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!

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.

I like bacon

For hormonal reasons, the details of which I will spare you all (I'm not pregnant, I assure you), I am more than usually jonesing for fat and grease. I really wish I had some bacon right now.

In other, unrelated news, breastfeeding the twins is really starting to wear on my nerves. Especially (and this should come as no surprise) in the dead of night, when I am once again sitting in the babies' dark, boring room with nothing to do except try not to fall asleep and drool on whichever twin is taking its turn to torture me.

Last night, while I was trying to cling to consciousness long enough to shed my offspring and return to bed, my wandering mind wandered back to my own goofiness as a kid. I remembered thinking that the following things were new - to the world - the year that I was seven:

1) The color purple (not the book, not the movie - the actual color)

2) Plastic

I don't know how old I was when I realized that both of these amazing discoveries predated my own brief existence, but I think I was in my teens. I'm a bright bulb.

(household items made of plastic, per the wonder of wikipedia)

Kids say the darndest things

I want to post, clearly, but I have little to say. So here are some gems from the crazy little people who live here.

First - the five year old has recently taken over our old iPod shuffle. One of his favorite songs is Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone" (he also loves Justin Timberlake, the boy was born for the top 40). With the earbuds in, his already loud voice reaches new peaks of loud as he shouts out what he believes to be the lyrics: "since you been gooooooooooone/I can't breed with a closed mind." Cracks me up every time.

Second - the three year old threw up in the car yesterday, thanks to his preschool's idea of a "healthy snack" (cookies and juice) followed by a one hour car trip. I asked him what happened (in a concerned mom voice), and he said "someone made it pour out of me."

Kids sure are dumb. Maybe that's the appeal - yes, my brain has been fried by parenthood, but I am still smarter than my offspring. Bigger, too. Plus I get to stay up late and eat chocolate whenever I want (though those are still probably not great ideas). Whee! I love being a grownup!

I am Jack's fat lazy ass

Remember in Fight Club, where whatshisface-not-Brad-Pitt read those old Reader's Digests and learned about internal organs from articles like "I am Jack's pancreas" and "I am Jack's liver?" It's probably yet another in a long line of negative indicators about my mental health that I'm beginning to think like that character. What the hell is that actor's name, anyway? Shit, I have to go look it up now, one sec. Aha! Edward Norton. Yeah, I was never going to come up with that on my own. What on earth did people do before the Internet?

So, it's 2:28pm and I'm sitting in the living room in dirty pjs, a robe, and my husband's slippers, ignoring two moderately whiny babies and one large whiny boy (all also in pjs) while the other, mercifully unwhiny boy plays something quietly in the other room. The last couple nights have been better in terms of sleep consumption, but my much anticipated (by me) rebound into energy and joie de vivre has not yet materialized. I can think of plenty of things I should do, even several things I would like to do, and yet I am doing...nothing. I need some kind of gauge, like a car has, to indicate when my laziness descends officially from decadent sloth into plain old unglamorous depression. Not that a car has that specific gauge, just that it has gauges, period. Wow, this is coming out way too literally from my stream of consciousness, I need to invest in some editing.

Oh, goody, big boy is psychically channeling my hideous mood. The very thing we needed right now was for there to be two of us. I can't think of anything else to write that isn't beyond pathetic, so I'm going to go sob in a corner and rock like a mental patient. The beauty of babies is that when you rock while holding them, it looks like you're comforting them instead of just yourself.

Why, exactly, did I have children?

I hate to post in this frame of mind, but I don't have all that many moments not in this frame these days. I am beyond tired, beyond hopeless, into mindless rage and chest crushing futility. Last night was by far the worst. I don't think I slept more than half an hour at a time until after 6:30 this morning. And don't think I handled it well, because I certainly didn't. I woke my poor husband up at 3:30 by sobbing into his back.

I am, as I type this, engaged in a screaming battle with my five year old from the first floor to the second. He has been in his room for 2.5 hours. His first day back at school is tomorrow. He started the evening by sobbing that he doesn't ever want to go back to school, that he wishes he'd never been born, and that he wants someone to kill him. It was so disturbing that it wrenched me out of my own Dantean Inferno of rapidly deteriorating mental health temporarily, but I'm well past concern now and back into rage and exhaustion, and if he does not go to sleep very. fucking. soon. I am seriously going to lose my shit. I swear to god, the palms of my hands are hot with the urge to slap him and my head aches from not screaming abuse. I do not have enough left of me to handle this right now. Thank goodness the house is big enough that I can just separate myself from him physically and thereby keep him safe.

5 year old just said to his brother (who he just woke up with all the screaming), "Mommy doesn't even like me." Truer words were never spoken, my small psychic friend. I love him, as evidenced by him still living and breathing, but like? Not right now. Right now, there is very little that I like.

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.