work were left out like booby traps, the dog remained unfed, and the bulk of the dishes remained in the dishwasher. This is why it's so important to look at intentions, as well as actual results (god knows it necessary for anyone living with me to evaluate my contributions based at least as much on my intentions as on my actual accomplishments). I think it's actually charitable of me to attribute this monologue to my husband, rather than assuming that he's trying to kill the rest of us off with his negligence. See? I'm a nice wife.

We're so proud

My five year old (seen here when he was 3) was delightful all weekend. Really, just a joy. We had so much fun at ZooBoo, and after a great dinner, the boy voluntarily cleaned up a mess he didn't even make. So I spent extra time with him before bed, reading and talking and just enjoying his company. Just before I was ready to tuck him in, he went to the kitchen for a drink and inexplicably stopped into the downstairs bathroom-in-permanent-progress, which he usually avoids. I heard a loud thump and then a scream, and I rushed into the bathroom to find him sobbing on the floor, clutching his knees, pants around his ankles. It's so hard to comfort someone while weeping with laughter, but I did my best. I did suggest, with as straight a face as possible, that in future he pull the pants up before walking away from the toilet, and I praised him for scaring whatever vermin have been living in the basement entirely off the premises with his crash.

No, you can't have him. He's all ours.

Exhibit Y in the case against my mother's sanity

This just in from my mother, apropos of, well, nothing:

"You know the inane toilet paper pack in the downstairs bathroom?"

Oh dear, she just retrieved the toilet paper pack in question to emphasize her point, which she has just summarized as "I have never seen anything stupider on a package." It has a "roll size guide" that shows, graphically, that a single roll = 1 roll, a double roll = 2 rolls, and a triple roll = 3 rolls. Okay, I'll grant you, it's not Tolstoy, but I'm not sure I'd waste a whole lot of brain power being offended by its simplicity. I'm sure the poor cubicle dwellers at Charmin are just trying to get through each day so they can go home and numb the pain of their jobs with alcohol. Not that I'm projecting based on my own corporate experience.

And before I post again, I must get the children cleanish and dressed in costume, as we are headed for the ZooBoo today. Should be fabulous, as are all adventures in the company of six only-semi-housebroken children.

You'll put someone's eye out

I actually just said those words - "you'll put someone's eye out" - in all seriousness and with no forethought. I am officially a mother.

I was coming down the stairs with both babies, having blissfully slept in until 8 (it's the new 9, I love daylight savings), and I caught sight of my little angels just as angel #2 drew a bead on angel #4 with his plastic bow and arrow and let fly. He missed, thank goodness, but it was dangerous enough to inspire the mommyphrase above.

I stripped the oldest two boys of obvious weapons, so they moved on to rolling golf balls at each other from across the room. Sounds safe and within the rules (no throwing in the house), but #2 is rolling the ball so fast it is actually rolling UP #3 when it gets to him. I just had to tell #2, "this is not skee-ball." At least that's not one of those inane-to-children phrases like "you'll put someone's eye out."

ETA: I loathe Blogger. I've been trying to post this forever (well, like 10 minutes, but it's just a click, so technically I think 10 minutes counts as forever). Mercifully, Blogger did not eat my post - it saved it so I can view it, it just refuses to let me share it with the world. Okay, that's off my chest - back to pushing "publish post" a few hundred more times.