Candy

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

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

I may already be dead

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

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

Xenophobia

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

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

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

They like me, they really like me

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

Should have known better

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

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

Wow, time flies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This war has been brought to you by...

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

"Corporate funding for The War..."

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

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

Maybe not a mistake

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

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

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

The tonsils have left the building

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

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

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

Sigh. Fine, I'll work.

Tired

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

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

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

Feeling like a real live girl

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

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

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

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

Doing better

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

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

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

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

Blue, baby, blue

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

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

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

TGIF

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

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

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

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

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

More of the same

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

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

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

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

Illness, mental and physical

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

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

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

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

Knowing It's Coming Doesn't Help

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

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

An end to penis envy

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

The Sordid School Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The First Annual Allies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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