Brought back to blogging by horrible headlines

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

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

Aaaaaaaaaand....I'm back!

Where was I?

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

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

Wine is good

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

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

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

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

Failure

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

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

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

My dietary intake today

Because you all want to know:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am soooooooooo tired.

Working on a green thumb

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

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

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

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

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

Working title: Live long and prosper.

Also, The Office is the funniest show alive.

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

It's like Egypt around here

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

Paging Dr. Freud

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

Dis.tur.bing.

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

And now, for a change of pace...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I annoy myself

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking for the good in my boy twin

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

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

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

Voice recognition (helllllllllloooo, computer)

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

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

Stephen Hawking, I have bad news for you.

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

The list is growing

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

Hear me out - gun control

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes I love my kids

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

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

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

Men are boring

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

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

Disclaimer: I have the flu and may be cranky.

Happy birthday!

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

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

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

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

Damn, you're getting old.

Heard around our house

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

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

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

Seeing things

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

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

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

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

Lazy posting

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

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

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

This is so cool!

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

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

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

Hmm, what other skills DO I want to learn?

1) Speaking a foreign language

2) Colorwork in knitting

3) Being thin

4) Installing solar panels

5) Auto repair

6) Resisting illness

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

9 months old

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

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

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

Blackmail fodder for adolescence

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

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

Pilates: Coming to a mall near you

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

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

"Pilates? Is that a new store?"

Smartass.

Milk as an action verb

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

"Yer the mom, you can milk!"

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

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

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

I knew I had the better deal.

Blowin' in the wind

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stickin it to da man

A few months ago, I checked out my husband's credit report through the glory that is annualcreditreport.com (try it! you'll like it!) and was horrified to discover that he probably could not qualify for an auto loan at Joe's Crappy Car Emporium, home of the we-say-yes-to-everyone car loans at only 24% APR! His credit was a bad math SAT score or a really good but still possible batting average. Further investigation revealed that one of my stepkids' doctors offices had been sending bills to my husband in his name, but at his ex-wife's address. Bills he never authorized, for accounts on which he was not the guarantor, and (again) at an address where he does not receive mail. FIVE of them had gone to collections and been reported to the credit reporting agencies by the time we discovered the depths of the problem.

I took a deep breath - this was just a mistake, and surely the billing people would want to resolve their mistake so they could get paid, right? Oh, stop laughing. I was thinking the best of people, I promise not to do it again. One zillion phone calls later (and that's only a slight exagerration), we finally wised up and started complaining in writing. Except wisdom got us nowhere, and we never received any acknowledgment of our complaints, and every time we called we had to start over from scratch. To make things more complicated, the turnover at this billing department is insane, and literally every time I called, I got yet another new person in her first week on the job. I was starting to have to inform these clerks of their own policies.

I finally turned to my crisis resolution center, Google. What did people do before Google? I can imagine life without indoor plumbing or central heat or (god knows) functioning transportation, but no instant-gratification-provider-of-knowledge-of-questionable-reliability? I love me some Google. And did Google come through for me - it turned me on to Credit Boards, a collection of credit information and experienced credit fighters who volunteer huge amounts of time to help visitors with their credit problems. I learned about the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the relevant portions of HIPAA. I suckered some poor account supervisor at the health care provider into giving me her email address, and I started emailing her. Often. With thinly veiled threats of legal action. She loves me, I assure you.

Today, I received notification from my poor harassed buddy at the health care provider that they have sent a request to the credit bureaus to have the erroneous entries removed from my husband's report. I feel like I just ran a marathon or won an election for public office or some other life changing and incredibly unlikely accomplishment. I won't feel completely better until the entries are gone, and they said it could be up to 45 days, but it's progress, and I'll take progress.

Especially since my van is a big, fat, stupid paperweight again, sitting in my driveway unwilling to start, and too close to the house to light on fire.

From the depths of despair to the peaks of self-congratulation

Whew. I so remember now why I quit working in IT and swore I'd never go back. After I got that site certified the other day, I was riding high on puzzle-solving endorphins. I came crashing back down the next morning when I discovered that our overall goal was still not accomplished (the certificate was one part of a larger puzzle, and although I thought it was the final piece, I was incorrect). I spent three hours onsite yesterday, and several more online last night, only to find that not only had I NOT fixed the new thing, I'd broken a couple other things that had worked before. Lame lame lame. That's when the awful feeling came back, the one I remember from my working days, of stomach acid and burning eyes and desperation. Knowing you have to fix something and don't know how and there's nowhere to turn, you just have to keep plugging away at it.

Here is yet another foray into really arcane and uninteresting computer crap. I was trying to set up RPC over HTTP access so the clients could get email using their Outlook software over the internet without opening extra firewall ports. This is a built-in function of Exchange, and Microsoft gives pretty easily followed steps for setting it up - configure the service, set up the access, change a couple ports, add a certificate, configure the client. Kind of a lot of work, but not hard once you find the directions. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. I did everything I was supposed to, tested, and...nothing. Went back over every step, assuming I missed something, typed something wrong...nothing. Went to discussion boards, googled "RPC over HTTP sucks" and...nothing. I undid settings and redid them, removed DNS zones (that I'm grossly unqualified to be mucking about with anyway), called my network engineer friend for a consult, yelled at my husband, lost sleep I desperately needed, and... NOTHING. Finally, I followed all the steps again from the beginning, as if I'd never done it before, but this time added about twice as many port entries as Microsoft calls for and changed the authentication method in the client, both per some random guy on the internet's suggestion, and...success! What???? WHY???? Stupid. Fucking. Microsoft.

While I am happy and relieved that it's working, I'd feel more comfortable about it if I understood WHY. Still, this has been a voyage of self-discovery for me. I have put my husband on notice that any dreams he may have of me ever contributing financially to the family again should be laid officially to rest. Work and I just do not get along.

Self-certifying an IIS site

Or, Why Microsoft Blows.

My husband asked me for help with a consulting job last night, so I dusted off my incredibly old and rusty skills and tried to remember things I did 4 years ago and then translate them to another platform and two generations of operating system later. And I did it! I think. I did something, anyway, and I think I know what else I NEED to do to finish the job. Vague enough for you?

This won't be interesting to anyone but me, probably, but Microsoft annoys me so much that I have to vent it anyway. In my former life, I worked on Lotus Domino servers. They don't have as much market share as Microsoft, which makes no sense to me, as Lotus is more secure and just plain makes more sense. Certificates are a case in point.

Well, let me back up. A certificate is something you add to a web site that tells visitors (or their web browsers) "you can trust this website, its authenticity has been verified." You can get a certificate in two ways. 1 - There are a handful of globally trusted verifiers, whose business it is to verify (duh, and how many times can I say "verify" in one paragraph) that a website is legitimate. So, if you want to make your website look trustworthy, you pay one of these companies to check you out, make sure you're legit, and issue you an electronic certificate to put on your site. 2 - Alternatively, if you're just setting up the site for your own personnel, for example, you can authenticate your own website, and give yourself a homemade certificate. If you do this, people accessing your site will get a message that the certificate is not from one of the big trusted companies, but it will work just the same.

So, I was working on option 2 - creating my own certificate and verifying it myself. In Lotus, which I used to use, there's an easily followed and logical set of steps for doing this. The software designers recognized that this is a common need and made the process as painless as possible. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to have taken this opportunity to play a little game of hide and seek with web admins. First of all, Microsoft blows in general, and there is no central admin console except what you cobble together yourself out of "snap-ins" (which sound like snap-ONS and make me want to do unnatural and painful things to the morons who developed them). Once you stumble, through trial and error, upon the correct snap-in, you then have to check the properties of the "default site" (hoping it's the right one), then pick one of like 10 tabs with similar and ambiguous names, then finally request a certificate. Now, you'd assume the process for verifying the certificate would be at least a little bit the same, but you would be completely wrong. To verify the certificate, you have to go to add/remove programs in the control panel. WHAT??? You scream in frustration, pulling out your hair! That makes no sense at all! You are correct, sir.

Anyway, I wandered and roamed throughout the operating system on this poor unsuspecting company's server (I had their permission, they were unsuspecting only in their unfounded trust in my abilities) until I finally figured out how to recreate, using a retarded software, that which I could do in my sleep four years ago using an intelligent one. And then my brain exploded, but I had my pride to comfort me.

What's in a name?

As some of you may have seen on my husband's blog, we got a mini dachshund puppy this weekend. Although this may be a sign of our ever-declining mental health, it wasn't quite as impulsive as it seemed. The puppy is really for my mother (who lives with us), who had a dachshund while we were growing up and has missed it ever since.

My mother doesn't like naming things (which I don't get - naming rights are half the reason for having kids!), so she told the 5 year old he could pick the puppy's name. He took the responsibility very, very seriously, and the process took 2 days of discussion followed by one hour of intensive review of all contenders. He came up with this list of contenders (some of them suggested by others in the family and many of them created on the spot) - the notes next to some of the names indicate why the name was NOT ultimately chosen:

Crystal - his sister has a pet mouse of the same name
Angel
Diamond - the dog is not clear
Chloe
Hermione
Curious
Snow - the dog is not white
Tootsie
Sheba
Zuron - too boyish
Kaminia
Azakra
Peanut
Azalea - too purple
Clementine
Tabitha
Amelia - this was his great-grandmother's name, and he didn't want to besmirch her memory
Ashanta - this one was deemed too scary, but I can't remember why
Leia
Sacra
Lorelei
Vivian - also 'too scary', as it sounds, to the 5 year old, too much like "oblivion"
Genevieve
Bailey
Celeste
Joy
Emerald - the dog is not green
Aquamarine - the dog is not blue-green
Opal
Ruby
Sapphire - the dog is not blue
Topaz
Zeckrimiah - we really had to talk him out of this one
Mariah - a bad singer
Citlalli - a classmate, who might not have appreciated having a dog named for her
Rackimiah
Esmerelda
Flower
Blossom - the name of a friend's dog, too copy-catty
Takra
Amiah
Cherry - too edible
Strawberry - ditto
LaFawnduh - Daddy's Napoleon Dynamite inspired contribution, shot down quickly by the boy
Flash - too boyish
Jekra

Through much prodding, he narrowed this list down, first to 30, then to 11, then to 5, and finally to 1 - Hermione. We're all happy with this choice - we're all Harry Potter fans, and my mother's old dachshund was named Herman, so it's similar enough to be a tribute. Now to teach it to the dog...

Other people's poop

Spring has been coming and going around here lately, and today was beautiful and warm. We took the four oldest kids to a gigantic newish playground north of the city. Before turning our city bred crew loose on the county kids, with their shiny SUVs and well-manicured mothers, we made them use the port-a-potties in the parking lot. The 3 year old required some urging to enter the foul blue hut, but quickly became curious about his surroundings and ultimately observed,

"Look! It's other people's poop!"

Story of my life, kiddo.

How is a restaurant like a washing machine?

I've been eating out a LOT the last couple weeks. My husband got a new job (so we had to celebrate), I had a birthday (so I needed to drown my aging sorrows), we went out with friends, and overall I've just generally stopped feeling like cooking. Eating out is just more fun. And less mess.

On my way home from last night's oh-my-god-good dinner, I was thinking in my post-drunk haze of how lovely it is to eat good food in a place where people cook it and clean it up for you. I didn't learn to cook until a couple years ago, so before that I sort of ate out by necessity. I mostly eat in now, and I really do like to cook, but I hadn't realized until this latest round of decadence how much I still really enjoy eating out. I likened it, in my head, to washing clothes in a machine instead of beating them on a rock or something. Yes, I technically COULD wash my clothes without benefit of a washing machine (yes I could, hush all you naysayers), but aren't washing machines so much nicer?

In the same vein (not to be confused with, "my efforts were invane," quote taken from an email a friend just received from an idiot), I wish Baltimore's zoning laws allowed quail, as I had quail eggs for the second time in my life last night and I looooooooove them. Sadly, I will have to stick with chickens. That's okay, I like chicken eggs, too.

I forgot how fun bars are

I have, inevitably, caught the twins' cold. When they were sicker at the beginning of the week, I marveled at their capacity for whine, but now I marvel at my own capacity for sitting upright and participating in inane child-led conversation, so perhaps their cold was worse than I thought. Or maybe I'm just a weenie.

I had planned on going to a girls' night out karaoke thing last night, but as the evening approached and my whole self clotted with mucus (come on, you know you want me), I had doubts about how much fun I would have. I went anyway, in an ongoing effort to not be a flake and instead actually do what I say I will do, and surprised myself by having a fabulous time. It's like the bar atmosphere itself lifts my spirits. Even before my first drink, I felt lighter and happier than I have in a while, and my husband (who is not a girl and who we included, generously, nonetheless) laughed at my transformation into a much younger, livelier version of myself.

I love my friends, my friends' friends, my husband, and alcohol. I love my mother for watching my herd and my herd for not giving her too hard a time. I love that I'm going out again! Tonight! For dinner with friends. And again again! Tomorrow! For an art fundraiser at my son's school. It's a revelation, that the world has been out there waiting while I've been living the same day 260 times over with few variations.

The Money Pit

I seem to have a strong, unmanageable, perverse psychic gift. If I think to myself, wow, [something] is going really well! then almost immediately, that thing will turn to shit. Examples:

1) Last month, I said (out loud, very bad idea) that it had been a long time since our craptastic van had had one of its patented spectacular flameouts. $1100 and 8 days in the shop later, I am resolved never to even mentally comment on its good behavior again.

2) In early February, everyone around us was getting stomach flu, and we were well. "This winter hasn't been too awful, illness-wise!" I foolishly remarked. We have not been well since, and the past month has included RSV, pneumonia, sinus infection, strep, and scarlet fever. You know how the IRS now feels compelled to practically pay US, because we are so many? I think Blue Cross should take up a similar plan, though I admit I can't figure what would be in it for them.

3) Just last night, I thought to myself how fortunate we are to own a home, and how our positive balance sheet owes entirely to the increased value of said home since its purchase. Today? I had my neighbor (a contractor) over to give estimates on the long (looooong) list of long (looooong) neglected home repairs we need done. He hasn't given an estimate yet, but he shook his head over each room in a fashion that reminded me of an oncologist with a very bad bedside manner. My house may have cancer.

In related news, my neighbor is working on drumming up business and said he'd give me a discount if I got him referrals. He is a really nice guy, for whatever that's worth (since I have no actual ability to evaluate workmanship, it's worth a lot to me), he's licensed and insured, and he seems responsive. So, if anyone in the Baltimore area needs work done on their house and wants to get me a discount a referral, let me know!

The tide may be turning. In our house, in addition to the typical sock eating monster that leaves us with one of each pair, we have a binkie eating monster that secrets away pacifiers in dead of night. I think we've bought 400 of them, and we only ever know the location of one, max, at a time. Tonight, as I put the twins to bed, I asked my husband to look behind girly's crib and he found SIX of them. Things are looking up!

Silver lining

I am on a commission (as my three year old always says) to be more positive and productive, to whine less and live more. Call it a new year's resolution, dating from my birthday instead of the actual new year. The twins are making it difficult, however, to see the good in life or have the energy to live it. It is 5:30am. I fell asleep at 12:30 and have now been up since 4, courtesy of a one-two punch of suck from my lovely offspring.

This may all sound like whining, but wait! Here's the spin I finally came up with, after much unseemly despair - isn't it amazing what the human body can withstand? I mean, I look like crap, the twins seem to have finished off the demolition my older children started on my body, I'm exhausted all the time and I can hardly finish sentences my mind has become so vague, but the fact that I'm still able to walk and talk at all is a testament to...I don't know, to something. Human resilience. The ability to live for months at a time with little rest. The fallacy of the 8 hour sleep.

Hmm, I reread that and it still doesn't sound all that positive. I may need to try anew another day. I would say tomorrow, except that it already practically is tomorrow, and I'm afraid days begun on less than 4 hours of sleep hardly ever turn out all that well.

Latching on

I know I've been slacking on posting, but it's been a fairly crappy week, and if you want to hear me whine you can always reread my previous 354 consecutive whiny-ass posts. Summary: van is out of shop after only 8 days in, new water heater is installed (and only cost a teency bit less than our honeymoon, which included a much larger quantity of hot water in the form of the Gulf of Mexico), approximately one half of the family is on antibiotics for reasons ranging from scarlet fever to sinus infection (although I did not pass the test and am suffering, as stoically as you might imagine, without benefit of prescription medication), and I am now 31 years old, blech. In better news - my husband starts his new job Monday (yay him!), my children are being generally not-sucky, and the twins have (knock on everything wooden) been sort of sleeping. Hurray!

As is my wont, I am latching on to a new obsession. At least it's not cloth diapers! Not that I'm not still obsessed w/cloth diapers, of course, but I have pretty much all I need for now and so have been casting about for something else to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money on. As my husband just said, when I latch onto something, I really mean it. Today's candidate is.....

Raising chickens. My husband has been lobbying for chickens for some time now, but I've been slow to see the light. Now that my eldest is at an age of quasi-reason and loves all things outdoors and alive, the time may be right. I must sign off now to research chicken coop building plans, but I leave you with a picture of my leading candidate, the Red Orpington:

Why yes, it has occurred to me that I'm insane, thank you for the suggestion.

So much for spring killing pestilence

I'm enjoying the warmer temperatures, but so far the much-anticipated death of plague has not materialized. My mother has a sinus infection so severe she's actually going to the doctor (this is nearly unprecedented, she's very opposed to anything less than 100% self-sufficiency and is, what's the word? STUBBORN), my 5 year old has scarlet fever (scarlet fever is such a romantic sounding name, and so old-fashioned, I feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder) and a double ear infection, and - oh, there's no and. The rest of us are still incubating, I guess. I assume our turns are coming. This just in - my husband feels like he's getting a cold. And is supposed to start at his new job any day now. Damn the plague!

Oh, and our van, after 2 service dates last week and $1000 out of pocket, now stalls when you stop at lights or turn corners. Fun!

In other news, my daughter has learned to crawl, which has greatly reduced the number of words I can write without having to get up and rescue the electronics or the cat from her clutches. She got a tooth, too. She's so fancy.

Maryland charter schools being targeted by proposed legislation

My son goes to a charter school. Charter schools are funded like public schools (and are free to students) but are independently operated. In the case of the Baltimore City Public School System, under whose umbrella our school falls, this really can only be a good thing. This is a school system that recently "lost" 50 million dollars (as in, actually misplaced), a school system that has struggled with overcrowding, decrepit facilities, high dropout rates, poor test scores, and violence in schools. The Baltimore City school system has driven families out of the city, where their only options have, until recently, been failing public schools or insanely expensive public schools. Charter schools offer an alternative to those families - to my family - and yet they have been under attack from the very beginning.

Charter schools in Maryland are only in their second year of operation. There is a court case pending already to try to force the school systems to actually fund the charter schools appropriately - right now, the charter schools are operating at several hundred to a few thousand dollars less per student than public schools in the same systems, and yet they are doing a better job educating students and keeping them safe. Now, before that case is even settled, some of our state senators are proposing legislation modification that would further reduce the charter schools' already inadequate funding.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that government doesn't support education, but I don't get the push behind flogging charter schools. I can't imagine they'd make much money if they succeed - a lot of the families currently attending charter schools would choose private schools or move to a better school district or homeschool if the charters were no longer available, so those funds would be lost to the public school system anyway. Obviously, what is best for the students and community is not the driving force, I just can't figure out what is. It's so short-sighted, putting kids last. What are we supposed to do in 20-30 years when there is a shortage of qualified professionals to take care of us and a burgeoning prison population? That may sound overly dramatic, but it seems to me that the old adage about an ounce of prevention applies here - the current system is not working well (at least here in Baltimore City), so why not try something different?

I wrote to my state senator and all the misguided sponsors and signers of the proposed legislation and all of the committee members who will be debating it this morning. If you are so inclined, you can email them too, and ask them to vote NO on SB 669:

Sponsors/signers (just add "@senate.state.md.us" to the end of each name to get the email address):
roy.dyson
gwendolyn.britt
robert.hooper
lisa.gladden

Committee members (just add "@senate.state.md.us" to the end of each name to get the email address):
joan.carter.conway
richard.colburn
janet.greenip
andrew.harris
mike.lenett
paul.pinsky
jim.rosapepe
bobby.zirkin

Fight the power, man!

Unfun ways to blow a lot of cash

1) Broken (wait, let me look it up) front wheel bearing on the world's lemoniest lemon of a craptastic piece of shit minivan. Surely, you may be thinking, a "bearing" isn't expensive? Aren't bearings just little balls? Ah, but you (or your friendly shmos at Goodyear) can only obtain these made-from-rare-goose-poop or something bearings as part of a "larger assembly". For $499. Good. Grief.

2) Hot water heater. Frequent visitors to our house have probably noticed an increase in body odor over the last month or so, as our showers have gotten shorter, colder, and rarer. Today, we are conceding defeat and engaging in a (cold, smelly) quest to find an adequate replacement. Quickly.

Oh, and the installation for the water heater is the same price as the heater itself! What was with the hard sell on college, parents? Clearly, if financial solvency is a factor in your career choice, you can do no better than auto mechanic or plumber.

1:56am

This is my second night making the twins go four hours between feedings. In the sober light of day (and perhaps this is why sobriety is so overrated), it made sense to say, "surely chunky 8 month olds do not need to eat every 45 minutes at night." It is in everyone's best interest for them to learn to sleep, and I have tried everything except really committing to letting them cry. I have read possibly every word in the English language ever written on making demons babies sleep, and even the theories diametrically opposed to each other agree that consistency is key.

Last night, night one, wasn't that terrible. I fed them before I went to bed at 11. Boy twin woke up at 12:10 and screamed his head off for 30 minutes and then did go back to sleep until 3, when I fed them both. His sister took her turn screaming from 4:30-5, then they both got up at 7. Not terrible. Neither twin was noticeably emaciated in the morning (sadly, neither was I, but that's another issue), and I had had two chunks of two hours of sleep, which enabled me to do puzzles with my son, clean the house a little, and make dinner. All in the same day!

I went to bed feeling foolishly optimistic. I kind of go to bed every night feeling foolishly optimistic, come to think of it - despite 244 consecutive nights of them not sleeping (that's the actual number, not an exaggeration, by the way), every night I think to myself that maybe this will be the night they realize that sleep is not out to get them, that it might be nice to have a mother they see outside visitation hours at the asylum, that there is no way in hell they need to eat again. Anyway, I had hope, because I am dumb. It must be like pregnancy amnesia - I have horrible-night-with-babies amnesia, which allows me to continue trying to survive the twins' infancy against all the evidence pointing to the unlikelihood of that survival.

I fed the little monsters darlings at 10:45 and went to bed. Because I am constantly tense from forcing myself to stay awake, I can never fall asleep quickly at bedtime (though I can nod off in seconds any other time, like while driving a car), and I fell asleep around 11:30. Boy twin started screaming at 12:45. It is now 2:13am and he's still at it, although he does take occasional 5-10 minute breaks to make sure I try to fall asleep again - it's most effective, apparently, when trying to break down your enemy emotionally, to not just keep them awake but to jerk them back up out of sleep repeatedly. Twins? The Supreme Court would like a word with you regarding the applicability of the Geneva Convention. I think I'm raising little Republicans, talk about insult to injury.

I'm going to go suffer the noise horizontally again for a while. I hate this sound more than anything - it makes my heart race and my stomach churn, I actually feel like throwing up. Why are my babies so awful???

Adrift in the land of no sleep

I'm so tired, and I never sleep, but I'm bored of never doing anything because I'm tired. Here's where the poor judgement and clumsiness and erratic behavior come in. I decide that I MUST just go on with life, and stop this futile waiting for rest that is clearly not coming, so I make plans to do normal things like a normal person - get together with friends, go grocery shopping, knit (okay, not sure normal people knit, but I like knitting). I really enjoy doing these things, but then the wall of exhaustion hits harder and earlier than usual, because I squander my extremely limited energy on behaving in a manner unbecoming to the living dead, and then I just have to collapse in a moist desperate heap of hopelessness until the next 20 minute snippet of sleep I can snatch from the clutches of my evil twins (my twins are fraternal in genes but identical in evilness)(evility?).

I keep thinking of things to do, then fizzling out when confronted with actually accomplishing anything. Examples:

1) Starting a business. I have an actual idea (rare). I have a possible company name. I started doing financial analysis. I even submitted a quote request to a hardware vendor, but they haven't responded (possibly due to my lack of an actual, real life business), and so the steam, she has worn off.
2) Actual parenting. My three year old needs a 12 step program for video game junkies, so I have been trying to distract him from his addiction by plying him with mom activities like playgrounds, puzzles, and other fun things starting with the letter P. Peanut butter? Whatever. Anyway, his focus and will far exceed my own, as is only natural given our relative levels of sleep (him: 12 hours a night. me: 20-45 minutes, 2-3 times in each 24 hour period).
3) Writing the great American novel. In my head, in the dead of night (and let me tell you, as a regular visitor to the dead of night, it truly is a morguish and unpleasant land), I think of not just ideas but whole paragraphs of elegant and compelling language that I intend to commit to paper (or pixels) ASAP - but the ideas are ephemeral as dreams (and may, in some cases, actually just BE dreams) and never make it to the writing-down stage.

I'm sure there are more, but my brain is proving my point (do I have one?) by not remembering the rest. I need sleep. And maybe chocolate.

PMS is a bitch

And so am I. Holy crap, am I. I seriously can hardly abide my own company. My family's reward for letting me sleep in this morning (is it really sleeping in if you don't get properly to sleep in the first place until 6am?) is my glowering face and yelling, cursing reaction to absolutely everything. During one of my late night sojourns in the living room last night, I thought wistfully of the children's fleeting dependency and sweet innocence and resolved to be a kinder, more engaged mother. That didn't last three minutes into breakfast.

If I'm really done having children (and I believe that, for the mental health of everyone in the family, I had better be), WHY must we all suffer this every month? Here I am, menopause, come and get me!

I like bacon

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

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

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

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

2) Plastic

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

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

This explains a lot

So, my Jack Nicholson-in-The-Shining phase is over (for now), and I'm moving past crazy and desperate into spring. It's March, hurray! I hate February.

The Today show (aka, my contact with the outside world) is running a series on sleep this week (see why I love them?). Yesterday, they said if you don't get enough sleep, you lose what you learned that day. At least, I think that's what they said - I didn't get enough sleep last night, and I'm a little fuzzy on the details. Actually, I haven't slept enough in about eighteen months. No wonder I feel like a dull blade these days.

In other news, I shaved my son's hair into a mohawk. The obvious question is, why does my husband let me near the children with razors? I think it turned out really cute, actually, and I'm very proud of the boy for asserting some individuality - he's spent the last couple years trying to be a herd animal.

I'm such a failure

I don't want to go on and on (again) about how awful these babies are, how horrible it is living with no sleep and no hope, but I'm realizing now that they are almost EIGHT MONTHS OLD, and I have to be doing something terribly, terribly wrong.

Yeah. I just sat here staring at the screen, trying to think anything coherent to add or clarify, but I'm out. I feel like I'm dissolving, like what's left of who I used to be is disintegrating under the pressure of never resting, and I don't like who I am and I see no way back to who I was.