I am officially lactose free, and other news

While talking to my husband last night, I realized that I've had quite a few personal milestones this past week. I knew I'd been busy, but it's nice to look back and see that all that busyness actually led to some accomplishments. In bullet form, because I'm too lazy to really write:

• I weaned the twins. This is huge. It went pretty smoothly, and they don't seem to miss it too much, other than a little extra whining in the morning, and I feel unchained. Yay to not being a dairy! I can't believe I made it almost two years.
• I ran 20 minutes, in a row. I don't think I've ever even come close to that, even when I was a kid. I am just amazed by the couch-to-5k-program - I just finished week 5 (of 9), and I've gone from almost stroking out during 1 minute intervals to not struggling that hard at 20 minutes. Who knew I had it in me? Now, if I just stopped eating constantly, maybe I'd see some results...
• I finished teaching, forever. This semester was a bit of a struggle, and it's a huge weight off to be done. Done done done!
• I finished my first semester back in school. I got an A in chemistry, and I have my fingers crossed that I'll have an A in physics, too, if my professor ever posts my grade. In the meantime, I'll just keep checking every half hour. Somehow, the dream of med school seems much more attainable now that I've finished the first step, however small.
• I got a summer job, just like a real college kid - I'm going to be doing research with my physics professor, poking fungi w/sharp sticks and looking at their individual atoms under a super-cool space age atomic force microscope. AND I'll get to publish about it. AND I get paid. It's awesome.

Best of all, I have this week almost entirely free of responsibility. I'm done with school and not yet starting work. The weather is a bit dreary, but who wants to be outside anyway? I'm wallowing in lazy mornings and late showers and trips to Target with my husband.

Nutty nuthead day

Today I found out that my little boy got into the free, full-day, excellent pre-kindergarten program at my big boy's school for this fall. I am so very excited. His birthday is only two weeks after the cutoff for kindergarten, and while I'm happy about him waiting the year because of his autism issues, I think this is the perfect interim step. Plus, free, can't beat that. And it means my mom won't have to run all over with the twins to get him to and from some half-day program while I'm at school full time. Anyway, this is probably not all that exciting to anyone but me, but I'm very relieved and happy.

And in honor of my silly child, a story from the grocery store today - we were walking down the cereal aisle, browsing, and he said "why is everything we can't have delicious?" Wise words from weird wee bits.

Wow, did I speak too soon

I firmly resolve to never admit in writing to being even momentarily pleased with my children. Two of them have spent this afternoon being the biggest assholes they can possibly be. I have left my cool so far behind, I barely remember feeling anything other than rage and despair about this whole motherhood thing.

I hardly ever comment on the trauma of step-parenting on this blog, but this time I simply must. I believe that putting a child on psychotropic medications for no other reason than that a parent can not or will not handle said child is nothing short of child abuse. Take a perfectly happy kid, put her on an SSRI because she doesn't listen (I've looked at the specs of the SSRI, by the way, and nowhere does it say that it makes children behave - on the contrary, the specs explicitly say this medication is not for use by children), and then be totally fucking amazed when that child becomes a jittery, orally-fixated basketcase. Her mother actually gave her a rubber thong to wear around her neck and chew on like a portable petri dish to try to stop her from eating her hair - obviously a better solution than not drugging the shit out of her as an alternative to actual parenting. There is nothing as consistently frustrating in my life as loving these children and seeing so clearly when they are being mistreated and being able to do exactly nothing about it.

Oh, and girly's cough is back with a vengeance, boy twin has a fever, and my husband and I are both starting to feel a little under the weather. I was thinking earlier, after girly threw up from the phlegm, that the best thing about having only one child must be the knowledge that the vector of illness doesn't have all that far to go - in our house, it can take literally weeks for an infection to burn its way all the way out - but listening to my children pick and fight and torture each other all. goddamned. afternoon makes me think that maybe there are other downsides to this large family thing, also. Happy fucking mother's day.

Mother's Day

Sometimes I feel like the most unsuitable unfit mother. I always love them perfectly, but rarely show it perfectly. I am far too selfish and impatient to be the mother my children deserve, the mother I wish I could be. Since I started back to school and the twins finally started sleeping, I've felt my lack even more acutely - am I hurting my kids by pursuing my own dreams? Am I taking too much time away from them for classes and homework and friends and my own life in general?

Thank goodness for Mother's Day. For this morning at least, I feel like I must be muddling through okay. To quote Sally Field - they like me, they really like me. All of my big ones have drawn me pictures and brought me treats of their own creation. My stepson drew a picture of our family in which I was labeled "Mom," which may be the best Mother's Day present ever. My four year old is singing "Happy Mother's Best Day to You," to the tune of "Happy Birthday." My girl twin is finally over the worst of her mystery fever, which may not be for me but makes her a much more pleasant member of the family. Everyone is being cheerful and kind to each other and only regularly destructive, and we're going Go-Karting in a while and life feels at least temporarily in balance.

I am so fortunate, and so are my children, that there are so many wonderful mothers in my life. My own mother has always been a model of patience and selflessness, and I try to live up to her example while my family and I benefit from her steadying presence every day. My grandmother was the kindest person I've ever known. I still miss her and I wish my children could have known her. My mother-friends save my life and sanity every day. When I had my first child, I didn't have many close friends who were mothers, and I felt so alone with my inadequacy and panic. Now, seven years later, I feel part of a network of incredible women, incredible mothers, and I don't know how I could go on without them.

Why is it so much harder to write what's real and important? I am not "only" a mother, there is more to my ever-shifting sense of self, but if I suck at this the rest seems pretty pointless. It's nice to have days like this, with or without the holiday label, that make me feel like I'm at least generally on the right track.

I may write my next post from prison...

...as I may be committing child abuse tomorrow. Surprisingly, not against one of my own children. This did start, as most of my parenting problems do, with my now-7-year old. He came home from school extra-surly today, and progressed through all of the negative emotions as the evening wore on until he peaked at near-hysteria just before bedtime. While I tucked him in, I finally got him to tell me why he was acting like he was possessed by evil spirits, and it turns out some little bastard in his class is bullying him. I got in over my head with the boy-raising fairly quickly and brought my husband into the conversation. Together, I hope/think we bolstered his weenie little spirits enough to survive another day.

Also, my girly has an inexplicable fever of 102. I am sooooo done having children, in case anyone was wondering.

Birthdays and Bodies and Bitchiness, oh my

I know, I know, I suck at blogging. I think about it, but I think I'm developing some sort of adult-onset ADD, compounded by a serious case of PMS. It's actually been a lovely few days, with gorgeous weather and happy children and fun with friends, but I have two tests in the morning and my children are being even more than usually obstreperous and my heart is actually beating funny in time with my general irritation. I did not miss this part of being a girl while I was pregnant all those times. It makes me mad every month. I'm done with babies! No more fertility for me, thanks.

So, in the interest of not being all-bitch, all-the-time, and to further delay the inevitable panicky last minute studying I've already postponed repeatedly (oh crap! hurray! I JUST as I was typing this sentence found my chem book. That's got to be a good omen), I have to comment on the BodyWorlds exhibit my friend and I went to at the Maryland Science Center today. It was so amazing, although I was surprised that it made me a little woozy at first. Nothing awful, not as bad as the first time I watched someone get his jaw wired at the hospital, but more than I expected. The bodies are all sliced up to reveal different aspects of their anatomy, and in many cases certain external features like eyebrows and earlobes and belly-buttons were reattached to the outside, which somehow made them seem both more and less life-like. There was also one whole section on fetal development, which was one of my favorites, although I did wonder how they managed to sneak all the dead fetuses past the right-to-lifers who won't even allow embryonic stem cell research.

It was so pretty out that we went paddle-boating in the harbor after the museum. I've always wanted to do that, but somehow I never get around to doing touristy things in my own city. I also got my very favorite peanut butter ice cream from Lee's, served by a nearly-comatose young man named Duane (he really seemed to be worse at consciousness than customer service, like just breathing in and out was taking most of his limited capacity for thought and action). See how I have absolutely no room for complaint? Stupid hormones, making me grumpy. It's even more frustrating to realize that my big girl's hormones are probably responsible for her insanity, too, and that we're just feeding off each other and into some awful stereotype. Thank goodness I'm hiding in my room, purportedly studying. Better get on that.

Stolen quiz, stupidly double-spaced (why can't I figure this out?)

TECHNOLOGY
Q. What is your wallpaper on your computer? I had to look - my husband just changed it to some weird Matrix-y city scene.

Q. How many televisions you have in your house? 1 in the living room, 1 in our room, 1 in mom's room. That's all that function, although we also have a warehouse of broken electronic crap that surely includes several obsolete televisions.

BIOLOGY
Q. Are you right-handed or left-handed? right

Q. Have you ever had anything removed from your body? Just children and teeth.

Q. What is the last heavy item you lifted? Um, groceries? I don't know, I'm not much with the heavy lifting. The twins, I guess.

Q. Have you ever been knocked out? Not yet!

BULLSHITOLOGY
Q. If it were possible, would you want to know the day you were going to die? No, I'm neurotic enough.

Q. If you could change your name, what would you change it to? Kate? That's a tough one. I hate my name, I guess I should have alternatives planned. Laura? Um, Corrine? I'll have to think about it.

Q. What colour do you think looks best on you? blue, maybe

Q. Have you ever swallowed a non-food item? yep

DAREOLOGY
Q. Would you kiss a member of the same sex for $100? Sure

Q. Would you allow one of your little fingers to be cut off for $200,000? Probably.

Q. Would you never blog again for $50,000? Sure, I hardly blog now!

Q. Would you pose naked in a magazine for $250,000? Probably

Q. Would you drink an entire bottle of hot sauce for $1,000? I don't think so

Q. Would you, without fear of punishment, take a human life for $1,000,000? If I got to pick the person. :)

DUMBOLOGY
Q: What is in your left pocket? nothing

Q: Is Napoleon Dynamite actually a good film? I actually do like it. I like anything that I watched with my husband that put him into hysterics - his reflected amusement is hilarious

Q: Do you have hardwood or carpet in your house? hardwood

Q: Do you sit or stand in the shower? stand. That's a weird question.

Q: How many pairs of flip flops do you own? 1

LASTOLOGY
Q: Last person who texted you? Friend's husband, wanting to go to the gay bar with us

Q: Last person who called you? Heidi

Q: Person you hugged? Husband

FAVOURITOLOGY
Q: Number? 14

Q: Season? Spring because of flowers

Q: Colour? yellow

CURRENTOLOGY
Q: Missing someone? Yvette

Q: Mood? Lazy, happy

Q: Listening to? Backyardigans

Q: Watching? Also Backyardigans

Q: Worrying about? Sewage and dead mice in my basement. You'd worry too.

Q: Wearing? New tank top and capris. I always swore I'd never wear capris, but that was before cellulite made shorts inadvisable.

RANDOMOLOGY
Q: First place you went this morning? Running, can you believe it?

Q: What can you not wait to do? Finish the semester

Q: Do you smile often? all the time

Q: Are you a friendly person? usually

Mmm, sewage

You know what I don't like? My house. There are things about it that I do like, of course, but in general, it is a pain in my ass. There are holes in ceilings, broken windows, rampant weeds, hideous ancient paneling, weensy closets, and now the latest - some drain thing in the basement is full of, well, worse than crap apparently, and worse than crap is now backing up all over the basement floor. The good news is that the plumber was here really really fast. The bad news is that he is nowhere near free. Also, there is sewage IN MY HOUSE. That is definitely also bad news. Yuck.

I'm vomiting truth

That's a Tivoli quote from this evening. I'm too drunk to do justice to the evening, but too many funny things have happened not to post. First of all, the drive to the bar involved me, sadly sober, listening to no fewer than 5 backseat drivers yelling RIGHT! LEFT! even though I knew where I was going. And my mother went too. Yes, to the gay dance club. It's been a strange evening. I made Sarah cry and now Tivoli is in the fetal position and nachos are the only option. Surely this will make no sense in the morning, but such is 2:30am revelation. And now Sarah is life-coaching Tiv, and I'm trying to listen and transcribe while eating and drunk-spinning, and I love my friends and life seems good despite itself.

Happy birthday, baby

Happy birthday to my sweetheart. You're the best husband and father I can imagine and I'm lucky every day to be with you. I love you!

No twins were drowned in the writing of this post

My mother is back doing her clinical trial, and her 36-hour absence is palpable. My daughter is wearing the pjs she wore to bed Saturday night (it's Monday evening), a raincoat (her choice), and purple sparkly shoes (again, her choice). My four year old is in the same clothes he wore Saturday as well. Only because he continuously shits through his clothes is boy twin in clothes not old enough to walk by themselves. The laundry pile is starting to groan ominously. We're eating take out and leftovers whenever hunger occurs to someone, and there's no apple juice. The living room looks like Legoland in California meets Jackson Pollack, but with more dirt. My car has such unspeakably foul and ancient crusted takeout containers on the passenger side floor that I'm afraid to even tackle it.

Okay, I got the twins in the tub and relocated the laundry heap down a floor. I am sitting outside the bathroom, where my rotten daughter is deliberately and with malice aforethought throwing water onto the floor and yelling NO when I tell her to stop. Defiant pig. I have a classmate babysitting in the morning, and more classmates coming for a study group in the afternoon, so I have to put a veneer of clean on this pit of disorderliness. But first, I have to listen to the 6 year old read his homework, which always feels like doing penance for some unremembered but obviously very serious sin.

What a glorious day

I should give up the doctor idea and become a meteorologist. At least here in Baltimore, they get to wear hilariously ridiculous clothes and just make shit up for a living. Today, for example, was supposed to be rainy and wretched, and it is just beautiful. Not that I'm complaining. It just seems like a good gig, where no one cares that you're wrong all the time.

I spent most of my afternoon at the library at my college. Anyone who knows me well knows that libraries and I do not, as a rule, get along, but I needed a book on integrals (god help me) and the library is part of the college and not a larger library system, so I'm not yet banned from it. The library itself seemed to be on to me and my poor borrowing habits, though, and it took me a ludicrously long time to:

a) find the building itself
b) find the front door (really, how hard is that?)
c) goggle at the warehouse-sized room full of 4000 computers and about 17 books
d) use one of said 4000 computers to find a suitable-looking book
e) go up and down the elevator, hitting several floors more than once, in search of "Stacks," which is where the computer directed me but which is not, anywhere near an elevator, labeled
f) find a book that looked both useful and not hideously painful to read (like this post! ha!)
g) stand in a line longer than the one at Target this morning (who are these dorky undergrads, clogging the college library on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon?).
h) actually study, a little. Anyone have any questions about friction? No?

Wow, that was boring. Boring to live, boring to write, boring to read. But I'm committed to the blog entry now, despite my crazy 4 year old yelling "SIMON FOOTBALL" in the background on a permanent loop, so I'll keep plodding on.

Despite my battle with the library, it's been a good day - I got to go to Target (whee, I love Target) and get a curling iron, among other things (although I think I should have gotten a smaller one, now that I've played with this one), and the guys did yard work while I studied (it's really for the best that I not be around while the boy uses the riding mower, it makes my heart stop). I finished my friend's vampire book, which was hilarious, and I think we're going to the movies tonight, like real live popular culture consumers. My poor girly just fell and bit through her top lip, complete with way too much blood and no small degree of hyperventilation by me, but she seems okay and my own blood pressure should return to normal any time now. I can handle strangers' blood (and even my own, actually), but not my kids'.

Oh, and I had a caramel macchiato and cookie dough for dinner. Life is lovely.

Drunken ramble

Depending on who you talk to and your frame of mind, alcohol is supposed to either relax you or depress/enrage you. I think it takes a special kind of moodiness to have both reactions in one evening. I was trying to be tidy and clean up leftover beer from this weekend's birthday celebration for my husband (FORTY, can you believe it!), so I had a couple (3?) Coronas and was feeling jus' fahn, until the boy. Always the goddamned boy. Lost his fucking backpack. How do you lose a BACKPACK. He used it 25 minutes ago, it's large, the house isn't that big a mess. And it's not just the losing it, it's the atrocious magnified mosquito whine he emits when feeling guilty/angry/frustrated. Of course someone else took it, we all covet the backpack. It couldn't possibly be his complete inability to follow through with one goddamned task or find his ass with both hands and a map.

Whew, I feel better now. As I'm sure you all do. Now is bedtime, that most wonderful time of the day, and my mother is coming back tomorrow from her leisurely retreat being a lab rat for a clinical trial. I already appreciated her, honestly, but now I REALLY do. And now it is spring, almost in earnest, and the green grass always reminds me of when I was pregnant to bursting with this same wretched child, and the season seemed to move so much faster than my own arrested progress toward motherhood. Every time I left the house, I would gape childlike at the tree buds and burgeoning flora, much to my now-husband's amusement. Thinking back to that time and right after, when I held that bewildering new person in my arms, I resolve again to be more patient. I think it would help to lose my hearing.

E is for Easter. And Early. And Ear infection.

The plague continues apace and respects no holidays. The four year old is still wheezing, even after steroids, and is now complaining of ear pain. My husband is terribly congested and being quite stoic about it, which makes me feel both sympathetic and guilty, since I have NOT been all that stoic the past few days. I am feeling much better myself after the removal of the giant tumor-like nastiness from my tonsil, but we are all suffering from one degree or another of sleep deprivation. Last night, my husband had to go to work to fix something at 11:30. I went with him to keep him company, thinking it would be a quick trip. We got home at 3:30am. I fell asleep right at 4 and was awakened by excited Easter children at 4:22. In the course of trying to convince the children to go the fuck back to bed for a bare minimum of three hours, I rendered one shrill and shrieky with the injustice of not being allowed to sleep in my bed if he could. not. be. quiet. and the other began grabbing his ear and writhing in pain, requiring that I go downstairs, navigate the 30 pieces of poo the dogs left in the kitchen, and get him medicine and drink. I got back to sleep at 6:15 and we restarted the day as a family at the much more reasonable hour of 7:45. The big kids searched for Easter candy, the twins shook Easter eggs and ate candy off the floor like dogs, and I resembled the cryptkeeper with my sunken orbits. Happy Easter!

Want to see something really nasty?

I'm gaining new medical knowledge already, and I haven't even applied for med school yet! This beautiful picture is of a tonsil stone, also called a tonsillolith. Sadly, this is just an internet image and not a picture of the actual stone I removed from my tonsil today, but it gives you an idea of the nastiness (mine was much more impressive but shriveled a bit after extraction and is no longer all that photogenic). For those of you who, like me, had never heard of tonsilloliths, they are calcified ick (I believe that's the technical term) that grows in the "crypts" of your tonsil (no part of a body should be called a crypt, in my opinion, seems sort of morbid) and forms a pearl-like stone. Like an ice berg, mine was more subterranean than terranean and left a sizable hole in my tonsil after I extracted it with a QTip. I can't overstate the relief I feel now that it's not rubbing against the inside of my mouth and throat every time I swallow or breathe or eat. Don't say I never taught you anything!

The Easter Pig

We're not religious folk, but I like Easter. I like that it is a high holy Christian day but follows the most pagan and bizarre of calendars (how does the crucifixion have anything at all to do with the lunar cycle or the equinox)? Besides, what's not to like about unlimited candy, fancy dresses, and messy coloring of eggs? We've all been ill and it's starting to look a bit like The Shining around here, so today we dyed Easter eggs, in part to compensate for missing yet another outing due to wheezing and aching and general pestilence. Boy twin was mostly interested in picking up completed egg artworks and talking to them in his own sibilant crazy language, but girly got very involved in the dyeing process. I love this picture - besides showing her joy at the strange thing I was letting her do, her personality just shows through here:
























Of course, her personality is also pretty plain here, where her pouty little pissy face clearly objects to having had her picture taken the first time:

























Lastly, for your viewing picture, I present my piglet's imitation of an egg. I can only guess that this is based on the dragon egg in the critically acclaimed Backyardigans film Tale of the Mighty Knights, which quacks throughout the movie:

Spring Break

Wow, has it been almost 2 weeks? I sure do slack. Let's see, what's been doin'.

I had midterms in both classes last Wednesday (still no grades back, but I think I did well). Today, I gave the midterm in the hideous atrociousness that is the class I'm teaching - enough said about that. I have off from taking classes this week, off from teaching next week, and the kids are off next week too. A friend is in town for 2 months (or longer! she could stay longer!) and we have grand ambitions for projects while she's here. Today would be a good time to start on those ambitions, probably, but I don't see getting out from under this blanket on the couch any time soon. The 3 little kids are all varying degrees of ill, with the 4 year old in the lead with what he calls "group" but really seems to be regular but asthma-inducing virus. He hasn't wheezed in so long, I'd hoped he'd given it up. That boy, always has surprises up his sleeve.

In other news, I'm older now, and had a lovely birthday weekend with friends and the zoo and parties and cake. Lots and lots of cake. I am straining to put on pants that were loose not long ago. I am sadly having to contemplate cutting back to 1 or 2 desserts a day and maybe even exercising. How wretched.

This is dull, but life is pretty routine right now - a good routine, but nothing too noteworthy or exciting. Aren't you all glad I wrote?

He really IS an alien

I took the 4 year old with me to pick up the big boy from school today. Big boy read his reading homework on the drive home, while 4 year old quietly listened from the back. All of a sudden, and apropos of nothing at all (not what big boy was reading, not any previous discussion, not a TV show, nothing), the 4 year old yelled out in evident frustration:

"When am I ever going to get my tail????"

Opportunity Cost

All this high-falutin' book-learning is going to my head. Although I am studying physics and not economics, all the random never-used trivia I picked up somehow during my first try at college (how, I'm not sure, as I rarely went to class or read a textbook) is coming back to me at odd moments. Just now, for example, I was weighing (get it, weighing?) my desire for potato chips against my desire not to be fat to the point of resembling a marine mammal, and I realized that the opportunity cost of NOT eating the chips is just too high. I want the chips more than I want to fit through doorways, apparently. Surely self-knowledge is a good thing.

So little to say, so little time

My thoughts are fleeting at best, and mostly interrupted with fragments of physics equations that I can never quite follow to the answer. I often marvel at the fact that I managed a bachelor's degree at all the first time around, with the atrocious study skills and lazy ass class avoidance habits I had - I haven't missed a class this semester and I do my homework days in advance and STILL I find physics to be as close to incomprehensible as I'd imagine arabic or hungarian or russian to be.

My lovely husband tivo'd Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for me, and we're watching it now. It's a bit of a disillusionment to see how god-awful it is - I was 15 when it came out and thought it the height of romance and good story-telling. I remember riding around with my friends and listening to my cassette single of the awful theme song by Bryan Adams, and just hoping one day I'd find love as true as Robin and Marion's. I suppose my husband will have to do.

What else is happening? February has flown and March always feels like the real start of the new year to me. The zoo is reopened, and the four year old is looking forward to seeing real tortoises in action ("I'm a little nervous," he confessed, but he still can't wait). We have birthdays and spring breaks and Easter upcoming, longer days and shorter nights (the nights seem plenty short already, I'm beginning to look forward to the twins' departure for college as the next sure time I can sleep through the night).

I also have a new theory about why women live longer, on average, than men. If the last years of a full lifespan are spent gradually losing your context, then men have at least a decade's head start. My husband (and sons, too, actually) couldn't find the couch he's sitting on without a map, for example. My mother, who is not old but aspires to be, is getting to be almost as bad. She opened the freezer yesterday to check our stockpile of butter and grumbled as she closed the door that she can't find anything in there - I opened the door myself and was immediately confronted with a bright yellow box reading "BUTTER" in big letters on the side. Crazy old bat (I say that with love).

Things are all so comfortable and pleasant, I half-fear that the other shoe will somehow drop, but it's hard to sustain paranoia when life feels so good. It does leave less to complain about, though - I'll try to find more to write about despite the absence of grievances.