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.

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.