Goodbye, 2007

2007 is ending with a whine for me, instead of a bang or a whimper. Well, there may be a little whimpering. I have seamlessly (though not soundlessly) transitioned from fever and mucus to fever and stomach cramps (with some residual mucus), all compounded by a hellish visit from, how shall I put this, (cover your eyes, father-in-law) my monthly visitor. God help everyone who comes in contact with me, I am a whiny bitchy nightmare.

I'm very much looking forward to 2008, though, and not just because my stomach has to settle down at some point in the next 365 days. This will be the first year of my life that I've entered with a firm sense of purpose regarding career direction. My children are all well and mostly happy, my husband is lovely, my mother enables me in a wonderful way, I have amazing friends, and I have freedom of choice in just about everything I do, which I recognize as a very rare gift. Combine being able to do just about whatever I want and actually knowing what that is, and I'm a very lucky girl.

And, since I'm silver-lining-mining, this stomach bug is launching my annual effort to stop resembling a marine mammal nicely. I ought to shed those 5 holiday pounds in no time.

Sure is quiet around here

And I'm not even just talking about the deafening silence of my blog. My love and nemesis, the six year old, is off on a 4 day jaunt to the beach with his stepsiblings and their family. It is simply amazing how much easier my little three are to watch without the human noise egging them on to shrieks and stupidity, and how much less is the ringing in my ears without his incessant tonsil-less drone. What really is surprising, though, is how much I miss the little bugger. The vacancy he leaves is as large as you'd imagine, but more poignant than I predicted. I hope he's doing okay. Brave little toaster.

In other news, our Christmas was good. I remember how pointless and brief Christmas seemed to me during the years between childhood and childbearing. Christmas with my herd of monkeys is joy and chaos, the constant frenetic effort of weeks paying off in 30 minutes of flying paper and shrill happy voices. I caught my husband's cold just as I finished the last absolutely necessary task of holiday preparation and collapsed happily enough into my fever and mucus, grateful even through my whining that it hadn't hit me even a day earlier.

I leave you all with the Christmas picture I never got around to making into cards this year. Better late than never, right?

A meme from Cole

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights
15. Gone to a huge sports game
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s diaper
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower (in a pond at night)
23. Gotten drunk on champagne
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and didn’t care who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
44. Watched whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Holland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Culebra
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Played touch football
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted the Snake River
82. Been on television news programs as an “expert”
83. Gotten flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Kissed on the first date
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in Rocky Horror
96. Raised children (in the process)
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
98. Passed out cold
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Touched a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a T.V. game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon
122. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Touched a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad - and the Odyssey
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head
149. Caused a car accident
150. Saved someone’s life

That was really fun, you all should do it! I'm too lazy to elaborate on all/any of them, so post questions in the comments if you simply must know more.

A Long December

The holidays are taking their time reaching my grinchy heart this year, and I keep thinking sad and kind of hopeless thoughts. I've started listening to NPR in the car, which is not helping - whether the topic is this criminal administration or the too-long-ignored crisis of global warming, just driving around town is starting to affect my blood pressure. I am thinking too long and hard about big things I can't fix, can't even touch, and I'm starting to shrink in my own view. And then here at home, with my children to ground me and make me feel present and necessary, I am fretful and ineffectively concerned about someone I love. Her sadness is as big and far from my reach as anything on NPR.

For Christmas this year, I have more wishes to give than gifts. My wishes for my friend: That your sentence of grief is not long, and that time blunts the edge of pain soon, so you can visit your sweeter memories without getting hurt. That the world surprises you with moments of grace and beauty, now while you're doubting its capacity for goodness. That the friends and family you nurture so lovingly are able to reach you through your sorrow, so you know you're never alone.

Shark Puppies: The unspoken global warming threat

I am experiencing a return of the mysterious North American Sleeping Sickness I contracted last month, so I took a coma-like 3 hour nap this afternoon. During my blissful escape into unconsciousness, I had a very vivid dream. Global warming had proceeded apace, and I was walking along an icy shoreline with a leading scientist-of-the-future, who explained to me that climate change had resulted in a drastic evolutionary leap in sharks. The sharks, who were swimming conveniently right at the edge of the land so we could observe them, were now all having live birth, and their young lived on land and looked like puppies. While we spoke, one of the sharks had some of the aforementioned shark puppies, which were cute and round and black and brown, and the puppies started frolicking on the beach. My children, who appeared at this point as if from nowhere, were naturally drawn to the cute baby creatures, which then turned and bared their horrifying shark teeth, scaring the holy bejesus out of me and the kids. I really wish I had any artistic ability, because the vision of the gnashed-teeth shark puppies is really haunting me. Maybe I'll give it a shot later, I don't want to deprive anyone else of the horror.

Thoughts on a tragedy

I had four majors in four years as an undergraduate, which should come as no surprise to people who know me well - I'm not terribly decisive. My sophomore year major was Political Science. In typical young-liberal fashion, I was determined to change the world, and I thought the best way to do so was from inside the system with which I found so much fault. I wasn't sure if I wanted to go to law school or run for office or start a grass-roots change organization, but my enthusiasm waned quickly as I saw more and more seemingly insurmountable problems and felt my own smallness.

I still feel that uncomfortable mix of cowardice and helplessness when confronted with social issues that move my soul and turn my stomach. In this, the most powerful country in the world, there is so much simple human unkindness, so many things that would be different if only we could all agree to look out for each other. So many laws that try to be one-size-fits-all and end up suiting no one well. So many stupid rulings from stupid old men who choose convention and ingrained misogyny over compassion and common sense.

One such topic that has touched close to home recently in horrific fashion is domestic violence. In a nation that often seems to adopt "every man for himself" as its motto, women and children are far too often left with no place left to turn, trapped in lives of fear and secrecy. When a woman does muster up strength I can only imagine and leaves her abuser to save herself and her kids, she is almost entirely on her own. The few laws that are set up to protect her are weak and ineffectively enforced. If she tries to get child support (often desperately needed) and/or gets a restraining order (because the abuse and threats almost always escalate when she leaves), the abuser all too often uses her temerity as an excuse to snap entirely, and front-page tragedies ensue that leave pundits shaking their hands and wondering, dumbly, how this happened.

Isn't it obvious how this happened, how this keeps happening? If a man assaulted someone to whom he was not related, he would likely serve jail time. If he threatened a politician, he'd be locked up just for the threat and charged with terrorism. If he stalked a movie star, the star would get private security to supplement the extra police protection. But if he hurts his wife, his children, our society still turns a blind eye. If he threatens them, the woman has to choose whether to disappear (in defiance of laws protecting the man's rights to visitation, regardless of the heinousness of his crimes) or to try to live as normally as possible, hoping reason finds the unreasonable. If he kills them, some sick people will say the woman drove him to it with her unreasonable demands for support and security.

I don't have the answer. I hope smarter people do. This Christmas, in lieu of gifts to many of my nearest and dearest, I will be donating money to The Heartly House. I encourage everyone to consider donating to a group doing similarly critical work to protect mothers and children, either locally or at a national level. This Christmas, I'll be even more thankful for the serenity of my home and the safety of my children.

A Weird Week

We had a lovely, relaxing Thanksgiving with friends, but tragedy struck just once-removed the next day and I've felt useless and sad ever since. It's not my tragedy, but I love my friend and I hate how sad she is and how helpless I am to do anything to make her feel better.

And (much less importantly), my husband is out of town on business tonight and I hate that. He should always be within fetching distance (as in, please fetch me ice cream, please fetch me a blanket, please fetch me a valium). My children have been shockingly unloathesome while he's been gone, so that's one bright spot. And here's another...

Today, I was doing a phone interview with some people who used my 4 year old son in a research study recently (I have a lot of kids, might as well loan them out as lab rats, right?). The woman asked if my boy knew what to do in case of an emergency.

Me: I don't know, let me ask him. Buddy, what do you do if there's an emergency?
Boy: Call the police.
Me: Yes, but how do you call the police?
Boy (emphatically): You dial SIX SIX SIX.

If ever I needed proof that my children are more than usually wicked, here it is.

I'm officially lazy. Also, I still hate George Bush.

My bloodwork from last week finally came back (and I only had to call the office three times - anyone have a primary care physician recommendation for me?), and everything was completely fine. I still feel like the victim of a slow-motion underwater mugging, but apparently I'm just really really lazy. I can live with that, I guess. This whole adventure has reminded me just how much I can't stand doctors, by and large. Kind of masochistic to want to be one, huh?

My big boy had a political discussion with two of his friends during carpool today - they were comparing notes on why George Bush is a bad guy. It's a little sad that the 6 year old set has it more together than the 30% of Americans still giving this yahoo an approval rating, isn't it? The latest in my personal loathing has to do with the opening of military airspace to facilitate holiday travel. It offends me that the White House doesn't even pretend to hide their own hypocrisy. We're in constant and imminent danger from terrorism, to a degree that requires us to suspend the Geneva convention, wage preemptive war, and invade citizens' privacy, but Thanksgiving travel transcends our need for secure airspace? It's like the last vestige of an actual defensive military has now been removed - our military is now officially only for offense. As long as no one's late for dinner tomorrow, I guess our security doesn't matter that much after all. And of course, we have to advertise the opening of the airspace. I sometimes get the feeling that the whole crowd running the country right now are thumbing their collective nose at the rest of the world, including and maybe especially American citizens.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sappy

I can always think of a lot to say when things are going wrong. When life is good, though, how many ways can you say that? The twins still don't sleep, but I think I've given up on it - I actually can't imagine sleeping through the night any more. I'm still crazy tired, but I should get the lab results back next week, and in the meantime I'm eating a lot of meat in case of anemia and giving myself more than the usual license for laziness. Except for those two chronic items (which may just be two sides of the same coin - I suppose not sleeping for years could lead to fatigue), my life feels really comfortable right now. Bad things happen all the time, across the world and right in the neighborhood, but I have family and friends, everything I need and most of what I really want. Everywhere I look I feel lucky.

More about my so-called life

I loved that show. Still love Claire Danes. Dumbest network cancellation ever. But, as usual, I digress.

When I'm driving around or working at the hospital or sitting in class, I think of general interest topics to blog about, but when I have a few minutes to type, all I can think of is my own daily crap. I should rename my blog that - my daily crap. Although that sounds more scatalogical than I intended.

On the school front, I have yet another new master plan. I really like this one, actually. I figured out that since I have to do all the pre-requisites again anyway, I'll only be 6 classes from a second bachelor's degree (in chemistry), so I'm going to go ahead and enroll as a degree-seeking student and follow that track. The advantages are preferential registration and the appearance (I hope) to medical school admissions staff that I have goal-seeking abilities. Or something. Plus, more degrees! It's a little weird, because I started out college a million years ago wanting to major in chemistry, and now I've come back around to it. In one sense, it feels like completion or some circle of life crap, and on the other hand it feels like I kind of just wasted 15 years. I guess I'll try to focus on the former.

Unfortunately for the new master plan or any activity at all, I've been feeling really horribly run down the last few weeks, even for me. Yes, I'm busy, and no, I don't sleep, but this is ridiculous. I'm tired while I'm sleeping. It's bad enough that I actually went to the doctor today (for someone who wants to be a doctor, I'm very doctor-averse). I have a raft of bloodwork to do tomorrow (have to do it fasting). Hopefully it's just anemia or my thyroid gone wonky or mono and not something hideous.

So, that's the update. I'm full of ambition and exhaustion. Weird combination, not exactly designed for success.

Discouraged and cranky

I'm having a very grumpy day, kick-started by a very long night of screaming by wretched boy twin, who is implementing his own brand of daylight savings in the form of staying up all night. In addition, big boy was off school today because of the election and was on my very. last. nerve. all day. PMS may also be a factor in the mood extravaganza. The biggest piece of the grumpy-ass pie, though, has to be the information I got today from the med school where I want to go, which indicates that I need to retake 3 classes I was told a few months ago I do NOT need to retake, due to their (and my) advanced age. Crappity crap crap crap. So now I have to revise my whole plan again, and my dream is starting to feel more like a hallucination (an hallucination?), like a fading mirage.

To paraphrase Forrest Gump, sometimes there just isn't enough chocolate.

A much better week

I'm feeling much better, the kids are almost entirely well, my good friend's birthday is Sunday (woohoo, the big 30!), and I got to observe a surgery today. I love love love working at the hospital, and the tech I report to said Wednesday that I should look into getting on the payroll. How cool is that? As excited as I am about the whole doctoring thing, though, I've decided to go back to my original plan of applying for entrance in 2010 - yeek, that sounds far away. It's for the best, though, will allow me to take prereqs more gradually (and hopefully do better at them), prepare more for the MCAT, volunteer more, teach more, oh, and spend more time with my kids. I like them a lot lately. Weird, huh? Oh, and the clincher - if I take an extra year with the prereqs, I'll graduate from med school in 2014 instead of 2013. So clearly it's meant to be.

Halloween was a lot of fun, courtesy of friends who rise to the occasion of holidays and don't just act stunned when the holidays appear as if with no warning like I do. Now to figure out Thanksgiving. You'd think after 31 years, I wouldn't be so shocked by the regular progression of time.

I've had all these bloggy thoughts lately but haven't been on the computer much. Mostly I've been studying organic chemistry, to the point that I'm dreaming of molecular formulas and thinking of human relationships in terms of parallel hydrocarbons. That can't be healthy, right? I actually like the class, though. I swear I can feel synapses firing in parts of my brain that were atrophied from disuse.

Candy

I was just struck by the contrast between my youthful dreams and my current, middle-agey ones. I found myself wishing, with real fervency, that I could eat limitless numbers of Reese's cups without becoming ill or obese. I think if a genie came to me right now, I'd be torn between using my one wish for world peace and using it for a Reese's cup free-for-all.

It's been a weird, kind of awful week. Yesterday I ended up in an ambulance with girl twin after her croup caused respiratory distress. That was probably the single worst moment of my whole life. Tonight, I spent three hours at the doctor's office myself to find out I have pneumonia. No wonder I feel like death. At least now I have the justification I needed to sit on the couch and eat junk food for the next couple days. Mmmm, Reese's cups.

I may already be dead

It's funny that when my kids have runny noses, I get annoyed by the constant drip and ick and whine and think they should just suck it up it's just a damn cold get over it already, but when I have a cold, it really does seem like a fairly serious matter capable of moderate to severe life-disruption. I'm not sure if this is a cold or the flu, but the symptoms include severe headache, inability to breathe, joints hurting, feeling of extreme heat, and incessant bitching about the aforementioned everything.

Oh, and that feeling of extreme heat? My regular body temperature is pretty low (around 97), and I almost never get fevers, but I feel like such complete crap that I was sure THIS time I'd broken triple digits. Took my temp, and it's 96.6. If I were a cadaver, they'd estimate my time of death as hours ago.

Xenophobia

I almost never watch the news, because...well, partially because I almost never control the remote, and partially because my attention span is really short. Tonight was an exception, and two of the stories during the half hour broadcast were about people freaking about about the dilution of their culture by immigration and tourism. One story focused on Switzerland and one on Tibet. In both cases, the representative xenophobes waxed on, in English, about how all the foreigners were marginalizing their culture (which, if I am not mistaken, does not include English primarily in its purest form in either case), and worrying that their way of life would be lost forever.

It seems to me that a static culture is doomed as surely as a static language - if you don't want your country to be the national equivalent of Latin, you may want to start embracing change. What is the obsession with preserving the status quo? Is this time and place so complete and perfect that keeping it immutable is of more value than honoring the rights of others? Literacy seems to be the answer here - if you love the here and now, preserve its memory in writing and pictures, but don't try to fix it in time.

When I do watch the news, I frequently find myself saying what I all too often resort to saying the boys - "don't be a jerk." How many of the world's problems would be resolved if people could just pull the sticks from their asses and mind their own business?

They like me, they really like me

I have this vague feeling I've used this title before, but I'm always up for some positive reinforcement, so I'll let it stand. I'm halfway through my first semester teaching an Intro to Computing class at a local community college, and I feel like I've finally hit my stride. I really enjoy my students, and today one of them told me that mine is his favorite class. He said it in a very non-Eddie Haskell way, too. I'm pitifully easy to please - I've been replaying it all day. Yay me, I don't suck!

Should have known better

I've been doing well with my stupid organic chemistry class, but chapter 5 wasn't making any sense to me. Since I'm a logical person (ha!), I made the considered choice to just take the chapter quiz even though I had no idea what the fuck the insane incoherent asshole who wrote the textbook was even talking about. Because at least if the quiz was over, I could move on to something else, something that just could. not. suck as much as alkene/alkyne reactions and transition states and rate-determining bullshit. Predictably, I did not do very well on the quiz, and now my mood has shifted from post-good-weekend happy to maybe-I-can't-do-this-after-all despair. Lame, lame, lame.

It was a good weekend, though. When I'm over this bitterness, I'll tell you more about it.

Wow, time flies

I've been a little preoccupied lately. Boy twin had a double-ear infection followed by a new molar and girly got FOUR teeth and the number of pained bits mentioned there (um, 2+1+4?) is more than the hours of sleep I've had during the same time period. I actually dozed off a little during the masterful crafting of that gem of a sentence. What was I saying? Oh, right. My father-in-law sent me this email, which prompted me to realize that the date of my last post, 10/3, was 8 days ago and not, like, half an hour ago, like I thought it was:

When one begins a blog, doesn't that come with an implied contract that one will keep that blog (somewhat) up to date?

Twice daily is probably unrealistic to expect – but – daily updates are/or should be the norm.
Going three days without updating your personal blog is akin to a child not brushing his/her teeth for three days. Going a week without posting something is just beyond most people's ability to comprehend. What kind of example are you putting forth for your kids? Has anyone thought about contacting child protective services?

Is there a Blog Master to whom this complaint should be directed? Can one get their blogging privileges revoked? Is there a penalty associated with blog-lacking-updates? Does one hear from the Blog Master that they must go back and retroactively update all days for a rolling month period that were missed?

Things I wonder about when I am so busy at work that my head is spinning.

So, since my poor, clearly-overworked father-in-law has put so much thought into it, and since it's his birthday, I will try to step up my game. Step up to the plate. Step...oh, I don't know. Thought I had more stepping cliches in my bag o' tricks. Thought I had a bag o' tricks. May really need some sleep.

So, here's a super-fast, very tired, distracted-by-The-Office update. I should rename this blog "random disjointed updates on my exhausted life." That may be redundant, though, as if you looked into my head, that's about what you'd see. Me trying to even remember what has happened recently. Here it is:

-I love love love volunteering at the hospital. I think I may finally, at the age of 31, have figured out what I really want to do when I grow up.
-I really like teaching my computing class, too. I am a little concerned, though, that I'm either a really bad teacher or my students are really dumb, because I gave the midterm today and they did not do well. Hmm.
-I'm really loving my kids these days. Think there's some correlation between me spending less time at home and liking them more? Another hmm.
-Organic chemistry is hard. When the twins let me doze off for more than ten minutes, I dream of hydrocarbon stereoisomers. I suspect this is not the key to good mental health.
-I've seen two hilarious comedies this week. I almost never see a comedy I like, or any movie all the way through for that matter, so this is a high point for me. The first is Stuck on You, which looked absolutely awful (the premise is that Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear are conjoined twins), but turned out to be not only funny but really sweet. And the other was Knocked Up, which I think we were the last people in America to see but which lived up to its hype.

We've moved on to My Name is Earl now, so I'll end this travesty of a post. I should be studying chemistry, but all the carbons are starting to swim together in front of my eyes.

This war has been brought to you by...

I registered for an online organic chemistry class last week (from the University of New England, randomly enough, as they were the only ones I found who offered it online), and I got my materials in the mail today and can't wait to get started. My husband is being very supportive. He got the kids to bed and is watching a really boring Ken Burns show so I won't be distracted (sleepy, maybe, but not distracted). The show did catch my attention for a moment, though, when the intro began with this line:

"Corporate funding for The War..."

I seriously thought for a moment that it was a news story and that the Iraq debacle was now being sponsored by AT&T or something, like all of the stupid renamed baseball and football stadiums. I mean, in a world where Candlestick Park is replaced as a name by 3M field, what isn't possible?

Back to my studying. And beating the big boy into submission - he's back in school and resuming his nightly refusal to go. to. bed.

Maybe not a mistake

Summer's pollution gauze has lifted and the clear blue of fall is far far above us as we sit outside without bitching about heat or bugs. The neighbor uses heavy machinery and yells in Spanish to his friends as they cut down leaves, branches, trunks high above the roofs. My mother watches earnestly, purporting an interest in botany and calling us often to watch as the men leap from branch to cherry-picker and wood crashes past them to the ground.

The babies lurch more quickly and talk to each other in guttural growls only they understand, punctuated more and more often with actual human language. The girl plays with shoes, the boy complains eloquently enough without many words. The little boy fills the vacuum of noise left by his brother's post-operative silence and loves the kitten until it says "me." The big boy is healed by his brother and sister's weekend visit and makes pizza from foam and titans from pixels. The biggest boy is quiet, enigmatic. The big girl is resilient and innocent, still cheerful despite bullying and uncertain supervision.

I read other mothers' blogs and the love shines from them, and I wonder what I'm missing, why my children so often seem like something to survive. This weekend, though, I see it. Sometimes they almost glow.

The tonsils have left the building

Big boy had his tonsils and adenoids out this morning, and he did better than I could have hoped. Thank goodness. He was brave as anything, and I tried for a brave face too, but I'm glad it's over. It's been less than 12 hours, and he's up and getting himself obscene amounts of ice cream, with much less whining than I feared.

Boy twin, on the other hand, who had no part of his body surgically altered today and who was cleared by the pediatrician just 2 days ago when I took him in because of his excessive freaking bitching and moaning has spent the day, predictably, bitching and moaning. I really do love him, I swear, but he is NOT a pleasant baby most of the time. I keep hoping it's something he'll outgrow, but I feel for his future teachers/spouses/children if this persists. At least I only have 16.5 years left of it, max. Because his butt's going to bounce when I throw him to the curb on his 18th birthday.

I am procrastinating - I need to plan for my class tomorrow (I've been planning a week in advance like Donna recommended, but I fell off the wagon). I'm loving the teaching thing. And my boss said I could have more sections next semester, so yay! I'm going to try to start taking my last four pre-med pre-requisites soon, too, if local colleges would get their butts in gear and post their winter schedules already. I love love love volunteering at the hospital. It's seriously addictive, I never want to leave when I'm there. Hmm, what else can I talk about that doesn't involve grading quizzes? Oh, i just read Water for Elephants, which was really really good. Between it and an elderly patient I worked with the other day, I keep thinking about novel ideas involving old men. Because I'm original like that.

Sigh. Fine, I'll work.

Tired

Something seems to be wrong with Boy Twin. He has been exceedingly fussy, even for him, all weekend, and now he has sworn off sleep. That's not strictly true, as he's actually asleep right now, across my arms as I type, but he flatly refuses to let me sleep. Tomorrow (today?) is my 3rd day volunteering at the hospital, and so far I don't think I've gotten more than 4 hours of sleep before any of my shifts. Makes it harder to memorize the gigantic amount of stuff I need to learn there when my mind is wrapped in cotton batting.

We had a great weekend, though. My husband has been working about a million hours a week, and I haven't been all that gracious about the whole single-parenthood thing, but this weekend we all hung out together and the weather was beautiful and except for one whiny-ass baby, things were good. I love it when the weather's so nice that the kids spend all day outside and the house is none the worse for wear (although it's still plenty "worse" from last week, sadly it still does not self-clean).

My hospital volunteering has me so excited about becoming a doctor that I don't want to wait three years to start medical school, as my original plan required, so I'm trying to relearn the science I once knew and start taking the remaining prerequisites this winter. I got a refresher chemistry book from the library (okay, my mother checked it out for me, I'm still persona non grata at the library) and read the whole thing this weekend - it was fun to observe my own brain dredging up old information, one ah-ha after another. How much of it I'll retain this time remains to be seen, especially since I only slept about 3 hours tonight (last night) and I think I read that you have to sleep after learning something for it to stick. Which means I've learned nothing in about 7 years. Which actually sounds about right.

Feeling like a real live girl

You know, like in Pinocchio (wow, I spelled that all kinds of wrong at first, thank goodness for google)? "I'm a real boy!" Well, that's me - a real girl, that is. The September ramp-up period is nearly over, and the family is in full schedule mode now, and it feels really good to have outside interests to break up some of the 24/7 giving that is life with small children. I'm settled into my class now and I think I'm actually doing a decent job. It's a lot more fun than I thought it would be - I hope they give me another section or two next semester, too. And I started my hospital volunteering this week. After a couple hours of running around for badges and paperwork and TB tests and scrubs and badges again and scrubs again and paperwork again, I finally got to start in the real live Trauma PACU today, and it was really cool. I'm volunteering at a teaching hospital, so they're used to having to explain things, and everyone was really nice, and I'm really looking forward to going again on Friday. Plus! I got to wear scrubs! (Picture, including extra chins and missing top-of-the-head, courtesy of little boy):

Also - little boy's birthday went splendidly, big boy is having his tonsils out next Wednesday (gulp), and gorgeous fall weather has arrived. The best part of the fall weather has to be the new outfits for the babies (not the best expressions, but check out the shoes!):

Little boy got some awesome new hand-me-downs, too:

And yes, the still-nameless kitten is still alive! I think he may be down a couple lives, though.

Doing better

I'm still here, and life feels less painful though still a little overwhelming. My mother is back, though, and my friend is in town and helping me catch up on the disaster that my house became in sympathy with my mind last week. Just in time, as little boy's birthday is tomorrow and I'm totally not ready and haven't slept much in a week or two to boot. To boot is a funny expression.

Updates in bullet form, as I must must must start cleaning and got about 4 hours of sleep and can only think in fragments:

• Boy twin got ear tubes in on Wednesday. One of them got a blood clot on it, which has resulted in some oogy looking blood-from-ear, but otherwise it went well and the change in his personality has been dramatic. He's SO pleasant. Poor baby must have been hurting more than we knew!
• Big boy was evaluated for tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy and is a go for surgery. The theory here is that his sleep issues stem in part from faulty anatomy and are contributing to behavior problems. Let's hope it works!
• Big boy again - he had a GREAT week at school this week, didn't cry once and went to bed like a champ every night. Thank. God. Apparently 2 weeks was the required adjusted period. It would be so handy if he'd post that kind of information ahead of time.
• Still no dryer. The one we ordered was delivered 2 days late and didn't fit down the stairs to the basement. Suck suck suck. Still working on ordering another, smaller dryer.
• We got a kitten. Because yes, a kitten is EXACTLY what I needed. It was more a mission of mercy, though, than a true mental aberration. Poor kitty was about to be dumped in the woods by a weird crackho with 5 kids in the car, and was so covered w/fleas he had fleabite anemia. The vet said he's only 4-6 weeks old and shouldn't even be away from his mama. He's SO tiny (the cat, not the vet), but really feisty and tough. Still nameless, since big boy can't commit, so I think he's probably going to end up stuck as Kitty.

I think that's the highlights. Off to clean/stash stuff in closets.

Blue, baby, blue

So, I'm moving on from yesterday's silver-lining-seeking and entering the dwelling-on-it phase of this mood front. You know the stages of grief? I should document my own stages of falling-off-the-edge-for-no-freaking-reason. For example:

1) Denial (doesn't everything start with denial?). I get more preoccupied, more confused, more forgetful, but without really noticing at first. My world grows smaller and harder to handle, gradually and then faster and faster, until it's so small I'm forgetting the rest of the world and denial becomes impossible to sustain. I then move on to:
2) Determination to avoid, this time, the joy-sucking darkness of mind, the fear and anxiousness and paralysis of the next stage. Another stage in denial, really, where I look for things that don't suck (and sometimes post them in lists, see below). Inevitably, this does not work, and then comes:
3) Suck. The point at which I give up the pretense that life is livable under these mental/emotional conditions and wallow in the misery. Today, in other words. It's 8:45pm, I took 2 naps today, I'm still in last night's pjs, the kids have been left to the tender mercies of their father's loving but fairly distracted care all day, all meals have been leftovers, I've read an entire novel, and I just sobbed at a children's movie, prompting big boy to say "you're crying over a stupid movie?" Hello, daily-crying-about-school pot, I'm a kettle. Everything feels wrong, I feel wrong, words sound wrong, food tastes wrong, noises are loud and jangly and...wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
4) The stage that's hard to see from here. I know, intellectually, that stage 3 does not last forever. Believing it is tough at times. Medicine helps. Maybe this time it will be short.

So there you have it, falling apart in four easy steps.

TGIF

It's been a long while since I was this happy to get to a Friday. If that which does not kill us truly makes us stronger, we ought to be getting stronger any day now around here. So far, we have not had a single school day start without big boy in tears, and the twins are feeling better but are now terminally spoiled from being held through their illness and whine a hideous "eh eh eh" duet all the livelong day.

But! It's finally the weekend, so I am determined to try to find a bright side and dwell on it. Some options I've come up with for positive thinking:

1) Designing either mother's jewelry or a tattoo that somehow represents all of my kids, now that I'm damn certain I'm done having them.
2) Working on the computing class I'm teaching. It's both more fun and more difficult than I thought it would be, and is a good diversion from family life. Diversions are good. Anyway, my friend has challenged me to prepare for a WHOLE WEEK of class in advance, to be ready no later than Sunday night. I think it's madness (so far, I've felt pretty well prepared if I had everything set 12 hours before class started), but I'll give it a whirl.
3) House painting. My sister came to visit this week and ended up painting my bathroom and kitchen. Now I want to paint the other rooms on the first floor. And hey! A friend is coming to visit from out of town next week! I wonder if SHE would like to paint?
4) Pioneer living. With our dryer still out, I've been hanging clothes (and cloth diapers) to dry outside. The weather has been cooperating, so it's actually been really fun. Not that I won't welcome the new dryer that should be here Monday, of course.
5) Dreaming. I got almost no sleep last night, but DID have a great Hugh Laurie dream (although his name in my dream was John Book - wasn't that Harrison Ford's character in Witness?). No worries, I'm not pregnant, just having flashback dreams, apparently.

Also, I'm getting very excited about winning my father-in-law's Last Man Standing football pool again this year. I think my complete ignorance of all things football really helped me last year, as I was able to put my full confidence in a combination of my own psychic energy and the USA Today odds page with no interference at all from actual information or understanding. I've learned nothing at all about football in the interim, so I'm sure my cluelessness will serve me equally well this season.

Best of all, we have no real plans this weekend, so I can catch up on some sleep and occasionally go to the bathroom in peace. I hear that I'm going to miss these little ankle-biters when they're older, but I've also heard that women's sex drives peak in their early 30s. Obviously not universal.

More of the same

I feel like I should post, but since my days lately have been literally filled with screaming from very early morning (I think today is still yesterday to me, technically, since boy-twin managed the night shift single-handedly last night) until late night (well, late-night by the standards of a very tired thirtysomething lifeless mother of too-goddamned-many, it's 9:45 and I am ready for some SILENCE, DAMN IT), my train of thought has been a few cars short of...well, a train. A few lumps of coal short of a hopper? Cards short of a deck? Cheese sliding off the cracker? God, I'm tired, and my ears ache from the screaming.

So, just another update. The twins officially have hand foot and mouth disease, which sounds like a livestock illness except that you can't keep the kids in a barn, even though they act like they were born in one, what with the door-leaving-opening and all. Damned mosquitoes. What? Oh, sorry, my stream of consciousness hit a dry spell, or a tributary, and my metaphors are not all that well thought out at the moment. Although I'm not so far gone as to not linger on my love of the metaphor. Or the tangent. Or the padded room and Valium.

Crap, where was I? Oh, the twins. Yeah, sick. Stupid virus that's not dangerous or treatable but very painful and results in twins unable to eat, nurse, sleep, or do anything other than whine and scream (whining under the influence of tylenol, scream when the meds wear off). Big boy is, as I type this at almost 10pm, going into hour 2 of the nightly bedtime screamfest, despite a therapy appointment today that gave me what now appears to be false hope and an afternoon of absolutely charming and pleasant behavior. My own mother told me today that if she were in my shoes, she would run away, and although I would not call that helpful advice, particularly, it is a little reassuring to hear that the unbearable nature of this behavior is not merely in the eye of this particular beholder. Hmm, that one's not a metaphor. Idiom? Whatever. Oh, and our clothes dryer died. Usually, appliance rebellions send me into hysterics, but it hardly even registers against the backdrop of the constant noise and the no sleep.

Oooo, but my sister-in-law just called, and her water broke and she's on her way to the hospital, so I'm about to be an aunt again. Yay for new babies who are not. mine.!

Illness, mental and physical

Little boy: Look! I in time-out!
Mommy: Why are you in time-out?
Little boy (a little proudly): I killed a baby! HAHAHAHA!

Our mental health benefits are really going to get a workout over the years, I have a feeling. Like they're not already.

So, I haven't posted in awhile. Here is the update of suck in a nutshell: Big boy's first week of school totally sucked. The twins and I have some African-sleeping-sickness-type illness wherein we whine and sleep as close to 24 hours a day as we can but have no other symptoms. My husband has introduced the big kids to the joy and social death of peer-to-peer gaming, so the rest of us are gaming widows/orphans. In better news, my mother is back, just in time to do everything while I sleep and my husband plays on the computer.

I spent too much time hoping the long weekend would have good weather, and forgot to add in a wish for no plague. Back to bed.

Knowing It's Coming Doesn't Help

So. School started yesterday. I'm so weary from the afternoon of screaming we just endured/are enduring that I hardly know where to start. I knew that big boy's erratic behavior and violent mood swings would get worse while he adapted to the beginning of the school year, but somehow it's still nearly impossible to handle. He's screaming again, as I type this, and it makes my chest hurt. I'm not even annoyed with him, or at least not much, I know he's the only person feeling even worse than I am, I just don't get it. I know the schedule disruption is tough, but I swear this behavior would be extreme even if there were some sort of dramatic trauma involved, and there's so not.

God, it's impossible to think, or type, during this. I guess I'll go try again. I. Hate. This.

An end to penis envy

Oh my god. Look what my weird husband just found online. It's a paper penis substitute to allow women to pee standing up. The best part are the directions, which refer to part of a woman's anatomy as "the flow area between your legs." The flow area??? Who on earth is bankrolling this? AND, they recommend that you recycle the used paper penii. I'm very earth-friendly and all in favor of recycling, but I don't want my recycled paper products to have your bodily fluids on them. What is wrong with people, seriously?

The Sordid School Story

And now, at long last, for the details of our last-minute decision to transfer big boy to another school. I think I've probably told most of the 14 of you who read this blog the whole story in person, but here's the recap for those of you who have been out of cell phone range this week and have been wondering about the disturbance in the force you felt when my head asploded on Sunday. Yes, that's another Star Wars reference. It's contagious.

I will begin with a tiny bit of background. Boy's old school was started two years ago and has been adding one grade per year, with an ultimate goal of having grades pre-K through 8. The school has space in two buildings previously owned by a church, and operated in only one of those buildings for its first two years. Plans were in place to renovate the second building to include a gym, cafeteria, and some classrooms. As recently as the end of July, school officials expressed, to a parent audience, confidence that construction would be completed in time for the opening of the 07-08 school year next week. In the meantime, the old cafeteria was demolished and replaced with offices for staff.

The revelation that caused the aforementioned head asplosion on Sunday was that the construction on the second building has not been completed and may, in fact, not yet be started, because no one got the necessary permits. The biggest immediate problem is that there is no cafeteria for the several hundred children who will begin the school year on Monday. The school's solution (which was already undertaken before any notice was given to parents) was to BUY A TENT, and pitch it in the courtyard, and have the children eat in it for the duration of the construction. The duration, incidentally, is being spun as "until November," which I believe is constructionese for "July of 2010."

A note about myself - I often overreact to an unforeseen situation at first, but upon reflection chill out a bit and learn to accept my new reality. In this case, I found I was doing the opposite. Although my initial reaction was mostly amusement at just how ludicrous the whole thing is, the more I thought about it, the more upset I got. My primary objections to the tent solution, in no particular order:

1) This is the mid-Atlantic. If we are charitable and assume that lunch will only be under the Big Top until November as planned, that still covers a time period that could include extreme heat, extreme cold, rain, snow, even hurricanes. None of which are rendered more pleasant by time spent under vinyl. Are tents made of vinyl? Sorry, not the point.
2) This is Baltimore. The city mammal should be the rat, if it's not already. Hundreds of kids eating outdoors daily, plus rats. This does not seem wise.
3) If/when they finally do the necessary construction, it will be in an old building directly next to the tent. Asbestos? Lead? Aerosolized by renovation and sprayed into the air next to the tent? Hmmm.
4) The school is between two fairly busy streets in a big city. I'm not hyper-paranoid about child predators in general, but having kids eat outside every day at the same time with limited security seems like an open invitation to local creeps.
5) The kids used to use the courtyard that now houses Circus Circus for recess. Now, they won't have anywhere to go for recess except/unless each individual teacher, at his or her discretion, chooses to take a much larger amount of time away from instruction to walk the kids the extra distance to the park.
6) I'm not crazy about the underlying themes of incompetence, miscommunication, lying, and poor prioritization that this latest incident exemplifies.

I had already seriously considered moving him several times, so this was really just the straw breaking my back. I'm sort of bad at committing to decisions in general, but I've felt such relief since making this one that I really believe it's the right one. I will miss the community at the old school and I hope they are able to pull it together and achieve what they're trying to achieve there, but I think that it's best for our family, and this child in particular, to be in a more stable and safe environment.

And that took an inhumanly long time to write up and may not make any sense at all, and I'm going to bed. 'School' is starting to gain on 'sleep' in the list of bad things people don't tell you about having kids.

The First Annual Allies

Today has been hard-core suckass horrible, but rather than dwell on the misery and bitterness, I have decided to hold an Alioto Family Awards ceremony. You may call the awards "the Allies."

Most Likely to Become an Actor - the award goes to....the 6 year old, for a fine, sustained performance of histrionics this morning the likes of which (I hope) most people have never seen. His exertions were impressive to behold, and his energies went toward both verbal and physical expression of displeasure. The reason for this 2 hour tantrum, which would have made any 2 year old envious? I sent him to his room for interrupting me on the phone over 10 times during a 5 minute conversation. I know, I'm vicious. Please don't call the cops.

Most Likely to Become an Opera Singer - the award goes to....boy twin. His voice is, thus far, usually gratingly unpleasant, but I'm certain that the incessant "eh eh eh eh" whine he emits must be strengthening his vocal cords and preparing him for a life of fame and fortune on the opera circuit. Does opera have a circuit? Whatever.

Most Likely to Be Eaten by a Giant Tortoise - the crazy wacked-out almost-4-year-old, who will not let his goddamned imaginary enemy go, and who spent the whole day alternating between being really rough with the babies and then shrieking in literal hysterics when I put him in time out, because being away from my side renders him subject to the mercies of the "giant tortoise! giant tortoise! giant tortoise! giant tortoise!" I swear to god, if he does not get over this soon, I'm going to find a giant tortoise and feed him to it.

Most Likely to Live to Adulthood - girl twin, my lovely darling angel-girl, who was a little fussy today but did just have surgery yesterday and was wearing lavendar satin and tights and was thus cute enough to pull it off. Also, she was mostly drowned out. And she has adorable ringlets.

Most Likely to Chain My Mother to the House upon Her Return - my husband, who not only has to weather my mood swings alone this week, but also has to listen to me bitch without pause about the enormously increased workload I have with my mother gone. Of course, he just turned on yet another boring-ass documentary and then left the room to play a video game, so my sympathy is lower than it might be.

And thus concludes the first annual Allie awards. I really, really wish alcohol didn't conflict with my medication.

More insanity from my children

Today was rich in crazy around here. A sampling...

I mentioned in a conversation with my big boy that older women can't have babies any more (don't ask, I get sucked into the weirdest topics with him). His response? "Because the hole closes up, right?"

The almost-4-year-old saw an episode of Little Einsteins this morning that has apparently scarred his poor weird brain for life. For those of you not familiar with it, Little Einsteins is not a scary show, unless cartoon children with disproportionately large heads and a propensity for bursting into song frighten you. And they should. But back to my wacky boy - there was a brief appearance on this morning's episode by a tortoise. Since he saw the tortoise, the boy has been glued to my side, unwilling to go upstairs or even to the bathroom by himself, and has been Rain Man-chanting this refrain: "the giant tortoise in my wall has strong claws and is going to kill me." I have tried logic (shocking that that didn't work), sympathy, tough love, etc, but he stuck with his concern and got shrieking hysterical if asked to go into his room. I may have toned it down a tiny bit by showing him the most innocuous looking tortoise picture on the internet, then telling him that tortoises like cabbage and giving him a head of cabbage to spread around the yard to lure the tortoise out of his wall and into the great outdoors. Sometimes, you just have to fight crazy with crazy.

Even the twins got in on the action today. I was trying to get them to make the sign language sign for "please" before each bite of dessert tonight, but they really aren't getting it yet. Finally, boy twin did the sign properly - but on his sister's chest, not his own. I wonder if it's making permanent dents on their psyches to be a group act?

There's lots of other stuff going on this week - I moved big boy to a new school (only 6 days before the start of the new school year) and girl twin got tubes in her ears today - but I had to get the funny in before my sieve of a brain lost it.

Missing my mommy

We're back from vacation, and it was really wonderful, but now my husband is back at work and I'm actually having to take care of my kids all by myself like a real live grownup. My mother lives with us but is out of town for a couple weeks helping my sister move, so my secret weapon against the constant incursions of dirt and noise is gone. People ask me all the time "how do you do it?" when they hear how many kids I have, and I feel like a faker because the true answer is that it's not even hard with all the help I get from my mom and husband. These next couple weeks will make me appreciate that help even more, I'm sure. I already did two loads of dishes and three loads of laundry yesterday (my saintly mother usually does those), and I already miss having someone to share goofy twin antics with.

I'm trying to maintain some order while she's gone, though. I actually got up before the kids today to shower and dress (even though the rat bastards ALL woke me up at least once last night and I'm exhausted), which is why I have a minute free on the computer. I have all of our appointments written out for the week - usually, I just leave one or more of the kids with my mom and run out quickly for doctors and stuff, but I need to be more organized if I'm going to get all of us anywhere on time. I've also found out yet more disheartening information about big boy's school, so I have to spend some time on the phone this week in a sure-to-be-futile effort to find 1st grade openings a week before school starts. And, craziest of all, I have to continue to hound the department of parole about big boy's bio-dad, who is trying to move here but can't because of bureaucratic crap. Why am I helping with this again?

That was rambling and uninteresting, but my window of peace is short and I have to post something, right? Wish me luck!

Vacation!

We made it to South Carolina yesterday with all 6 kids and didn't even need to use duct tape on anyone. Miraculously, every single one of them was good for the 11 hours it took us to get here, and I still like them all at the end of today, our first full day of vacation.

It's beautiful here. Every time we come to visit my in-laws, I think fleetingly of how nice it would be to live here, but then I spend five minutes on the road and realize I'd be in prison within a week. These are some seriously bad drivers, and not just bad but hellishly slow. My blood pressure goes up just thinking about it.

My step-daughter and I got our hair cut today. It's nice not looking like a female sasquatch, and my step-daughter can start fifth grade in two weeks without people thinking she keeps small nesting animals in her hair. Doesn't everyone drive 500 miles to get their hair cut? The twins are responding typically to change - my daughter is hamming it up and eating her weight in food at every meal, while my son clings desperately to my leg, refuses food, and longs for home.

And with that, Big Love is on. What could be better than this?

Awesomest day ever

Well, that may be a bit of hyperbole, but it was a very, very good day. First, I had an interview to volunteer in the Shock Trauma department of the hospital where I want to go to medical school in a few years, and I'm in! and I start September 17. THEN, random weird social networking paid off in an unexpected way when I was informed of an open adjunct position at a local community college via a mom's list serv that I hardly even post to. I replied to the post yesterday, had an interview this morning, and got the job! It was quite gratifying to see how happy they were with my IT credentials and ability to speak in sentences (I sure fooled them) - I think they were really and truly desperate for teachers, as the quarter starts on 8/27. So, I'm a teacher, yay me! It's just 3 hours a week for 15 weeks and the pay's not bad (certainly better than the nothin' I'm getting for the oogy hospital work - my big boy said incredulously, "you're just doing it to be nice?" when I explained that I wouldn't be paid for my efforts). So, zero to two jobs in one rewarding morning. Look at me! Then, I took all four of my wee bits to the pool all by myself like a big girl and no one drowned either accidentally or on purpose, and I even like them all right now, at the end of the day. Wonders, not ceasing.

There are a lot of exclamation points in that paragraph. Run-on sentences, too. Be not afraid - I'm spending this entire weekend trapped in a car with my children, so my next several posts are likely to be written under heavy medication and possibly from some sort of institution. I just need to figure out a way to write out the feeling of "rocking in the corner like a mental patient."

I'd join a gym

We just got an email about a back-to-school orientation being held in the scalding, scorching, searing, sizzling, smoking, steaming, stuffy, sultry, summery, sweltering, sweltry (alphabetized list of hotness, including the new-to-me "sweltry" courtesy of thesaurus.com) cafeteria at my son's school the third week of this putrid month. My husband recently attended another meeting in the same venue, and his instant response was, "no way, I'm not going. If I wanted to go to a sauna I'd join a gym."

The punch line? We belong to a gym now. It even has a sauna. Here I've been feeling guilty only taking advantage of the gym once or twice a week. At least I know it's there!

I love my marriage. Only with my husband can I feel like a fitness queen with an excellent memory.

Knowing you're done

I am a frequent visitor to a large families discussion board. One of the regular topics on that board is how to know when you are done having kids. Some of the women seem very certain that their families are complete, and some don't seem to think they will ever really feel done. I worried for a long time that I would fall into the latter category. I would look at friends with one or two kids, who seem very content, and wonder what was different about me that made me want more. Even after the twins were born, for a while I just wasn't sure.

Now? I'm sure. And it's not (just) a feeling of being fed up with the repetitive inanity of daily life with small children. The confirming factor for me is how I feel as the twins metamorphose from helpless larvae into little toddling people. When my oldest was a baby, every developmental milestone was poignant for me - although I celebrated his progress, I mourned the loss of his babyhood, the disappearance of my baby. I even anticipated how much more severe that feeling would be when it was my last baby disappearing, but now that the time has come, I am surprised to discover that I am greeting each baby step toward personhood with nothing but happiness, and maybe a little feeling of liberation. I love babies, and I've loved my babies, but I'm happy to be done.

That sigh you just heard was my husband's deep relief.

Your boy's...different, Mrs. Gump

My funny quirky boy has been making a lot of changes this summer. He's become a lot more social, a lot more compliant (most of the time), and he seems much happier now that he's understanding us better. Sometimes, though (like, a few times a day), he reminds us that he's a little bit off from center with the wacky things he says. Examples? Why, certainly!

Example 1: After the drive-by rocking the other day, poor quirk boy was quite distressed. My friend was comforting him and called him a peach. He incorporated this into his (skewed) perception of events and has repeatedly explained to us that "those bad boys thought daddy was a peach so they throwed rocks at him."

Example 2: Currently, his favorite toys are two erector set sticks. Neither he nor any of the other children have ever actually built anything with the erector set, but he pretends the sticks are everything from chef's knives to light sabers. This morning, he held them up facing each other and said, "look, they're friends! [in high squeaky voice] 'I like your outfit!' [waggling the other one now] 'I like your outfit too!'" Apparently, complimenting each other's clothes is what friends do. My friends ARE mighty stylish.

Example 3: The boy hurts himself frequently - the developmental pediatrician said he has low muscle tone, which may contribute to the injuries, but sometimes it just seems like he doesn't trouble himself with petty concerns like obstacles or cliffs in his path. This morning, he fell getting out of his bed (he was already up and trying to come downstairs). He knocked himself pretty badly on the side, and cried, "I gave myself a bug bite!"

The twins are freaking out and the temperature has risen at least 10 degrees while I've written this, so I have to go make Sophie's choice twice - which twin to comfort first and whether to plug in the computer or the a/c. We've only lived here for 5 years and we don't have all the kinks worked out in terms of outlet usage. Nor do we have many pictures or curtains up, for that matter. I guess we'll have time to decorate when the kids leave for college.

Lights? Tunnels?

Yesterday, I took my kids to a little beach and let them run themselves exhausted, and it paid off - my wretched big boy went to bed last night with only a couple quiet requests for water and NO SCREAMING. He woke up today looking unlike the accident victim he appeared to be in my last post and we had a lovely day together with only a few nerve-shredding rounds of sibling rivalry. He started to fall apart a little after dinner, but I took him away from the rest of the family and we talked and read a few chapters from a book about the Wright brothers and ate soft pretzels in my bed and he calmed down enough to come downstairs for a game of Sorry before bed. I didn't even try to make him go to bed without me lying down with him, and when I told him after an hour of waiting for him to pass out that I was going to have to go downstairs soon, he said he was ready for me to leave right then. I nearly fainted from the shock. So now I am free from my children's clutches for a few blissful hours and my lovely husband taped Wedding Crashers and we got awesome food from our CSA today and had bacon for dinner and the a/c is working and I feel like maybe, just possibly, I fixed the boy just a tiny bit tonight.

Self-flagellation

There's really no reason for me to share this picture with the world except to wallow in my own guilt and despair as worst mother in the world. This is what my poor big boy looked like when he woke up this morning. This is the result of him screaming for two straight hours at bed time last night. He screams EVERY night at bedtime, but this time must have been qualitatively different, from an opthamalogical perspective.

This can NOT be normal. Seriously, why???? WHY??? He's six years old. He's had to go to bed every night of his life. Why is it still this awful?

Editing to add: I don't think I was clear enough in my original post. We didn't hurt him, I promise! This is all just from crying. As you were.

My poor husband was the victim...

...of a drive-by rocking. Well, a walk-by rocking, as the kids were on foot. And he wasn't really a victim, because the dumbshits missed him like 10 times with their rocks. We were at the pool, and my husband went to get the car, and three dumb kids started chucking rocks. My husband got out of the car to chase them off, and they threw a great big honking rock at him. It went right over his head and shattered in front of him. He reached for his cell phone and they ran away. Little bastards.

The pool manager called the cop that does security for the pool off-duty, and 3 cars were there within 10 minutes. My step-daughter used her mad detecting skillz from camp to give the police a full description of the one rock-chucker she'd seen clearly, and asked if they could lift prints from the rock fragments. My husband's skin tone faded back from scarlet to mottled pink to regular, and the demented vengeance-seeking look gradually left his eyes. I love it when he gets mad, as long as it's not at me - it's so rare and so complete. Those kids are lucky he didn't go after them.

I learned that I do not function all that efficiently in a crisis. I saw what was happening before anyone else in my group did, but could not speak or move to help or stop the children from going toward the situation or do anything useful at all. I finally broke through my paralysis enough to yell "STOP!" - I think I was trying to get my own kids to come back away from the rock-throwing, but maybe I was scolding the little hood-rats. That'll show 'em.

Flowers for Algernon

I love that story. However, I don't particularly want to live in the story, and I'm afraid maybe I do. It occurred to me tonight to ask my husband if maybe they should be doing intelligence, not behavioral, testing on our 6 year old. He seems bright enough, in terms of school work, but he shows an entrenched inability to learn from his errors at home. Everything I read about parenting emphasizes consistency, and I see its value in the impact it has on my other kids, but you can have the exact. same. response. to this child 50 times in a row and he will be shocked as shit when you have the same response the 51st time. You could literally train a mouse to run a maze more easily than you could train this child to listen or put his shoes away or go the fuck to sleep at night.

I remember the first time I posted about my parenting frustration last year, how guilty I felt even writing it down. Now it is just a permanent part of me, this agony of frustration and this knot in my chest. I'm bone weary of being angry and feeling guilty and wishing there was any way out of having to deal with him, even for a little while. I dream of running away, not from home, not from life, but from this one child, and I'm pretty sure that makes me the worst mother ever. I thought my post-partum craziness was the reason for my irritation and despair, but I feel better about every other part of my life and this remains. It stays and stays and stays.

The prettiest girl

Let me distract you from my lack of posting with this picture of my gorgeous girl. Couldn't you just eat her up?

What size shoes do you wear?

My saintly friend took my big boys for the weekend, and my mother watched the twins, so my husband and I were left to our own devices for the first time since...holy, maybe our honeymoon? Anyway, a long time. Being wild and crazy, we decided to use the freedom to shop for clothes for my husband to wear to work. His current wardrobe consists of tatters formerly known as clothes. And by formerly, I mean in the 80s, so even if they weren't threadbare and full of holes, they wouldn't exactly be fashionable. So it may not seem like the most romantic of outings, but it was necessary, and it turned out to be way more fun than you might expect.

The really amusing part of our shopping trip came after all the clothes were selected and purchased, and we decided to stop by the shoe department to see if we could also replace the block-shaped scuffed shoes my husband currently wears to work every day. We picked out a few styles for him to try on (our selection process consisted of me rejecting all of his efforts to classify Sketchers and work boots as "business appropriate" footwear, and him rejecting all shoes with any style or flair at all). While we waited for the poor sales clerk to get his shoes, which we requested in a size 10, my husband stepped into one of those metal foot-measuring things just to check his size. Imagine our surprise when the scale clearly said that he wears a size 7. Possibly a 7.5.

My husband's reaction was denial. He literally refused to even consider for a moment that our dispassionate metal witness might be correct, and that he was the one who had not, for reasons passing understanding, known his own shoe size for 20 years. So I enlisted the assistance of the now-amused sales clerk, who confirmed with her professional expertise that my husband does, in fact, have the dainty pretty feet of a 10 year old girl. I mean, is a size 7.

Surely, faced with the mounting evidence, a reasonable person would cave and work toward acceptance of the new, small-footed world order. My husband is not a reasonable person. I next requested that the sales clerk bring out a pair of shoes, any shoes, in a 7.5. She did, and my husband executed a perfect OJ Simpson impression, wedging his foot into the shoe with a great display of grunting and straining and pained expression. But, and here is the key point, his foot did fit inside the shoe. By this point, I was gasping for breath, the neighboring crowd was starting to chuckle, and the sales clerk was beginning to look like maybe selling shoes wasn't quite as suck-ass as she thought it would be. My husband, rather than admit defeat, decided that he simply couldn't purchase shoes without his special work socks present (and they must be special indeed, to enlarge his feet by 2.5 sizes), and decided to come back later and try again.

All the way home in the car, I tried to convince my husband that the fact that he OWNS size 9, 9.5, and 10 shoes does not mean that his FEET are size 9, 9.5, or 10. He expressed his opinion that feet need a "buffer" between toes and end of shoe. He insisted that the wear pattern on his work shoes, which I now realize indicates that his toes reach the MIDDLE OF HIS SHOES, is completely normal. Doesn't everyone have quarter-sized wear spots right in the middle of their shoes? From their big toes?

The situation deteriorated further when we got home, and my husband held up his foot and said, "look at this, it's about 14 inches, right?" OMG, I'm snorting just typing it. 14 inches! He is in for such a world of disillusionment when this thought process reaches its logical next step. He couldn't find a tape measure, so he got out a piece of paper and held his foot against it, determining that his foot was about an inch shorter than the paper and therefore 10" long. "So," he said, "I wear a size 10! See?!" I explained, through tears of mirth, that shoe sizes do not correlate to foot length, and as proof of my premise, I reminded him that men and women's sizes are different. His response? "I thought...the centimeter."

Seriously, there's no way this is as funny written out as it has been in person, but this is one hell of a funny day. Couples without children must just have fun all the livelong day.

Yet another swimming pool PSA

This time of year, there are constant warnings in the media and in whispered anecdotes and in mothers' secret hearts of fears about the dangers of swimming pools. Just last week, for example, my boy twin proved once and for all that I DO have too many children when he escaped for 30 seconds (I thought he was on the blanket right in front of me, but it was his 3 year old brother acting as accomplice by somehow impersonating him) and was standing up in the kiddie pool, fully clothed and quite pleased with himself, by the time we noticed his absence. That boy is going to make me revise my position on child leashes, but that's another story.

This PSA is for you parents reading at home, though, not for your children, so pay attention. If you are an adult, say 5 feet tall or taller, and you are playing with your child in the shallow end of the pool, do not show them how to do a backward flip underwater. You're taller than you were the last time you did that (in the 1980s), and you WILL hit your lip and chin on the bottom of the pool. The bottom of the pool, incidentally, seems to be made of recycled sandpaper, and while I admire the recycling ethos, it does not feel good on one's face.

Consider yourselves warned.