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.

Laziness and loathing

I'm the laziest blogger ever. I have things in my head about which I could write - Harry Potter, med school, ear-infection-prone twins, knitting, language delays, organic food, disastrous housekeeping. But my interest flickers from thing to thing faster than I can pull up Blogger, and I'm beset by some parenting malaise that prevents coherency (clearly). Because next to and under and around and through the laziness is the loathing, the annoyance, the deep-itch-irritation with my big boy.

I am a good parent in my head. I have reserves of self-confidence that I begin to suspect are not warranted, a faith in my love for my kids and the belief that I've sacrificed too much for them for it not to matter - they have to turn out well, I've paid for a good result with my time and sleep and heart and soul and body and money and whatever other currency I had at the beginning of this foolishness. And yet. My big boy tries my patience every day. Every 5 minutes, really. And it seems like my patience is never quite big enough for the task.

We're having him evaluated, for ADHD and a mood disorder, and I don't know what I'm more afraid of - that he does have some kind of problem that will affect him throughout his life, or that there's nothing wrong except my own terribly short fuse and imperfect affection. In the meantime, the summer days that were looking so promising are getting slower and longer, with all of us restless and at odds with each other.

Better living through pharmaceuticals

I'm not sure if I mentioned it here, because I'm a little sketchy about needing prescription drugs to act like a human being, but I've been on a low dose of Zoloft since May. It takes 6 to 8 weeks to reach full effectiveness, but I started feeling somewhat better right away, and my doctor doubled my dose last week to the regular starting dose (I was originally on a very low dose indeed) and now I feel....normal. Like the person I'd actually forgotten I used to be. It took me a few days of feeling this way before I realized that it wasn't a fluke, that I wasn't high, that this is regular, non-suck life. I've been enjoying my children, I've been patient and calm (mostly - I mean, it didn't turn me into someone else or anything), I've been happy. I've also been sleeping like 12 hours a day, but I figure that will level off, or else my mom and husband can just adjust to doing all the housework and child care unassisted. I'm sure they won't mind, when they contrast that with having the old, mopey, weepy, screetchy, post-partumy me back.

So, life is good and my brain seems to be returning to some kind of normal functioning. Normal for me, that is. My weird date-thing is back, where I figure out what I was doing a week ago, a month ago, a year ago, etc. Every day can be red-letter if you memorize obsessively. For example, 10 years ago today was my first day of work at the job I ended up loathing that I moved to Baltimore for. If that isn't the awkwardest sentence alive, I don't know what is, but you get my point. It's also my birthday - I'm 31 and 4 months. It's also one month since Flag Day, 3 days before the anniversary of the day in 2002 when my husband and I toured the venue we ended up choosing for our wedding, and one year since my stepson met the twins.

Boy twin just jabbed little boy in the eye with a fork. I think that's the international sign requesting parenting, so I'd better run. Happily!

Eight things about me

These are hard to make interesting. If you're reading this, you probably already know me, so what can I say that you don't already know? Cole tagged me, though, so I'll be a good sport. Here goes...

1) I never win bets with my husband. Ever. I can be 100% certain that I am correct, and still I will lose. He got a big screen TV because of a bet about our second child's gender, and he just won a bet about an actor in a stupid movie, and I was so so sure I was right this time. Damn it.

2) My favorite book and movie are Gone with the Wind, and have been since I was about 10 years old. Scarlett has had a strong and lasting impact on my personality, I'm afraid.

3) I have mellowed with age, but still have a firm shit list of people that I irredeemably loathe that has stuck at three entries for years now. One is George Bush. My good friends know the other two. Don't anyone get paranoid, now!

4) After approximately 15 years of expecting the great body hiding within me to emerge, I'm beginning, slowly, to accept that this may just be how I look. More of me to love, baybee!

5) I know a very little bit about a lot of things and a lot about almost nothing. Most of what I DO know, I gleaned from novels, not from actual authoritative sources, so that's suspect too. To sum up - never believe any fact you get from me.

6) I used to love dogs. Really. I even raised puppies to become Seeing Eye dogs. Weird, huh?

7) Among my many failed attempts to improve myself and learn new things have been: piano lessons, Japanese classes, salsa dancing classes, two gym memberships, one creative writing class, and several gardening books. But med school will be different!

8) I hate feet.

Not sure there was anything new or revealing there, but I did it! One more small step toward becoming the kind of person who sets goals and then (here's the nutty part) works toward them.

Impatience

I feel like I'm waiting a lot lately. Little boy has a diagnosis but I'm waiting for an available language therapist. I finally took big boy to seek professional help, and I'm glad, but just the evaluation process is a many-week, multi-visit wait. I'm really set on the medical school idea, but I have to wait to apply, and I just found out I have to wait until August 10 just to interview for the volunteer position I applied for. I have house projects I want to work on, but I have to wait for the weather to cooperate.

I hate waiting.

This and That

I've been meaning to post pictures from the twins' birthday and party, but they're on my husband's computer and I never get around to it. Maybe before their next birthday. I think they had a good birthday, not that they had any idea what was going on. We had their pictures done at the Picture People and they turned out really well, and we went to dinner at Fuddruckers and gave them ice cream. What more could babies want? At their 12 month doctor's appointment on Friday, they got shots and were both diagnosed with yet another double ear infection, so that was less exciting, but they both still managed to have a lot of fun at their party on Saturday. We lucked out and had it the last day of tolerable weather before this oppressive heat moved in, and we had a wonderful group of friends here to celebrate.

What else? My big boy has been getting curiouser and curiouser (in the killed-the-cat sense, not the Alice-in-Wonderland sense, but I like the phrase) about his biological father, and asked if he could speak to him last week, so I tracked him down. Boy is very excited to have contact with these mysterious antecedents (we talked to his biological aunt, uncle, and grandmother, too), and I think some of his recent hideousness has been due to unexpressed questions. The bio-family all did really well on the phone, were excited to talk to him and made him feel very special. I know there's a big potential here for a let-down, but I think it's best to answer his questions as they come up and give him the contact as he requests it. At least I hope so.

Boy twin is walking around the room and jabbering in an alien language - he all of a sudden seems about 6 months older than his floppy little twin. She has decided to be a stereotypical girl lately and cries if we say no, however gently.

I'm still set on the idea of med school, strangely enough. I've been researching programs and applying for volunteer positions and trying to squeeze blood from the stone that is our finances.

That's about it. Not much time for contemplation lately, but I'll try to come up with something more interesting than a current events update for my next post.

Happy Fourth!

I love the 4th of July. It's my kind of holiday - a day off with food and beer and friends with no formality required. It has no religious foundation, so I can participate hypocrisy free, and I don't have to figure out presents or panic about cards or cookies or any expectations at all, really. Plus, the twins' birthday is July 5th, so the 4th is like a warmup.

I do like being American. It's almost embarassing to admit that - there's so much bad to take with the good, and the country seems so much like a well-intentioned but kind of dim fat old woman with extravagant spending habits and 32 spoiled cats. I hate that we push our collective craziness onto the rest of the world so unequally - our pollution, our bizarre holy wars, our insatiable oil hunger. I hate our complacency and stubbornness, our resolute unilinguilism, our residual racism, our wastefulness and selfishness and palpable sense of superiority.

But we're kind of kids, still, aren't we? At only 231 years old, we're really just starting out, and if we've outgrown our maturity on a rich diet of natural resources and economic luck, we're not all bad. There's definitely something to the whole freedom of speech and freedom of religion idea, however imperfectly implemented, and we do struggle closer and closer, on balance, toward some kind of equality. We make efforts at sharing, with each other and with other countries, although our spending priorities seem a bit out of whack.

I can't help feeling hopeful that we can hold this house of cards together long enough to outgrow some of this teenage angst and form a truly more perfect union. Maybe we will start looking at the almost-everything that unites us and stop hunting down opportunities for division.

To sum up - you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. See? Who needs to write, when you can quote dead people!

So, here's to America, to eating hot dogs and drinking beer and watching 1776 on TBS. Happy 4th, everyone!

Here I am, stuck in the middle with you...

I have been at home with the kids now for 2 years full time, 3 years if you count the year I worked part time before that, and I think that has finally been enough time to recover from the psychic scars of my first crack at a career. I'm done with that career, and now done having babies, and soon my babies will be done being babies and I am finally starting to really believe in life after this. I was beginning to think I would just continue to dither in relative complacency until the kids were grown and my husband retired, then call it a life and release whatever vestiges of ambition still loitered on the perimeter of my dreams.

I may be overdoing it, though, aspiring to a career that will take more schooling than I've already had, and that I don't exactly qualify for to begin with. There are a whole lot of ifs in the plan I'm formulating. If I convince the pre-med catch-up program to admit me (despite my inadequate grades), if I get straight As in that program and rock the MCATs, if I get into one of the only two medical schools in driving distance, if I don't just crack under the pressure and give up at some point or change my mind as is my wont, if I get my MD and can actually decide what I want to DO with it - practice or research or business? - well then, I'll be pretty damn happy. And old. I'll definitely be old by the end of all that. So, although I may seem a bit young now for this midlife angst, I won't be by the time it comes to fruition.

In the meantime, life is so the same here, it's hard to think of current events to mention. Everyone's mostly better, illness-wise, big boy is mostly hideous, behavior-wise, little boy is mostly odd, husband is mostly funny with a side of annoying. I'm eating mostly locally with splurges for avocados and chocolate. The twins are mostly sleeping and the weather has been mostly god-awful. Summer is a vortex of sameness, a slow seductive hiatus of a season. I think it may be just what I needed.

Funny things heard around my house today

My husband, to sobbing boy twin, after boy twin did a particularly clumsy move that resulted in a face plant: "I'm sorry, my dim bulb. We ran out of genes by the time we got to you."

The 3 year old, while playing a flute: "The music went that way and crashed against the wall."

The 6 year old, when confronted with evidence that someone broke into a verboten toy stash: "I don't even know how to use my brain any more" (he was referring to a time now past when he was convinced he could move things with his mind, but I like the more global applicability).

Me: "I think I want to go to medical school."

Oh, wait, that last one is real. Maybe. Who knows with me. I emailed a post-baccalaureate program today to clarify some things, and I'm having lunch next week with the kids' pediatrician and will grill her about med school. I'm not sure I'd want to be a practicing physician (because I kind of hate people), but there are lots of things one can do with an MD, right? Work on drug development? Lobby for health care reform? Give controlled substance prescriptions for Christmas presents?

Plague redux (is that the right usage for that weird word?)

After a couple months without seeing the pediatrician, we started missing her. We're making up for lost time now. Both twins have ear infections, the asthmatic three year old is wheezy and had a chest x-ray today and is starting a daily regimen of Singulair, and I made a late-evening trip to the pediatric urgent care because big boy had a headache all day and then his hand went numb and I freaked out and assumed he was having a 6 year old stroke. Fortunately, he is stroke-free, but he does have strep. Poor bug. Throw in the mystery infection I'm on antibiotics for and well over half of the family is under doctor's care. Lame.

I still hate George Bush

I hate the sick feeling I get in my stomach and the tightness in my chest when I read stories like this about the refugee situation in Iraq. The feeling of helplessness and complicity, that our country has perpetrated this horror on these poor people who did nothing to us. It's amazing to me that we have managed to make Saddam Hussein's rule the stuff of nostalgia - it was actually better to live in Iraq with him in charge than it is now. Yes, he was a bad man, an awful dictator - but now there are millions of displaced, hopeless people and tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) dead and those who remain in Iraq must live in at least as much fear as they did under Saddam. How is this better? And of all the literally millions of refugees, how many have been allowed into the US? 700. Our government is like a little child who breaks something for the hell of it and refuses to clean up the mess, preferring instead to keep beating the shit out of the broken pieces.

But hey, at least George is keeping the world safe for unwanted embryos. Fucking moron.

(Note to the NSA/CIA/FBI/NBC - if you're reading this (and I'm sure you are), I promise I'm all talk. I will not take any action against the president other than continued wailing and gnashing his teeth. You may resume surveillance of (other) suspicious looking/sounding non-Christians.)

Happy Father's Day

On Father's Day, it's standard to praise the mad parenting skillz of the father(s) in your life, but I would honestly say, any day of the year, that my husband is the best father I can imagine. My kids are so lucky. He is patient, fair, genuinely interested in each of them, and, above all, fun fun fun. Time with Daddy is like a trip to an amusement park for my kids. He will drop anything he's doing to play inane games or wrestle on the floor. He includes them in everything he does, and they learn so much from him. He's by far the nicer person in our relationship, but the kids respect him and will go to great lengths to make him happy, while walking all over me and never fearing my much-more-substantial wrath. He is more involved in my stepkids' lives than many fathers are with kids that live with them full time. I grew up largely without a father, and I love seeing the richness of the deep bond my kids have with theirs.

When I was pregnant with my oldest son, I thought I was going to be a single mother, and I (foolishly) thought that was just fine, that I could do it on my own. I'm older and wiser now (and fatter, though that's probably not relevant), and I know for certain that my world and my son's would be a far less secure and joyful place without my husband. I don't know how I could do it without him, and I know for sure I wouldn't want to.

I love you, sweetheart, best husband and father. I hope you have a wonderful day.


(Note: one of the kids in this picture isn't ours, for those of you who know us and are confused by the random blonde girl)

Teflon boy

I was just obsessing researching autism spectrum disorders, because my 3 year old had his first behavioral therapy appointment Friday and it's fresh in my mind, and I found this article. I just skimmed it, but it seems to say that some kids with PDDNOS "lose" their diagnosis in time with appropriate therapies. I was already feeling pretty good about the therapies we have planned for him (occupational therapy, a social skills group for similarly strange little people, language therapy, and behavioral therapy), and this makes me even more hopeful that he will be able to have a "normal" childhood and life. It further made me realize that although people comment on children's resilience all the time, this child is more resilient than most. If he does lose this diagnosis in time (not to count chickens before they're hatched or put the cart before the horse or any other farm-y metaphor/cliches), it will be his third time losing a presumably permanent diagnosis. He was born with a VSD (heart defect) that Hopkins thought at a year would be permanent and might even need surgery, and it inexplicably closed on its own at 18 months. He was diagnosed with asthma right around his second birthday and never had another attack after diagnosis. I choose to look at this history as a sign that he's an odds-beater, a statistical anomaly. I know it's going to take a lot of work to catch him up, but I feel like we're getting an early start and a lot of help, and I just love him so much. Is it stupidly optimistic to feel like it's all going to work out fine?

Today is lame

Nothing is terribly wrong, and I'm not even in an especially bad mood (although I'm getting there), but nothing is going smoothly today. The day started off well enough, with me getting everyone dressed and out of the house by 9:30. I found a farmer's market nearby that started today at 10am, according to its website. We got there at 10:15, just in time to watch one lonely truck pull in and start unloading, next to two signs - one said the market was from 10-2, and one said 11-2. I guess the rest of the vendors are following the 11-2 sign. No big deal, we were near Whole Foods, so we ran over there instead. The minute we got in the store, boy twin set up an unholy racket that persisted throughout our shopping and my big boy, who just completed kindergarten and consistently earned high marks for behavior, proceeded to tear through the store, running into people and knocking over displays and just generally acting like an ass. We finished mercifully fast, and I asked big boy to help me carry a bag to the car. He snotted "NO," so I said okay and just got the stuff myself, then grabbed girl twin from the cart. There was a soggy squishing sound as I pulled her from the seat, because she had shit a perfect storm through her diaper and clothes and all over everything. I wrangled girl and mess and bags to the car, with big boy screaming behind me that he had changed his mind and wanted to carry a bag. I ignored the insanity and loaded the car, changed the baby, and started to pull away. Big boy made hissy huffy noises until I asked him to stop. Naturally, he continued, so I told him, still calmly, that I would not take him to the pool if he kept it up. He did it again - no pool. So, he screamed, literally SCREAMED, all the way home. I am a mean, mean mommy, it's my fault he acts badly, he hates me, I hate him, life sucks. Wah wah wah. Got home to a message from my friend that she had to cancel our playdate due to car trouble - apparently, today's powers of disruption are not localized. Dropped off the kids and went to pilates, which had been canceled (another sign of the day's widespread negative energy). Went to pick up my veggies from the CSA (love Tuesdays!), and am trying to maintain my enthusiasm for greens. Lots and lots of greens. That's okay, though, that's not really part of the day's suck. Came home to more bad behavior from big kids and whiny poopiness from little kids and it's 1:45 and I really, really just want to go to bed and start over.

How's your day?

SCHOOL'S...OUT...FOR...SUM-MER!

Children fold time back on itself. My oldest son just "graduated" from kindergarten, and the three months of vacation stretches out before us like the promised land or purgatory, depending on the time of day and point of view. I know that this summer will be challenging in many ways, but I still feel the excitement of summer as seen through my newly-liberated child's eyes. Thank goodness for the pool, for naps, for window air conditioners. For the chance to live childhood again, with more power and less sleep.

School is behind us but also already looming in front of us. I thought I had put the school decision behind me when I signed big boy up for his current school last March, but my commitment to that decision is a weak reed indeed. Just as I met the new principal and started feeling really excited about next year, I learned of a new charter school. It's a language immersion school - kids choose Mandarin, Russian, or French - and it's just around the corner. Wouldn't it be amazing to grow up bilingual? I've been reading studies of children from immersion schools, and they tend to do better in all subjects, not just language. If I don't send the kids there, am I depriving them of a really unique opportunity? If I do, am I scarring big boy by switching him from a school where he's already comfortable? Think they'd just let ME matriculate, as a kindergartener, so I can learn Mandarin myself?

I need to put the littles to bed. Our bedtime creeps later with the setting of the sun. If we lived in northern Alaska, the poor kids would be reduced to a 45 minute nap around midnight (but would sleep 23 hours a day in winter, now there's an idea...).

Diagnosis - clinically odd

My lovely, strange 3 year old is now officially odd. I took him to be evaluated for some of the wacky things he does and says, and he's been diagnosed with PDD (Pervasive Developmental Disorder) (it can't really be a coincidence that PDD and ODD are only one letter off from each other, right?). PDD is technically on the autism spectrum. The doctor described it as a catchall diagnosis for children with autistic traits who don't fit any of the other diagnoses.

I'm really glad I took him in - I was on the fence about it, because he really does seem okay a lot of the time. The evaluation was very revealing. A lot of my concerns had to do with his strange speech and frequent spells of inattention, and it turns out that a lot of that is attributable to a significant receptive speech delay. The doctor said that he knows that the socially appropriate thing to do if someone speaks to him is to respond, but he's not processing our words normally, so he just spouts back whatever his weird little brain conjures up - quotes from movies, phrases someone said earlier in the conversation, or just random jumbles of words. It's like he's been covering for his own delay and tricking us into thinking he understands us. She said he has a high IQ - isn't it strange that he's smart but has such a fundamental delay? Brains are so strange and complicated.

Because he's going to get intervention early (high order language therapy and some behavioral therapy) he should be able to lead a "normal" life. I'm already seeing a bit of a difference just having him repeat back what we say to make sure he gets it, and it's a relief knowing what's going on in that nutty little head.

And now for another obsession

I'm not sure this really counts as new, and obsession has a slightly negative connotation, but I'm sure this is how my husband would characterize it, so I'll go with it.

And the obsession is.....environmentalism, I guess you'd call it. Living as low-impact as possible. The eco-friendly madness started with cloth diapers, progressed to reusable grocery bags, and is accelerating noticeably this week, as I start poring over grocery origins and buying reusable bottles and sandwich wraps for us all to carry to the pool. I admit to being suggestible (the move to more grocery-origin-awareness was prompted by Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), but I also think it is indicative of my place on the learning curve. The more I read about the oil used to transport food and manufacture disposable products and the impact on the environment we have with our disposable culture, the more logical it seems to reduce my family's oil dependence and environmental impact as much as possible.

What sounds a bit like sacrifice is actually turning out to be a lot of fun. I've hinted at my craziness about cloth diapers before (they're so CUTE! and SOFT! and LEAKPROOF!), but I'm finding that all of my new reusable trinkets are just about as fun. I have an assortment of reusable shopping bags (made from organic cotton or recycled materials), which are sturdy and handy for far more than just shopping. I've started checking not just food labels but food origins at the grocery store, and I'm pleased to report that sticking to local food has resulted in much tastier, fresher food - sure makes doing the "virtuous" thing more palatable. I just ordered super-cool SIGG bottles from www.reusablebags.com for everyone in the family (except I forgot my mom, whoops! will have to place another order) to reduce the juice box/water bottle waste we generate, and I learned a lot about the benefits of reducing vs recycling from their website. I got some reusable sandwich wrappers there, too, to reduce my ziploc dependence.

We all went to the farmer's market today, with my newly-local friend Heidi and her son patiently in tow, and bought local, humanely grown meat and eggs and locally made cheese and bread. Our first CSA delivery is scheduled for this Tuesday - with the food I got today and the veggies on Tuesday, I really only need the grocery store for crackers and toilet paper.

I know this post isn't very entertaining - zealots aren't nearly as interesting to other people as they are to themselves, and I can recognize that even in the midst of my own zealotry - but it feels good to support the local economy, feed my family better, teach the kids to live simply and well, and reduce our direct and indirect oil usage all at once. If you want to enter into my madness, I highly recommend reading Barbara Kingsolver's book.

Brought back to blogging by horrible headlines

I know, I know, I've been a bad blogger lately. Bad blogger! One of the headlines today has me upset enough to start posting again. Did you all see the poor woman in Texas who hanged herself and her 4 little girls? Here's the story.

I participate on a few mothering message boards online, and the discussions there about this woman have me almost as horrified as the story itself. Everyone wants to attack the mother, to criminalize what seems to be pretty obviously an act of literal insanity. Her youngest child was 8 months old, which makes this incident, like the one involving Andrea Yates, sound a lot like post-partum psychosis. People having psychotic episodes do not act with conscious will. If it turns out that she did have PPP, then she literally could not control what happened. I'm not sure why that's hard to grasp - maybe the prevalence of "lower-grade" mental illnesses, like depression and anxiety, have made people believe that truly insane people are similarly able to function at some level. The fact that the process of her actions was so horrific is MORE confirmation, not less, that hers were the actions of a completely deranged mind. Yes, I pity people who are so irretrievably, chemically, physically, through-no-fault-of-their-own SICK. I pity the life I imagine she had and I pity the way that it ended. If someone had a seizure behind the wheel and ran off of a bridge and killed herself and her children, no one would call her a monster - sick people are not sick on purpose.

Aaaaaaaaaand....I'm back!

Where was I?

Hmm, it's been a while. Where to pick up? My mental health has been a little, well, unhealthy lately, but I'm a little less men-with-butterfly-nets today, so here I am. I can't prove any correlation, but the departure of Jerry Falwell from the planet has to have something to do with the world seeming a bit brighter today. That man was so awful, it's enough to almost make me wish he was right about everlasting punishment, as he certainly ought to be lining up for it now.

Things around here are about the same. Twins are lovely by day, ghastly by night, the boys are making me speculate about their future as juvenile delinquents, the house is a mess. I had a fantastic Mother's Day, though - my lovely husband took me to a hotel for the night to get some much-needed sleep, and then he spent most of Sunday re-anchoring our swingset to take one thing off my multi-page list of random crap to worry about obsessively. Our neighbor the contractor is making real progress on finishing our downstairs bathroom, and I started taking practice GRE tests today, although I'm not yet sure what course of study I'd pursue if I were to go back to school. Environmental engineering? Accounting? Underwater basket weaving? My testing so far reveals that I have retained nothing of junior high algebra but am the mack daddy of comma usage. That's right, punctuation, you have met your match.

Wine is good

I'm a little off this week. To put it mildly. I'm running the gamut from near-catatonic despair to trembling anxiety (I dropped and broke a jar of salsa at the store today, under the extreme burden of grocery shopping, because really, it's tough) to sobbing on the couch with my 3 year old begging forgiveness for he knows not what. I'm pretty sure the mother of the year people have shredded my application, and I'm guessing my mother and husband won't be submitting my name any time soon for the daughter or wife of the year, either.

But this afternoon, things started looking up. I got back from the oh-so-stressful shopping trip and the subsequent teacher-appreciation luncheon (really, air traffic controllers have nothing on me, what's more stressful than my life?), kicked the kids outside, and sat in a comfortable lawn chair on a beautiful afternoon with good friends and multiple bottles of wine. Wine makes me happy. It's like flavored Valium with a social twist.

As I tried to wrap up this I'm-doing-better update, a local hospital started faxing my home number every 3 minutes. Because that is exactly what my nerves were missing. I called the stupid hospital and spoke with a very unhelpful geriatric operator who said it would stop eventually. I feel better already.

The way I feel right now is why guns should be illegal. No one in my current frame(s) of mind needs to be armed.

Failure

I've been trying really hard to be positive lately. I lead a charmed life and I do appreciate it, but when the sleep deprivation worsens and I go from merely debilitated to nearly paralyzed, it's hard to see the color and joy of life. I love staying home with my kids and do not miss working. It's hard not having any external definitions of success, though. If my main role in life is that of mother, and one or more of my children is chronically miserable, doesn't that make me a failure?

My youngest, my boy twin, has spent such a huge percentage of his life crying. Screaming, more accurately. He is still, at 10 months, the worst sleeper ever, and it makes him cranky and me horrible. I just can't be nice, I can't be human, with less than 2 hours of consecutive sleep in a night and less than 6 hours total for months on end. I can't. I think those words so many times every night between 10 and 6. I can't, I can't do this any. more. It's not possible that my heart keeps beating and my lungs keep breathing when I feel like I may combust or shatter at any second. I want to be a good mother and a good person, but this is so awful.

Why is he so unhappy all the time? I dread his toddlerhood, I've suffered through his infancy, and what kind of mother feels that way? When I tell my 6 year old stories from when he was a baby, I wonder what on earth I'll tell boy twin. You were terrible? I wanted to run away from home?

My dietary intake today

Because you all want to know:

Breakfast:
1 can Coke
1 bowl granola
1 peanut butter/oatmeal cookie
1/2 piece birthday cake

Lunch:
1 can Coke
1 mini taco
1 cheese stick
1/2 large bag potato chips
1 blackberry

Afternoon snack (if one can describe a 3 hour eating binge as a singular "snack"):
1 can Coke
The rest of the chips
A whole lot of cake. And even more icing without any cake to rationalize it. But I just pulled it off the tray in chunks by hand without using silverware, so it doesn't count as an actual piece or pieces, right?

Dinner:
1 can Coke
1 serving baked spaghetti
1 weird shriveled piece of corn on the cob (I knew it was too early in the season)
1 salad with Trader Joe's kickass ginger-something dressing
1 piece garlic bread

Dessert:
1 large bowl Edy's peanut butter cup ice cream (but it WAS the slow churned lower-fat kind
4 glasses wine

I think I've actually consumed all of my calories for the week today. The babies had better step up and suck all this extra fat out of me, since it's their abominable (that looks wrong, but dictionary.com backs me up) sleep habits that are driving me to desperate measures. It's seriously only a matter of time until I'm thinking meth sounds like an awesome idea. I hear it gives you energy! Helps you get by with less sleep! Who needs teeth!

I am soooooooooo tired.

Working on a green thumb

I've actually been doing yard work this week. I generally shun the outdoors, for the following reasons (in priority order):

1) Cold
2) Heat
3) Bugs
4) Precipitation
5) Dirt
6) Wind
7) Boredom

However, the last week of April/first week of May usually includes at least 2 of the 5 days annually that I can handle being outside. No longer cold, not yet hot, bugs still in the larva stage, underbrush still tauntingly manageable in girth. The dead rat smell chasing me out of the house has helped, too. Anyway, this week I have spent several hours digging, pruning, and weed whacking. My yard looks, if not tidy, at least less like the bramble-crap around the enchanted castle in Sleeping Beauty.

Holy crap, this wasn't even my point. Wrong kind of green entirely. That's what I get for writing while watching TV.

Okay, back on target here. My point was going to be that I have simplified our finances recently by refinancing the house. Now that I'm not juggling multiple accounts, a big part of my joy in life is gone. Maybe this is a step toward career self-actualization, realizing that I love money. Not to have (although that would be nice - I've just never really had the opportunity to find out yet), but to play with. I like to fill out IRS forms about it, I like to put it into Excel spreadsheets, and I like to read about it on finance message boards. So, now that my personal finances have become dull, I am venturing into the wacky world of Prosper.com. It's a really cool idea - people loaning to other people, cutting out banks and credit cards. I'm starting very small, and I'm nervous about some of the things I've read on the lender forums about defaults on loans, but it should be fun!

Working title: Live long and prosper.

Also, The Office is the funniest show alive.

Sorry this is scattered, now I'm sucked into My Name is Earl. And I wonder why I haven't made it as a writer. I think lack of focus may factor in.

It's like Egypt around here

What with the plagues and all. Girly's ear infection is back/still here, but worse is the RAT infestation. Yes, rats. Giant-toothed, verminous, vile, foul, spine-chilling, big fucking rodents took up residence in our back enclosed porch. Oh. My. God. Gross. Fortunately, my husband has a friend who used to be an exterminator, and he came out this weekend to poison the rat(s). We know the poison was successful. How do we know? Because there is an odor about our house now that is so thick and vomitous that you can almost see it. My husband is a brave, brave man (or is a little boy trapped in a man's body - I asked if he was dreading the dead rat hunt and he said mischeviously, "I'm gonna poke it with a stick"). Anyway, he went to great lengths after work today to try to find our dead guest, but after tearing apart every conceivable place it could be, he had to admit defeat. We are hosting a party for the now-6-year-old on Sunday, and I would really prefer that the house not smell literally of death for the party.
As if that weren't enough, the aforementioned 6-year-old has reverted to his old ways this last couple weeks and is throwing Victorian-era hysterical fits about everygoddamnedthing for no. fucking. reason. But oh! I have a story about him that adds nicely to the portfolio of embarassing things I'm saving for his teenage years. Yesterday was his birthday, and one of his presents was a jar coin bank with a calculator thing on top to automatically count money as you put it in. Today, he wanted to play outside with the hose, but couldn't find his bathing suit, so he was sitting naked in the living room waiting for me to detach one of the milk-leeches and help him. While he waited, and I was only sort of paying attention here, he rubbed his penis all over the bank, then treated poor unsuspecting me to a very distressing display involving an odd gymnastic position, the bank, and his boy bits. I'm a little more scarred just thinking about it, like the rat thing isn't enough.

Paging Dr. Freud

My big boy is turning 6 tomorrow. Before bed, I asked him to give me one last hug and kiss as a five year old. He gave me a regular kiss, a butterfly kiss (fluttering eyelashes), and an Eskimo kiss (rubbing noses), and then he said "now let's kiss sideways like we're married."

Dis.tur.bing.

Of course, I laughed like an insane person, so he wouldn't stop. I can not wait until he has his first real girlfriend and I can torture him back by recounting this trauma.

And now, for a change of pace...

I looked over my own posts recently and realized that they're heavily weighted toward all the negative things about life with a bunch of kids. I think I tend to post when I'm fed up and need to take a break and blow off steam, so I end up giving a skewed view of things. Plus, annoying things are just funny to me. However, in the interest of balance and fairness, and because today sucked less than days have tended to lately, here are some good things about each of my little monkeys:

1) Our big girl is 10 now, and so grown up lately. Today, she saved the three year old when he lost his mind and ran toward traffic with no warning or observable incentive. She had four teeth pulled this month in the interest of packing the rest of her teeth in her head properly and was so brave about it. And my favorite moment with her today - she came to me and started a sentence with the words, "I don't tell on people often..." I started howling with laughter and made her repeat it several times before allowing her to proceed, and she took my mockery with good grace. She's a good egg.

2) The biggest boy is quite a renaissance kid. Just today, he was in a really cool play that evolved from his drama class (as opposed to a pre-scripted play) and he was amazing. He can really dance, didn't stumble over his lines, and stayed in character and focused the whole time. Then we all went to his baseball game, where he dominated as usual. He's such a natural athlete - it's very clear that he is my stepchild and not a biological relative. I'm afraid my biokids are at a distinct genetic disadvantage, athletically.

3) My first born will be 6 in three days, and I can hardly believe it. He's been having me tell stories from his infancy lately, and never tires of hearing about the time he accidentally "broke" a caterpillar when he was 2 or when he climbed into a bookshelf when he was 7 months old and I panicked because I couldn't find him. He's almost finished with kindergarten and is a math whiz. His behavior is sometimes erratic, but he tries so hard and is really patient with his little brothers and sister.

4) This is a toughie, as the three year old has been a little off lately. Well, more off - he's always a little different. He's also always entertaining, though, and the little glimpses we get into the world of his own mind frequently make my day. Today, he made a friend at his brother's baseball game, and spent an hour playing a game they made up that involved no Star Wars characters at all. I consider that to be a breakthrough. He's smart as a whip and a computer genius, which is probably a mixed blessing, and he does love the babies. A little too much, most of the time.

5) My girlie is just about the best baby alive, really. She is happy and funny and love love loves people and attention. She's flexible and a semi-decent sleeper. Plus, I can dress her up like a doll and paint her toenails. I love her truly-madly-deeply. Oh, and she can suck a golf ball through a garden hose, a skill which came in very handy when I had a blocked milk duct today and one that she will hopefully not find any other uses for.

6) Little bit boy has been much less suckass the last couple days, for which I am incredibly grateful. He is cruising along the couches and clapping for himself, and his wisps of hair look like those of a little old man who has given up on combovers. He has a fierce temper but loves his twin and follows her all over the house. If he would just. sleep. I would be as besotted with him as I am with the wee girl.

Who knew writing non-whine could be so fun? I should try it more often.

I annoy myself

I have been fighting a losing battle with my own grouchiness lately, and I'm sick of it. I want to just react to things normally, without running everything through a filter of hormones and illness and blowing it out of proportion. I have wasted a ridiculous amount of time and energy obsessing about my 5 year old's school lately. It is run by a flock of complete fucking idiots, but his experience has been almost entirely good, so why do I get my panties in such a twist? And now, to top off my own self-annoyance, I just had a conference with his teacher. He's doing well, progressing fine, right on track, and in the middle level group, ability-wise. Which is, you know, exactly what I want for my kids, what I dreamed of myself growing up as a freakish savant who wanted nothing more than to be average. And I know that he is average, academically, so it's not like I think she's wrong. So WHY am I upset? I am deeply irritating.

I'm on day two of antibiotics for the sinus infection that has taken over the entire right side of my head. Certainly my outlook on life will improve dramatically once I no longer feel like my right eyeball and top molars are all moments away from leaping from my head.

It was the best of days, it was the worst of days

Today sucked some serious ass, but ended really, really well. Things that sucked:

• Boy twin and his incessant whining.
• The 3 year old and his oblivious resistance to listening. And that he wet himself again.
• The involuntary time travel from winter to muggy, sweaty summer, with no pause for spring.
• The almost-full bottle of salad dressing that fell and exploded all over my kitchen floor and diaper bag.
• The Gucci bitches at the zoo who shoved my double stroller with 2 sleeping babies out of the way so they wouldn't have to fold up their empty Maclarens while they carried Gareth and Poopyschmoop onto the tram.
• The frightening person who tried to push past me into my son's school at 6pm, clearly without a legitimate reason to be there. Thank god he was not armed.
• My son's school itself. I am deeply, deeply annoyed that I am still having to think about school options.

And then the good - I picked up my new minivan! Yes, it's a minivan, so I can't say it's cool, but it is about 4 zillion times better than my old car. It's got some kind of space warping going on, where it seems normal-sized from the outside but is gigantic on the inside. It seats 8 and has huge amounts of storage space and does not smell like donkey balls. I love it! Of course, now I feel guilty about getting it, because American Idol is going all humanitarian on me, but I'm sure I'll move past the guilt in time.

Looking for the good in my boy twin

I'm reaaaaaaally reaching here, but in an effort to go beyond mere holding-on-by-my-fingernails tolerance of my youngest, loudest child to actual positive feelings, here is a brainstorming list of why it is actually a good thing that he does nothing all day and all night but scream:

1) His lungs must be phenomenally strong - that has to be good for his health, right?
2) I don't ever need to worry that he won't speak up for himself. It's sort of his defining characteristic.
3) Similarly, no worries about him being the strong silent type and suppressing his real feelings.
4) We can take him on the road as the amazing chameleon baby - his skin turns red and his eyes turn green.
5) He has made it a LOT easier to come to terms with not having any more children.

Okay, that's all I've got. It's 8:15am, and I have used up all of today's patience. Hell, I've used up all of 2007's patience. Who knew babies could BE so wretched???

Voice recognition (helllllllllloooo, computer)

This is a test of the Vista speech recognition software's dictation function. I am going to type this, then read it to the voice recognizer thing. Then I will post the original and the one voice recognition took from dictation. You be the judge - is the technology mature? Should I let my finger muscles atrophy with my abs?

(Here's what Vista came up with from dictation):
This is a tax and business beach recognition software to teach an option. I'm going to take bids, then read it to the waist recognizer thing. Then I will close the original and one voice recognition took on DT said. Newbie the giants point and use the technology mature? Should I let my finger muscles atrophy with my hands?

Stephen Hawking, I have bad news for you.

By the way, I'm digging those Mac commercials.

The list is growing

The list of people I really hate has stayed steady at three for as long as I can remember, but the client I worked with last month is just itching to jump on. Not at the bottom, either. Asswipe.

Hear me out - gun control

The awful shooting incident at Virginia Tech on Monday has me thinking about gun control. There are some social debates that I waver on, like the Pisces I am, but this isn't one of them. I really do not believe that we need the right to handguns. Their sole purpose is to kill people - how is it necessary for individuals to have that power? It makes violence so much cheaper and easier. I really do try to listen to the opposing point of view, but people tend to lose me at "2nd amendment."

The 2nd amendment was not designed to arm citizens against each other, it was intended to protect citizens from the government itself. Do you think the government is going to let you use your 9mm against it? We can shoot each other and ourselves (and we do - according to the CDC, "American kids are 16 times more likely to be murdered with a gun, 11 times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a firearm accident than children in 25 other industrialized countries combined"), but law enforcement gets very serious about anything resembling anti-government activity. Which is as it should be - I'm not advocating armed revolt. If the laws of the land are followed, and the intrinsic checks and balances are not just ignored as they have been by this administration, I think we the people can effect change without resorting to violence. But I digress - my point is, the real reason for the 2nd amendment being null and void, why have we allowed it to be coopted by people who just want to have the power to kill other citizens?

Another argument I've heard, and I do love syllogisms, is that "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." That actually sounds like a plan to me - certainly would make them easy to identify, wouldn't it? If you could lock up criminals for just possessing the tools to commit violent crime, you could prevent a lot of it. It's practically PreCrime! I love Minority Report, even if Tom Cruise is insane.

And another thing - I was surprised to learn that the killer in this case was a resident alien. Not because I think all the crazies in the world have US citizenship, but because I find it hard to believe that our laws, which are so limiting regarding immigration and immigrants' rights, still somehow allow non-citizens to legally purchase handguns. How is this necessary? Even if you disagree with me entirely and think that guns are next to flowers in the book of what makes life grand, does it really seem like a good idea to open this up to visitors, too? I can't believe this wasn't the first law changed after 9/11. We, the citizens of the US, have given up so many of our rights over the past few years, but resident aliens can still arm themselves at will. My mind, it is boggling.

One last point, and I swear I'm done (for now) - to buy a handgun, a person has to prove his or her identity and wait a few days. While he/she waits, the dealer will run a background check to make sure there are no felony convictions or mental institution commitments in the person's past. This check is supposed to ensure that only responsible citizens can purchase handguns, but I would argue (am, in fact, arguing) that this gives a false sense of security. A clean background check could very well mean that the person is an upstanding member of society. Or it could mean that the person is a criminal who has not yet been caught, is using a false identity, or is insane but has never been institutionalized. Look at the Virginia Tech killer - this isn't a case where people shook their heads afterward and said, "he seemed so normal!" This was a troubled person with a history of stalking and mental illness. And yet, he was able to legally purchase a handgun.

I'm not a very good pacifist. I can imagine killing - if someone threatened my children, or in self-defense. I would have to be in a pretty tight corner, though, desperate enough to use whatever came to hand. Guns make it too easy, and don't allow time for second thoughts.

Sometimes I love my kids

I'm watching Pocahontas with my almost-6-year-old, and he just turned to me and said,

"This is like when brown people hated white people and white people hated brown people, huh?"

I love that racism is a history lesson in his mind. I hope he grows up into a world where it really is a thing of the past.

Men are boring

In real life, I know plenty of interesting men, but I'm beginning to conclude that no one in Hollywood knows any. A lot of scorn is heaped on the chick-flick genre, but damn there are a lot of dull men-only movies just itching to be mocked. Or slept through. Movies whose casts consist of 15 identical men in identical suits with identical haircuts, muttering portentously and incoherently about top secret boringness, brightened only by 30 second appearances by Angelina Jolie, or occasionally some other gorgeous but neglected heroine.

We're 3/4 of the way through The Good Shepherd, which I really wanted to watch, and I stopped paying attention at least an hour ago. From what I'm overhearing, though, nothing much has happened. Matt Damon is wearing glasses now, which means he's 20 years older, but Angelina Jolie has not aged with him, and their child is a grown and quite unattractive young man. How do casting agents think Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon are going to have an ugly child? But I digress. My main objections to this movie are that all dialogue is in mutters, everyone looks the same, and nothing happens.

Disclaimer: I have the flu and may be cranky.

Happy birthday!

I prefer the hard-bitten and cynical writing style (or at least bitter and whiny), but I'm going to try to change direction for just a minute to say happy birthday to my wonderful husband.

I've read that the failure rate for second marriages is way higher than for first - up to 80% - but I can't imagine us anywhere but together. I think every day about how lucky I am. My husband is incredibly kind, more patient than anyone I know, and absolutely hilarious. He's an amazing father and a generous husband. He supports me in everything I want to do, even when I'm off my rocker (I suspect that he supports me more when I'm off my rocker, because it amuses him).

Not to say he doesn't drive me crazy sometimes. For example, he refuses all responsibility for turning off the light in our room at night, even when he is the last one to bed. He thinks that it should be my job, because it's on my side of the bed, but it's too high up for me to reach and I'd have to get out of the covers and sit up to turn it off, rendering side of the bed irrelevant. The other night, he tried to wait me out, so I got out of bed and went over to his side. He sleeps with a CPAP machine, and my intention was to pull the hose out so he couldn't breathe. Unfortunately (for him), I don't know my own strength, and I pulled the whole machine onto his head. Whoops! That'll teach him.

So, everything is not always perfect, but it's always interesting and never lonely. Happy birthday, sweetheart. I love you.

Damn, you're getting old.

Heard around our house

My step-daughter flipped through Tivo and didn't find anything she wanted to watch, so she settled for American Idol. While watching the intro, she said, with real awe in her voice

"No wonder people like this, it's so sparkly."

Which leads me to the realization that I have so many kids because I like mocking people.

Seeing things

I was reading Snow White to my 5 year old yesterday (that's a whole other post - my husband's ex-wife edited this copy of Snow White in an effort to remove all traces of sexism - it's interesting and amusing to see what she cut, and to realize that you can't really make Snow White into a strong woman story by changing adjectives, and this is the longest parenthetical ever), and I started seeing lights, mostly in front of my left eye. It got worse fast, and pretty soon it seemed like a dozen fiber optic lights were between me and my field of vision, and I couldn't read the words on the page any more (the originals OR the suggested alternatives). My head didn't hurt yet, but I remembered my grandmother talking about seeing lights before her migraines, so I took advil, turned off the lights, and laid down. About 10 minutes later, the headache moved in and I can hardly even remember the next couple hours. My poor husband came home and took care of all 6 kids while I lay in the dark, whining intermittently. It eased up some after the kids went to bed (all things considered, it was a nicely-timed headache), but it still hurts some this morning and I really didn't care for the am-I-dying weird light thing. I'm guessing it was a migraine, and I'm hoping it was an isolated incident.

And now, for your entertainment, one of the edited passages from Snow White:

"Snow White ran faster and faster, and when she could run no more, she fell to the ground and began to weep rested."

Because, you know, weeping is girly and weak. Men don't weep. Or something. I bet they don't get migraines, either. I feel like a stronger woman already, just from reading the amended version. Censorship now!

Lazy posting

I keep thinking of posts and not typing them, so here's a very un-fleshed-out stream-of-consciousness list of some of them:

1) Yarn, and why I love it.
2) My progressing midlife crisis regarding a career. To work or not to work? To be creative or productive or save the world?
3) Babies, and how they are infinitely cuter when they sleep. I started to write that one yesterday morning, after they went a record ELEVEN HOURS (that's not just a record, it's nearly twice the previous record), but of course they slept for shit last night, so I can't call it a trend. I can, however, call that a runon sentence.
4) Easter math, and how you can not fit 6 bags of candy into 12 plastic eggs. You can, however, fit 2 bags of candy into one overstuffed me in about 30 minutes.
5) Spring break, and why it is a conspiracy by the school systems to make money for the mental institutions. It is Monday, and I'm about to start taking odds on which of us, if any, survive the week with big boy home from school and at very. loose. ends.
6) Taxes, and why they are awesome. My friend is letting me do her taxes and I'm having a ridiculously good time with them. Totally cheered me up after my suckass day of bad children and worse parenting.
7) Illness, and why I am oh so over it. My husband now has a fever of 101, and it will really suck for him to have to miss a day at his still-new job, where he is still fighting a bunch of fires left by the last schmo.
8) Consulting, and why I definitely do NOT want that to be my career choice. I fixed that RPC over HTTP thing two weeks ago, after getting calls and emails approximately once every 30 minutes from the client, checking on status. Guess how many times they've contacted me since I got it working? Guess!

There are more, but I'll spare you for now. That ought to hold everyone over for a while. Anyone want to vote on one or more for me to expand upon? Or should I stick to knitting and taxes?

This is so cool!

If I only had one baby, I would totally get this stroller:

It's so ingenious! I love things that turn into other things - I was a closet Transformers fan in junior high, and I guess it stuck with me. I just got a new twin stroller, and I like it, but even the smallest twin stroller is huge. Silly babies, coming in pairs.

In other news, I caught the kids' cold and am NOT being stoic about it. I think my husband wishes it were a work day. If I were nice, I would add "suffering in silence" to my list of skills to learn, but since I'm really only annoying other people, I don't care.

Hmm, what other skills DO I want to learn?

1) Speaking a foreign language

2) Colorwork in knitting

3) Being thin

4) Installing solar panels

5) Auto repair

6) Resisting illness

That's all I can think of for now. Going to go blow my nose for the 345th time today. Whee!

9 months old

I'm sure some of you already know this story - a couple months before I got pregnant with the twins, my then-4-year-old found my basal thermometer and asked what it was for. I told him it was to help me have a baby, and he said "you're going to have TWO babies, and we will call them Twinser and Twinser." Of course, I told him that usually babies only come one at a time - so imagine our surprise at that first ultrasound when we saw these little monkeys hanging out like a little tadpole gang.

Our little Twinser and Twinser are 9 months old today. It's amazing how fast they change at this age - it seems like they started sitting up one day and the next day they were off like a shot. They crawl in tandem across the living room, then look at each other as if to say, "now......BREAK," then split up and crawl furiously in opposite directions. I haven't caught on to their evil genius yet, and one of them almost always makes it to the dog food before I corral the other one. Boy twin is pulling up on everything (which reminds me, I really have to lower his crib mattress), and girly is setting land speed records for mischevious crawling.

This picture is from tonight. As I tried to wrestle monkey-girl into a diaper, I was distracted for all of 3 seconds and turned my head back to discover her knee-deep in my knitting basket, waving needles and yarn and very, very pleased with herself. Boy took the opportunity to hide behind her and postpone banishment to his crib. Smart babies, and so grown up all of a sudden.

Blackmail fodder for adolescence

This is what happens when you are a three year old boy and your sister is almost ten and is not yet allowed to dress up her only sister, who is an infant and has been deemed too young for the ten year old's tender ministrations.

The haircut and lacrosse stick really make the outfit, in my opinion. I'm definitely holding onto this picture in case the boy ever gets any crazy ideas about dating when he's a teenager.

Pilates: Coming to a mall near you

After much gentle persistence from my friend Cole, I attended her Pilates class yesterday. She's a really good instructor - so good, in fact, that I didn't hate her during the class or even afterward. Until today, when my muscles recovered from the shock of their exertion and started screaming every time I lifted a glass of wine to my lips. Nothing should interfere with Wine Wednesdays. Still, I have to admit the class was effective if it hurts this much, so I'll probably go back next week. Or the week after.

On my way to the Pilates class, I called my husband to brag about using the gym for the FOURTH TIME in only 3 months of membership, bringing our cost-per-use down dramatically. His response was:

"Pilates? Is that a new store?"

Smartass.

Milk as an action verb

My three year old is fascinated by nursing, and has transformed "milk" into a verb. In a game he's playing with my mother, he just told her he would be "Loop Skywalker" and for her role...well, I'll use his words:

"Yer the mom, you can milk!"

Light saber versus milk, it's an epic contest.

Follow-up:
Having just been given the role of Dad, I asked the boy:

Me: What do dads do?
3 year old: Work.
Me: What do moms do?
3 year old: Play.

I knew I had the better deal.

Blowin' in the wind

I'm afraid I'm a very weak-willed, indecisive person. I tend to agree with whomever I'm speaking with at any given time on almost any topic (one exception is politics - under no circumstances was anyone ever able to sway me into thinking Bush was anything less than a complete disaster). It's not just nodding and smiling, either - I can talk to someone with view A and fully believe what they're saying, then talk to another person with diametrically opposed view B and become equally committed to their viewpoint. I like to chalk it up to being a Pisces, rather than to fundamental flakiness.

So now I'm noticing that this wishy-washiness extends to more than ideological debate. Since the twins were just a few months old, I've toyed with the idea of going back to work, at least part time. I don't know why it keeps popping into my head. God knows I have my hands full enough here, and I like being home with the kids, and although we certainly aren't rich, we are fortunate enough not to need me to work to pay bills. So why do I keep thinking of working? I think it comes down to some yearning for instant gratification and a different kind of fulfillment than I get from parenting. I love my kids, but I won't know for years if all this work is effective - and even then, I won't know how much credit to take for success or how much blame for failure. Working has a much more immediate payoff - even on a bad work day, you get the positive feedback of a paycheck and another task to do.

The real indecisiveness enters the picture when I consider what to do, if I do anything at all. So far, the things I've considered (really thought about and looked into, not just gave passing thought to) include: tax preparation, freelance writing, starting an online backup business, knitting children's clothes, and doing IT consulting. I've also thought about going back to school to be: a speech pathologist, an environmental engineer, a lawyer, and a radiology tech. You can see the troubling lack of focus here.

Yesterday, I went house shopping with a friend, and during the course of the two or so hours we were out, I talked to the real estate agent about doing home inspection or becoming a real estate agent myself. I even came home and looked at the courses and requirements for doing real estate. The only thing that held me back from signing up then and there was the hours of the course - 9-5 for eight days, which I can't do because I'm still nursing the twins approximately 7 times an hour.

My husband has started saying "here we go" every time I bring up a new idea, and I don't blame him. I used to frustrate myself with my inability to find anything at all that sounded interesting to me, career-wise, and now I think "that might be fun!" about every job I come across. I'm not sure which is more annoying.

How old is too old for wondering what I want to be when I grow up?