Sleepless

D3 has, quite on her own, started sleeping 10 hours at night. D4 wakes up once in that time for a quick snack. Last night I set them both down in their bed at 9:30, and they smiled, looked around at the world, kicked each other happily for awhile, and fell asleep without a whimper. And they're still asleep.

(I have had enough children to know that this is no guarantee of all future nights being uninterrupted, but it is a pretty good start.)

So why do I sit here, bleary-eyed?

Because I don't know how to sleep through the night anymore. I still wake up at 2 a.m., and without nursing enough babies, I can't seem to get back to sleep. Ever.

This happened with D2, too, although he was 15 months before he started sleeping through the night. DOB suggests I could keep waking them up, but I have to go through this sooner or later and I might as well do it sooner if they want to sleep now.

I hope I don't have to cry it out. That always wakes up DOB . . .

Don't Quote Me

The mental equivalent of an itch you can't scratch is a quote you can't place.

Worse yet, a quote you can't remember.

I had one of those running through my head on Sunday. Something about "though much is . . . something . . . much remains."

This is why Google was invented, of course. Only Google is not very helpful when you can't remember the quote. I turned up a handful of vague references of other people who couldn't quite remember the quote either. Just enough to learn that the quote was from a poem by Tennyson and the missing word was "taken."

Well, that ought to have helped, except that Tennyson wrote an awful lot of poems and I had to get lunch on and didn't have time to go through the Complete Works. A search of those complete works turned up nothing.

This suggested that I had the wrong words, but if I didn't have the right words, I couldn't well search for it, could I? The only word I was quite sure of was "much" and that doesn't narrow things down very far.

I kept muddling down for awhile until I discovered the poem was about Ulysses, and finally I found the poem itself. It wasn't remains, it was abides, and "though" isn't spelled out. And Ulysses is exhorting his comrades to achieve even in old age.

Come, my friends,

Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

These musings on age have, of course, absolutely nothing to do with turning thirty in six weeks. It was just a random quote.

Miscellaneous

I think I finally have gotten into poison ivy. (Poison ivy doesn't grow in the Puget Sound region, so I had no chance to be exposed in childhood.) The older ducklings and I walked right into it in our bare feet Saturday night. (And I had been watching, too! I just looked up for a second!) I wiped all our feet down as soon as I could with baby wipes, but I still have a spot on my big toe that I think I missed. At least, it itches differently than mosquito bites, and I have good standard of comparison, because I got four mosquito bites on the other foot.

I can't wait for first frost. The mosquitoes are plotting to take over.

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You say "market volatility" I say, "DOB's going to be home late again." He's busy explaining to people that it's buy low, sell high, not the other way around, and if you're in for the long haul this doesn't matter unless you really think the entire US economic system is going to unravel, in which case you have much, much bigger worries than your 401(k), so stop calling him already. He probably doesn't say it quite like that, though.

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We weighed the babies yesterday, so the official tally for 3 months is: D3, 15 lbs., D4 13.5 lbs. They're hardly even going to get to wear their long-sleeved 3-6 month outfits, which now barely snap. We shall have to lower the floor in the co-sleeper soon, as it has a weight limit of 30 lbs. on the bed-height level. And am I ever going to miss that. Unless D4 decides to start sleeping through the night . . . or at least until four in the morning when D3 wakes up . . . (hint, hint).

I guess he needs to keep well-stocked to maintain his level of activity. Yesterday he almost managed to squeeze through the bars on the patio and fall into the flowerbed. Thanks to D2's exclamation I fished him back out in the nick of time.

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It ought to be a 50% chance. So why does it seem little kids always get their clothes on backwards?

Two Duckling Moments

I was in the middle of a writing lesson with the uncles this week, working on choosing thesis statements for a research paper.

Suddenly D2 marched into the living room carrying a plastic stool.

"I need to look at the sky," he said. He set the stool down, climbed on top, and stared upwards for a moment.

Then he climbed down. "I'm done now."

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The older ducklings like to play Sunday School when we're outside. D1 was running through a list of simplified catechism questions: Who made you? Why did God make all things? etc. and supplying the answers.

Then she got to, "Who wrote the Bible?"

The answer: "Moses and History."

You know, because we have the books of Moses and then the books of History. Prolific writer, that History. Almost as busy as Anonymous.

Weekly Dose of Cute

We have all (except me, as far as I can tell) had bad colds this past week. If there's one thing more sleep-depriving than one sick baby, it's two sick babies. Fortunately they are past the stage of being unable to breathe at night and are just a little snuffly now. And just as wiggly as ever.

Things I Don't Get

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Video clip help files. When I want help, I want to know the single answer to a single question. Words. Give me words. I don't want to watch a video of a cursor moseying around the screen.

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The reverse-shotgun-wedding. I overheard a mother (very loudly) commenting that she and her husband were going to be incidentally announcing their marriage at their twins' first birthday party. Apparently they had been planning on getting married when she discovered she was pregnant, so they immediately scrapped all wedding plans (with their pastor's endorsement) and just went on living together until the babies had been around for awhile. Because somehow having a baby (or two) makes it NOT ok to get married anymore. At least not until you have proved you can do without it.

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Naps. OK, sometimes I do. And that's where I should go now . . .

Miscellaneous

You may or may not have noticed that I generally post on Tuesday. That is because the older ducklings are generally at Grandma's house on Tuesday. The past two weeks that did not take place. Hence even less opportunity to sit down and post than usual. I find that posts benefit from a certain amount of percolation, but after awhile they just dissolve. So most of the brilliant things I have thought about in the last few weeks have simply vanished, never to return. Or perhaps they have dissipated into the brain but will slosh about and crystallize at another time.

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There are some economies of scale in a larger family (I speak here in the Time and Effort department. Money is DOB's concern.) It takes just as long to make a pot of oatmeal for two people as it does for six people. It takes just as much time to sweep up a dirty floor tracked upon by four little feet as by two.

Seasonal clothing changes are not subject to economies of scale. I only just realized this. It takes twice as long to trade out clothes for four children as it does for two, and is rather more than twice the effort in the box-moving department. And when the two smaller ones are likely to go through two whole sizes before the arrival of spring, that does complicate things. Also it turns out the hand-me-down wardrobes have glaring inadequacies, such as a complete lack of sleepers in one size. (In D4's case, I think this is due to being in a different season than D2; in D3's case I can only conclude I borrowed most of D1's clothes and had to return them.)

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D4 continues to wow people with his knack for rolling over--he had everyone in the nursery (and our church nursery is quite the crowd these days) watching him show off on Sunday. But D3 has moved up to "Real Person" status in DOB's eyes by carrying on a conversation with him. Her part consisted of repeating the word, "uhhh-oooh" with deep sincerity.

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The other day the mail consisted of nothing but two glossy advertisements--one for a children's clothing company, one looking like a black leather wallet for a mortgage company. I gave the clothes one to D1 and the wallet to D2. He smiled and said, "I love black mail!"

Three

D2 has now officially turned three, after being "almost three" in my mind for some time. Not in his. On Sunday he was Two. On Monday he was Three. Now he is big, unless, of course, he wants to be picked up, in which case he discovers that he is conveniently still little. (My arms tell me otherwise.)

We celebrated by taking lunch (an imaginative combination of cheese sticks, carrot sticks, bread, and grapes--but there were cupcakes. Callipiddar cupcakes.) to the park overlooking the river that has the duck pond. He got to climb the hill in the woods, feed the ducks, and watch barges on the river.

His head is so full of words now that they get into traffic jams on the way out. He can dress himself, but he still likes help. He loves hearing and acting out stories, especially the Three Billy Goats Gruff: "Who's that crossing over my bridge?"

Housework Forecast: Light and Spotty

There is a time for everything. I have wasted some time and aggravation learning this, trying to interest children in some activity only to have them design their own version six months later, bemoaning our lack of outside time in February and our lack of crafty projects in May.

But I'm starting to learn to take things when they come. And when the mornings are cool and the afternoons warm and the sun shines day after day and the yard is dry and the bugs not too aggressive--it's time to play outside.

Someone should tell the house that, so it would not do things like spilling honey all through the cupboard necessitating a deep clean.

But take fair warning: anything that doesn't have to be done right away, won't be done until the fall rains come.

Arrrhh!

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day! D3 is awaiting rescue, having been kidnapped by a villainous crew.
So far today we've read pirate poetry, gone to the park in costume, gathered treasure for our ship, been marooned on a desert island and built a hut from driftwood.

Still on the day's agenda: pizza from ye Sandwiche Islands, YouTube video clips from Pirates of Penzance, and a treasure hunt.

Well, why not?

The Mind Boggles

Not up to date on baby gear? Neither am I. I had no idea you could get a special timer just for remembering when you last fed, changed, napped, or otherwise interacted with the baby.

I'm not much on keeping track of things. By three days I haven't entirely given up on the chart from the hospital, but everything I write on it is entirely fabricated. I know I fed them sometime. They'll remind me if I forget to do it again. I probably forgot to change them, but I'll remember when they start dripping.

Of course there are people out there who keep those charts for months. They probably wouldn't use the timer that much either, as it doesn't have archives for the truly obsessive record keeper.

I'm still not sure why you would need a timer for something that comes with its own built-in alarm . . .

Clouds and Wind Without Rain

On Sunday it seemed rather breezy out. I tucked the tarp under the stroller extra-carefully, and an hour later it blew past the window. (Fortunately only to the back yard.) DOB looked on the internet and discovered a few people in our local area were without power.

Poor souls, we thought, and went on our merry way.

Then our power went out. Apparently we got struck, rather unexpectedly, by the tail end of Ike. By Sunday evening, ninety percent of the people in our county were without power.

Clearly I have lived in the city too long. When I was a child, I was conditioned to start running gallons of water the instant the wind picked up. This time, it didn't even occur to me to get some easily-consumed food out of the refrigerator.

Of course water is not as much of a concern when you're on city water instead of a well with electric pump. And with a gas water heater, we even had hot water. So no getting out of doing the dishes (alas!) but we still had showers (hooray!). On the other hand, the prolonged power outages of my childhood were associated with winter storms, usually ice storms, and keeping food cool was of little concern, whereas it was our primary problem this time. (And since we had a wood stove, cooking it was no problem either, but that also is a difficulty now).

It's a good thing I hadn't yet made up my mind to get rid of the fondue pot. It makes a decent bean soup, and we had an awesome sausage-cheese dip for supper. Some friends came by with a portable generator to run our refrigerator and freezer for half an hour, so I was able to pull a little food out of the fridge to cook for supper.

Temperatures were down in the low seventies, so there really weren't any other difficulties. Children can roll in the mud just as happily with the power out. I did miss watching a movie or reading through the babies' late evening non-stop feeding time. My admiration increases for mothers of twins who lived before electricity.

At four-thirty this morning I heard the house fan begin to purr again and peeked out the window to see that the street light was back on.

Now today's job is deciding which of the contents of the refrigerator and freezer are beyond repair and which need to be eaten promptly. I think the chest freezer survived fairly well--the meat was all down at the bottom and it was quite full--but I have an uneasy feeling about the ice cream in the freezer upstairs. Considering the damage on all sides, and worse things further south, I should not feel too bad about losing a couple half-gallons of ice cream.

But when one of them was Breyers' Triple Chocolate, it's still hard.

I am not ready for this

When I left the room to grab the camera, they were in the same position. Every time I set him tummy-down on the Boppy, he climbs over it. Sometimes he flips while he's at it.
I think I must have taken too many vitamins when I was pregnant.

25 Home Decorating Mistakes

According to HGTV. I've never had a toilet rug. Or a plastic couch cover. And I'm not afraid of color (although I might be guilty of too much).

But I freely confess to having too many bookcases for the walls. So much the worse for the walls. And all the furniture is up against the walls, because otherwise there would be nowhere to walk. Which is somewhat important.

A Threat

I understand that modern readers are jaded by television's pacing and need some action up front. I get that you can't ramble around for three chapters before getting to the actual story like a nineteenth-century novelist. Even I get impatient with some of those nineteenth-century novelists.

But is it really necessary to put the murder in the first line and then dump in backstory with a backhoe? Couldn't we stroll around Lord Frogmorton's ball for a few minutes and mingle before the body is discovered? Instead we wind up racing to the phone, while somehow managing to reminisce on the way about the personal history of everyone we pass. Absurd.

So, to modern novelists, I offer three options: 1) Spend a wee bit of time on setup. Write it well and people will hang around until someone dies. 2) Write your backstory sensibly. Let it unfold within the story instead of dumping it all off at the first opportunity. If you can't do either then, 3) Know that I will toss your book across the room and refuse to read past the first three pages.

Of course, since I'm not buying the books anyway, the modern novelist probably doesn't give a hoot what I think.

Changing Out

Today I swapped the 0-3 month clothes for the 3-6 month size. It is the first nostalgically sad (as opposed to I-haven't-slept-in-three-days sad) moment of parenting for me, since I never can get worked up over not being pregnant anymore. But tucking away all those cute little sleepers which will never fit again, that's a little sad. Yes, it's like a soppy Carter's ad.

Fortunately it's immediately followed by getting out cute new clothes and, in the case of many of them, reminiscing about when D1 or D2 wore this. I have an absurd amount of clothing in this size, since it's the size most people give gifts in. I could clothe triplets (two girls, one boy: Girl clothes are cuter and D1 got to the presents first). The new size is still a little baggy, which is good when worn by someone whose diaper regularly expands significantly.

But here's an important question: Is D4's shirt too girly? It makes such a nice (if somewhat Freudian) coordinating set, but it is light purple polkadots.

Like-Minded People

I have never walked out of a church service, but I did come close to throwing up in one for similar reasons. (Later that week I discovered D1 was on the way, which probably affected why my distaste took that particular form.)

What's sad and funny is the number of people who replied to that post saying in effect, "We're people like you, come see us!" or, "We want to reach out to people like you, what can we do?"

Which is exactly not the point.

It's an icky feeling to walk into a church and find yourself pegged as a target demographic. Young professionals, married with children. Check. Let's plug you in! Like a toaster. I am not a toaster.

I suspect a lot of people grew up despising their parents' strict and legalistic churches and so determined to be different anyway they could figure out. But cooler-than-thou is no closer to the gospel than holier-than-thou.

When we were first hunting for churches we also despaired that we would ever find a church that was just about being a church. Where the sermons would be about the Bible, not about either How Everyone Else Is Evil or Self-Help With Jesus. Where we would not settle into a comfy little spot with people just like us.

The thing that attracted us to our church was that it was full of people who were not like us. And not because they are busy trying to be cool and relevant. Nor because the church is trying to "reach out" to a particular demographic, but because they treat anyone who walks in the door as a person, not a statistic.

That's not always comfortable. Sometimes I wish for a larger buffer of People Like Me between me and the old ladies with (untested!) strong child-rearing opinions, or the random character who seems to be missing a few hymnals from his pew. Sometimes I am not charitable at all.

But I wouldn't even have a chance to learn in a church--or a ministry group--full of people like me. I still gravitate towards people of similar age, education level, and outlook, but fortunately there are few enough that I don't really have the option of staying there. I have to learn to connect with people with whom I have nothing in common except living in the same town and knowing Jesus.

Whether the church at large can be more like that, I don't know. I doubt you can do it in a big church. Anytime you get a large enough group of people freely associating, they start forming cliques. They may be diverse in their outward appearance, but they are always very much alike in outlook. (On the internet this can be even worse. People start identifying themselves based on things like their diapering style.)

It's only in accidents like families and neighborhoods that you can be forced into relationships with people you wouldn't naturally like very much. And so I suspect it's only in rather random small neighborhood churches that you can really see the kind of love that Jesus said would characterize his disciples.

Whatever it is, it can't be done by trying too hard. There's no book to be read or program to follow. Like homemade soup, as soon as you start packaging and selling it, it stops being homemade.

Dreams Come True

I used to say, when I was twenty-one or so, that I would rather just skip over the whole ooky falling-in-love business, the awkward newlywed stage, and just wake up one day to find I'd been married five years.

Saturday it happened.

And I do like it.

Falling in love was not as bad as I feared, but it was still rather unpleasant in spots. Being a newlywed had its good points, but isn't something I would want to repeat.

Now is better. We are starting to feel like a real family, with traditions and favorite dinners and inside jokes.

"Babies are very nice. Goodness knows I like babies. But a baby is not a family."
"Isn't that a fact!" said Father. "A family is everybody all together." (A Baby Sister for Frances)

I am glad, though, that I didn't skip over the last five years. Life moves fast enough without missing parts of it.

We popped popcorn and showed the ducklings our wedding video. D1 was quite excited to finally get a chance to learn how to watch movies. She has been practicing with an empty picture frame so that she would be ready whenever the opportunity arose.

The day was spent (like all the other days right now) taking care of the four extra people whom we have accumulated along the way. It was a good day. But I don't think it diminishes the enjoyment of now to say that I look for even better things in the next five years. Maybe one day we'll be able to get out of the house . . .

I didn't mean to fish for sympathy

It was more meant as a documentary. Let me hasten to add a few things:

1. D3 and D4 are really very, very easy, healthy babies. One baby with colic or reflux would be far more challenging. And they do both sleep fairly well. It's just that there are two of them and they aren't quite synchronized in when their longest stretch of sleep is. Now that the six-week growth spurt seems to be over, that is getting better, too.

2. Grandma takes D1 and D2 for two nights and a day every week. I realize it sounds ridiculous to think of only having two month old twins as being a break, but at least I can read what I want to read and rest when the babies do. And no one asks me a surreal question even once, let alone fifteen times. DOB also takes one or both of the older two out with him at various points during the week.

3. Nursing hormones are amazing things, as I discovered when I weaned D2 and had to face motherhood without them for the first time. A few minutes of nursing can transform me from "Who are these kids and why are they calling me Mom?" to "Awww, aren't you the cutest widdle fings." I may be delusional and goofy, but I'm happy. (And I'm very grateful to be able to exclusively breastfeed the babies without any complications. I just have to eat a lot. Not a great hardship.)

4. That great big twin nursing pillow allows me to feed the babies hands-free. This means books! Books! And lots of them. (Not very profound books, I'll admit, as those hormones don't do that much for sleep deprivation.) Still, I can be quite happy as long as I have plenty of books. Of course, D1 and D2 have discovered this, too. So the books are not always those of my choice.

5. Although Wondergirl is gone, Cicero is still here a few nights a week, which means help with dinner and dishes and an extra pair of hands to hold babies, much to the relief of our shoulders.

6. Why are we having an easier time with four kids than with one or two? The answer is, we have given up doing everything else. The world at large will have to wait to benefit from our presence for a few years.

7. D2 has potty-trained with amazing ease, and that means only two in diapers. And breastfed babies' diapers are really not so bad, as long as everything stays inside.

Not that a little sympathy--especially if accompanied by chocolate--is unappreciated. But I just wanted to give both sides.

Besides, if there is anything cuter than two sleeping babies, I certainly haven't seen it:

And D1 and D2 are quite a bit of fun to be around, too.

How Do I . . .

Cook Supper?

1. Put happier baby in a car seat.
2. Put crankier baby in a pouch.
3. Assign tasks to the older ducklings.
4. Pray for patience.
4b. If patience insufficient, send older ducklings to play in room.
5. Assemble supper with one baby in pouch while rocking car seat with foot.

Go Outside?

1. Send older ducklings to go potty and drink water.
2. Check and restock diaper bag.
3. Apply sunscreen and bug spray to all applicable bodies.
4. Set babies in car seats by the front door. (Note: They are probably screaming through this process.)
5. Take tarp off stroller, unlock from porch railing, haul down the front steps, set up and brake.
7. Carry out diaper bag and wrap. Drape wrap fabric over the top of the stroller to provide more complete shade.
8. Apply hats to all applicable bodies.
9. Let older ducklings go out and stand on the porch.
10. Carry babies out one at a time and strap into stroller.

Coming back inside involves the same steps (except 3), only backwards.

Sleep?
Option A:
1. Lie down, start a baby eating, and doze off into a fitful slumber.
2. Wake up a little while later, swap babies and sides, and doze off again.
3. Repeat all night.

Option B:
1. Wake up the non-hungry baby.
2. Put on the monster-big twin nursing pillow.
3. Feed babies.
4. Put both babies back in bed.
5. Now fully awake, go to the bathroom and then get a snack.
6. Get back in bed and lie awake, falling asleep briefly before someone is hungry again.

I haven't figured out which option actually results in the greatest overall sleep, so I keep swapping back and forth.

The Turning Point

There are many moments worthy of celebration in potty training. The first successful go. The first time they take themselves. The first dry day. The first dry night.

But the really critical moment--the one where you know it's going to take this time--is when they realize that they have latched on to the universal excuse.

Chores too tedious? I gotta go potty!
Bedtime too early? I gotta go potty!
Church service too long? Older siblings too pesky? Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go.

Smart children learn to ration this precious commodity so that the grownups cannot thwart this new scheme.

Climbing the hill

The sledding part of sledding is always over far too quickly, and then you have the long trudge back up the hill. If you keep watching the top of the hill, it never seems to get any closer. If you keep watching the bottom of the hill, it never seems to get any farther away. If you watch your feet and get mesmerized in the present motion, in the crunch of the snow and smell of the clear air, and then--a little bit after the third time you think you simply must look up--you finally do look around, you find you've come quite a ways.

I think that is why things do seem easier, emotionally if not physically, than they did a few years ago. I've stopped counting. I have no idea how many diapers I've changed or feedings I've done or piles of dishes I've washed since the beginning of the week, or how many are left to be done. I'm learning to just wash this dish, just change this baby.

And I can look around and see things have come a long way. D1 and D2 are suddenly almost big kids, able to dress and feed themselves, run little errands, pick up all that stuff on the floor. Not every task in the house now depends on my personal labor. It's a double deposit of energy. All the thousand little things have begun to pile up into something big.

The other day I commented to DOB, "If I were God, I would have given all these little kids to someone more organized."

He replied, "If I were God, I would have made you more organized since I was going to give you all these little kids."

But perhaps instead God determined that the only way to make me more organized--or even aware of my surroundings--was to give me all these little kids. It turns out I can do a lot of things I didn't think I ever could. I can clean up while I cook. I can make sure we keep the floors picked up. I can follow the same two weeks' worth of menus to spend the minimum time on meal planning and preparation. I can sing another song and read another story instead of retreating into my own head. I can get us to church on time on Sunday morning.

I can even do all this and still enjoy life.

I don't know for how long. I have never lived at anything like this level of physical and emotional intensity for any significant length of time. I'm very tired and the babies' biological clocks seem to be carefully tuned four hours apart despite my best efforts to synchronize them.

But I give myself a personal version of Aragorn's speech before the Black Gate:

The day may come when my parenting strategy degenerates to that of the Old Woman in the Shoe, when I stuff cotton in my ear and hide all afternoon in the closet.
But it is not this day.
The day may come when I duct tape all the children to the wall, when I pack my bags and move to a remote island off the coast of Maine.
But it is not this day.
Today I will get up and smile and find that I can do what I must do, by the grace of God.

More Quirkiness

I have put off this tag from Uncle Steve for some time now, but I'm sure he understands busyness. (My job is cuter, though.)

So, six unspectacular quirks:

1. I'll do almost anything to avoid making phone calls. The internet is a beautiful thing. Now I can email all my friends and do searches to find business information. D1 has more confidence on the phone than I do. (Though she is still harder to understand.)

2. I have an irrational antipathy to pacifiers. I concede that they are easier to get rid of than thumbs; I suffer guilt from the new evidence that suggests they may help reduce the risk of SIDS. But they're just too ugly. I can't bring myself to cover up my babies' beautiful mouths with those things.

3. I always surf away, cursing (uh, metaphorically), when some fascinating link turns out to be a podcast. I hate listening to things. I don't care much for watching things. I never want to wait for something to load. Give me text!

4. I'm shy about tagging people. What if the people I tag don't want to be bothered? What if the people I don't tag feel left out? Too much angst.

5. I tend to get distracted before I finish things.

Mars and Venus Watch a Movie

DOB and I have been watching The Lord of the Rings for the fourth (or more) time, in slow, brief stages, stopping it to analyze differences between the books and movies, debate motivations and plausibility, note subtle allusions.

DOB: Maybe tonight we can get most of the way through the boring part, with all that time in Lothlorien and floating down the river.

QOC: What do you mean, get through it? What's left after that part?

DOB: The battle.

QOC: That is the boring part!

The Mommy 'Do

You have seen this phenomenon. You may have succumb to this phenomenon. A woman with long hair gives birth to a child. She wears her hair in a pony tail for a few weeks, keeping things out of the reach of entangling baby fingers.

Then, one day, a month or so in, the hair is gone.

I've resisted it twice. But I understand. At that stage, your life stinks, in the literal rather than figurative sense: of sour milk and worse things. The contrast of being skinnier than nine months pregnant has worn off and been replaced with being fatter than ever before that. None of your clothes fit, the ones that do need washed, you feel frumpy and sleep-deprived and your hair keeps getting in your face or the baby's fingers.

And it occurs to you: there's only one of those things I can do anything about. So you do it.

This time the lure was too strong.

The extra danger for me is that I can cut my own hair. This has nothing to do with talent and everything to do with hair texture. A beautician told me twelve years ago that my hair would look the same no matter who cut it, and I've never been back to one since. But I usually just keep it in the same safe shoulder-length range.

This time I decided to go farther.

I cut bangs first. I haven't worn bangs since I was twenty. It was rather nice to look in the mirror and see a reprise of myself at twenty. Of course I hated the bangs when I was twenty, but that seemed irrelevant: the point was a reminder of myself when my skinny clothes fit and I had time to think about topics besides meal planning.

Emboldened, I began whacking further. Then I realized my mistake. I hadn't worn my hair short-short since eleven. No one wants to be reminded of themselves at eleven. When I was eleven and had the short hair, I always wore it underneath a shocking pink hat with "Camp Wakoma" emblazoned on it. My primary form of interaction with the opposite sex was arm-wrestling, at which I generally won.

But I'm getting used to it. It is easy. It never hangs down in my face. DOB likes it, and shows no inclination to arm wrestle with me (he says my shorter arms give me an unfair advantage).

D1 commented initially, "When you cut your hair you don't look like Mommy anymore," an ambiguous statement--perhaps, deep down, that was my goal. Except, of course, that I do look more like a Mommy than ever, because most mommies hit this exact same point.

Amazing Feats

People keep asking us, "How are things going?"

And we have been answering, "Fine so far, but Wondergirl leaves on Tuesday."

Now she has left. We have survived the past 24 hours. Actually we have done pretty well, thanks in no small part to all the planning and organizing she did while she was here. For one thing, she made our walls much more fun to look at.

She cut carpet from scraps in the attic to make baby-rocking and baby-playing zones in the living room.

She organized our bedroom to hold babies and baby gear. (Baby clothes are under the bed. Aren't the little bows on the baskets cute? )

She made more room to play in the kids' room, and made sure there was a place within reach for everything so they can keep it picked up by themselves. The "bunk crib" was originally built by DOB's father years ago; they only used the lower area for toy storage, but it has been working great as an extra bed spot for us.


She went shopping for all sorts of little odds and ends we never have the energy to search for, like the tension rod to put into practice DOB's brilliant idea of storing the omnipresent exercise balls in the attic and basement stairwells.

And she did all this while holding babies, potty-training D2, reading countless stories to the big kids, and serving three delicious home-cooked meals a day.

If home management were an Olympic sport, my sister would be the gold medalist.

Getting to Know You

D3 and D4 in typical poses.

It has been four weeks, which is long enough for the babies to start feeling like part of the family instead of unusually uncommunicative visitors. The umbilical cords are gone, the first layer of flaky skin has peeled off, they are taking real baths (not very often) and are starting to feel like they fit in their names.

Having two babies at once gives one an unreasonable opportunity to engage in those obnoxious parental practices of comparing, categorizing, and over-generalizing, even at this early age. D3 gets dubbed the princess, and it's not just a gender stereotype. (D1, despite her best efforts at dress-up, doesn't really resemble a princess, except maybe Elizabeth Tudor.) She admires the world placidly when all is going well, waves with proper beauty-queen style, and expresses her opinion loudly when she is not pleased.

D4 is the perpetual motion machine. If he's awake, he's flailing. He's already rolled himself front-to-back numerous times. He's still noticeably skinnier than D3, no doubt because all his calories go straight into movement. When we swaddle him awake, he settles down and stares around him with big eyes, astonished and apparently grateful to be able to notice that there's something out there besides his own arms and legs. I think we'll be babyproofing early for this one.

A Faulty Syllogism

D1 and D2 are dancing around the kitchen in their swimsuits, waiting for the dishes to be done.

D2: I'm a man with no shirt on!
D1: You're Adam!
D2: No, I'm a man with no shirt on!
D1: Yes, and Adam had no shirt on, so you're Adam!
D2: No, I'm not Adam, I'm a man with no shirt on!

Frugal Friday: Baby Carrier

This is the wrap we made with five yards of cotton jersey, on sale for $3 a yard. Do not take my example for how to wear it, though. This was the first time I tried it with both, and I clearly forgot to check positions in the mirror.

Go here for all kinds of ideas on inexpensive baby carriers. Or follow the directions at Moby Wrap with your own wrap. It works even better for one baby. With one baby you can still do housework. With two you can at least navigate stairs and doors safely.

The key thing about the cotton jersey is you don't have to hem it. It doesn't ravel. Even in the wash. Just cut it and wear it.

D3 is embarrassed by the silly pink hat. D4 looks like a little elf in his.

With the extra fabric, we cut five swaddling blankets. Stretch, it turns out, is the key to swaddling. That and leverage--you have to pin the TOPS of the arms, not the wrists. That and age. The nurses at the hospital only have to wrap sleepy brand-new babies, not determined, flailing 3-week-olds. However, if you catch them half asleep, it can help them stay settled.

And one from D2

The older ducklings (do we count as a big family once we start referring to the children in clumps?) visit Grandma two nights a week, so that I can have one day in which I really can sleep while the babies sleep (if that happens). We call them up to say good night, and the past several times the conversation with D2 has gone something like this:

QOC: Hello, D2, how are you?
(Pause)
D2: No one is talking.
QOC: I am talking. Can't you hear me? Did you have a good day?
(Silence)
D2: (Plaintively) No one is talking.
QOC: I'm talking and then I stop so that you can talk. Otherwise I would just talk on
and on like this and you would never get a chance to talk.
(More silence.)
D2: No one is talking! (Maniacal laughter.)

Hmmmm

D1 was downstairs playing while DOB worked out.

D1: Can you give me some liquor?
DOB: Some what?
D1: Some liquor. I'm making ice cream and I need some liquor.
DOB: You don't need liquor to make ice cream.
D1: Yes, I do. Liquor is the best part of ice cream.

QOC's later query: Perhaps she meant licker, as in the part of the ice cream equipment that you lick? It is all a mystery, as we have never made ice cream.

Those who have gone before

I strongly prefer checking books out of the library to buying them, because I prefer pretty much any way I can get a similar result without spending money. The downside, to some, is that library books have been read by many other people, who tend to leave their tracks. I find this part of the fun.

Most commonly one finds the printout of someone else's library receipt being used as an impromptu bookmark. It's like a ready-made recommendation list based on your reading choices. Other bookmarks are also intriguing: ticket stubs, junk mail. In one of my recent reads, I found a (wrapped) stick of gum tucked into the card pocket. Very handy.

Food stains are disgusting, of course, but understandable. Eating and reading belong together. The Christmas I had homemade chocolate truffles to eat while reading War and Peace (a great story in between the essays) still shines bright in memory, though I wonder if I could have gotten through it without the truffles.

Then there's the slightly wrinkled pages, which in my experience come from combing wet hair while reading, but perhaps there are other ways to get there.

Marginal notes are not as disgusting, but more indefensible. It's a library book. You don't write in it. Other patrons do not want to know your answers to the quizzes, and your thoughts are probably not brilliant enough to enhance the book.

What's the weirdest thing you ever found in a library or used book?

EDIT: Wondergirl just reminded me that I forgot to mention the Band-Aid I found in a book last week--probably the thing that originally prompted this post. It was, fortunately, wrapped and unused. Handy for paper cuts.

Baby Thoughts

Before your baby is born, make sure not only that you have an infant car seat, but that you have verified that you can adjust the car seat to proper infant size. Because otherwise you will be sitting in the hospital parking lot, starving and sweating and burning four-dollar-a-gallon gas, excluded from the hospital and home hopelessly out of reach. After we had tried all of our strength on unjamming the seat belt, and called everyone we knew with an infant, and enlisted the help of a kind man with tools, all in vain, it occurred to me that D2's car seat could be adjusted to carry an infant. So we at last made it home.

*********************

I read the books, I watched the nurses, I practice and practice and practice.

I'm still no good at swaddling. At the beginning of the night, I firmly grit my teeth and tie up the flailing limbs in the approved baby burrito format. They like being swaddled. It's a fun challenge. Sometimes you can watch them untangling themselves in unison, like synchronized Houdinis.

As the night wears on, though (feed, diaper, feed/burp, nap, burp, feed, diaper) repeated swaddlings tend to degenerate from burrito to enchilada to taco, until by early morning it's more of a taco salad effect with babies and blankets tossed randomly back into bed.

********************

Actually, nights are not as bad as I feared. I unsay all my whining about being pregnant for 40 weeks. D3 and D4 have picked up on the eating concept faster than their older siblings ever did and are fairly good about sleeping between their nighttime feeds.

They each bear a rather uncanny resemblance, both in size and face shape, to their same-gender older siblings. It's like starting over again only having both the babies at the same time. It may be too soon to say, but I think newborn twins is in fact a little easier than two 15 months apart. At least their needs are all relatively simple and nobody is getting into things behind my back.

Now, the part you've really been waiting for

The last "before" picture. New wall color courtesy Wondergirl.



The boys with Papa.


The girls with Grandma.

And after that we started color-coding them.

Labor Once, Push Twice

(Note: This will be the G-rated version of the birth story. I'll probably write up a more complete version with full mention of bodily fluids and all that for posterity on a birthing blog somewhere.)

I had bought the castor oil and orange juice Monday night, planning to take it Tuesday morning. But I still didn't quite have my nerve up. And then it occurred to me that we had a gift certificate to a very nice restaurant that would expire before the babies would be old enough to leave for a leisurely dinner.

So before the castor oil method, we decided to try the romantic evening out method. I managed to piece together enough garments to just cover me (the slimming effects of black are overrated), we had a lovely evening and ate a huge meal and came home and went to bed.

At five in the morning I got up and realized my water had broken, thus satisfying my long-standing curiosity as to what it would be like to start labor that way. The answer: messy. Fortunately the carpet was spared. I called the doctor and the doula, and the doctor said to head on in to the hospital. By the time we were driving and I was able to pay attention to timing contractions, they were four minutes apart.

We were amused to remember that our friend from church was having a c-section that morning at the same hospital. We were even more amused to discover later that she had the same doctor. He had promised to bring a book when I delivered so he wouldn't be bored waiting around, but perhaps this way he had enough to do.

The lady at the check-in asked all the various questions: "Has your water broke?"

Whereupon Grammar Commando wanted to rise up and say, "Has broken, my water has broken." But I sent Grammar Commando home, because a birth is no place for people concerned about propriety.

Our doula met us and we were sent up to labor and delivery with little further ado. While the nurse was setting me up and putting in the hep lock, I asked the doula to wash my feet. Unfortunately, I said, "Ah, that feels good," just as the nurse put the needle in. "That's not usually a good sign when someone thinks that," she commented, but I hasted to clarify it was the clean feet and not the needle that felt good.

After that things progressed pretty quickly--at least compared to D1's birth--and I was soon too busy to carry on much conversation. Our assigned nurse (secret identity Wonderwoman) had just passed her midwife certifications and had worked with our doula at another natural birth the day before. Fortunately they'd both had a good night's sleep, too.

DOB had wondered what exactly he was supposed to do with a doula there, too, but I managed to keep him and his mom busy as well as the doula: "Ice! Not there! No, too cold! Too warm! Rub my legs! Stop! More water!" Nobody got too exhausted and DOB had the chance to get something to eat, as we had rather skipped breakfast. The doula was wonderful at helping me spot where to relax, keeping me moving to good positions and generally distracting me from thinking things like, "If I'd just had a c-section two weeks ago, I would be feeling better by now!"

By 11:30 I was close to being ready to push, so we had to move to the OR (hospital policy for twin deliveries). I had dreaded this part, envisioning glaring lights, a bare table, and a huge unwanted audience, but the doctor and nurses kept the lights low until needed, let me stay on the comfy, movable bed from labor and delivery, and sent everyone extraneous out to wait in the hallway. (Permanently, apparently, because we never did need them, except for an extra nurse--whom DOB pleased by giving her the secret identity of Elizabeth Taylor--to help clean up the babies.)

Both the babies were facing sideways. (My children are always looking the wrong way.) So it took a bit of work to get D3 to turn her head. The doctor and doula helped me try different positions and push her into place, and finally at 12:45 she came through. I was astonished to discover that it was in fact true that I had produced a real, live baby and held her for a bit while we waited for D4 to start moving down.

D4, however, was still in no hurry to come out. He seemed to enjoy the extra room. So did I. Laboring with one baby was a piece of cake after laboring with two--not to mention I had the extra motivation of just having seen that all this work really did produce a baby.

The nurses took D3 away to clean her up. It was quite odd to have one baby out and still be working on another one. I tried pushing for awhile but he was really too high up so we decided just to wait and let the contractions move him down. After awhile I took D3 back and nursed her while we waited.

D4's heart rate kept dipping despite them giving me extra oxygen and fluids. The doctor finally decided it was time to break his water and get him moving out. When the water broke with signs of further problems and he still stayed high up, the doctor asked the nurse to bring in the forceps and vacuum extractor.

Apparently hearing those words was all the two of us needed to get motivated. A minute later, with three mighty pushes, D4 was out. He did just fine, too. We waited around for everything else to finish up, the nurses finished cleaning up the babies (they did both have some meconium ingested), and we finally were all tucked back into bed together and wheeled back to the labor and delivery room.

My doula awarded me the medal for going it natural (just in case anyone commented that you don't get a medal for turning down the medications) and then she had to rush off to yet another birth. (She's not usually that busy.) However, the real medal, as I told her, was that I already felt absolutely wonderful. The only real pain I had once the birth was over was from the bones separating under the pressure of all that baby, and I'd had that for the last few months anyway.

Before we were sent down to the postpartum room, D1 and D2 came by to see the babies. They were very excited to meet them and brought them name tags they had made. In fact, D2 began to show distress when it was pointed out that they were going to have to leave and go back to Grandma's house for awhile. Fortunately Grandma had foreseen this problem and had been saving his favorite set of toys for several weeks. "When we get there, you can get out the rug and the cars."

"Can I play with all the cars?" he asked, his face suddenly cleared and his eyes big.

"Yes," I assured him.

"Let's go!" he said.

This Is It

Suzanna Ruth
7/9 12:44pm
7lbs, 12oz; 20.5 in

Lincoln Theodore
7/9 2:05pm
6lbs, 15oz; 20 in

Full details from our regular commentator when she returns from her 48-hour maternity leave...

Watch This Space For a Special Announcement...

Bring It On

Labor-induction folklore is like hiccup remedies: the purpose is to keep you occupied and your friends amused until nature can take its course.

So far I'm still sticking to the versions that are fun. Walking (well, sort of). Fresh pineapple. Foot rubs. Etc. Some people apparently go for eggplant parmigiana, but others say it's the basil and oregano that are important, which is good because eggplant is a vegetable towards which I harbor a deep skepticism, no matter how thoroughly it is parmigianed.

The way I figure it, people must have gone into labor while doing almost everything except flying stealth bombers. One can therefore pretty much try anything to go into labor. Murphy's Law seems a good place to start:

Will removing the toilet from the main bathroom induce labor?
Taking DOB's spare jeans out of the hospital bag?
Having the house full of people?

So far, no luck with those. We considered trying attending a distant event, but it was too much trouble.

I also theorize that watching suspenseful movies should help. However, so far Alfred Hitchcock has done nothing for me.

Now it comes down to whatever I want to do, or whatever anyone else is trying to talk me into doing. Hey, maybe killing spiders induces labor! Cooking supper! Bopping DOB!

You never know.

WWTFFD?

It seemed unlikely that CNN had taken up necromancy, so I was not surprised to learn that the survey on what the Founders would think of modern America did not in fact poll the Founders, but polled what modern people thought the Founders would think. Measured this way, the "Founding Fathers' " approval of our country has dropped off sharply in the last seven years.

These poll numbers, of course, bears an uncanny similarity to those resulting from the question, "Do you think the country is headed in the right direction or the wrong direction?" What they bear no resemblance to is any particular beliefs or goals of the Founding Fathers themselves.

DOB and I considered that perhaps before being permitted to answer this poll, people should be required to name at least fifteen Founders, defined as those who signed the Declaration or participated in the Constitutional Convention, although I was permitted to sneak in John Jay. We tried it and found ourselves stretched to the limits, although there was some head-smacking when we looked up the lists. (And you know you're a history geek when you're head-smacking over George Wythe.)

Names alone would hardly be enough to qualify a person to answer the question; they should also have to recite or summarize a significant portion of the founding documents, and be able to contrast the views of a couple of different Founders, who, after all, hardly agreed in perfect concord. I bet Alexander Hamilton would be reasonably satisfied with the current America, while Jefferson would probably be horrified.

The trouble is, the Founding Fathers have achieved that sort of mythic status of Nebulous Good Guys, whose opinion, therefore, must pretty much match mine, because I am a Good Guy. The Founding Fathers would think just like I do about the country. Which is absurd.

It's rather like asking the question "What would Jesus do?" (Or how would he vote, or drive, or what not.) Jesus, also being good and wise, would of course come to the same conclusions I have. Considering the frequency with which Jesus astonished the apostles, I doubt any modern person can safely predict His actions in areas where he made no direct statement.

Not that it is bad to consider the opinions of the Founders politically, or the actions of Jesus personally. But we should keep in mind that it takes both an extraordinary amount of knowledge and an unusual degree of humility to genuinely apply their perspectives to modern circumstances. If all we're going to do is stick with our own happy opinions, we ought to be honest about and not project our personal ideas on our favorite icons.

Waiting Some More

You know how it is to drive down a long country road with directions that say, "Go on for several miles until you see the gray barn opposite the gas station," and somehow that gray barn seems like it's never going to materialize? Yet when you drive back home the trip back to the freeway only takes a few minutes.

Or how long it is from when you have the last touches ready for company and the company hasn't shown up yet and every time the phone rings you're convinced it will be them saying they can't make it after all? (When you're not ready, of course, they show up ten minutes early.)

I'm starting to feel like a freak of nature. (Not in appearance, necessarily. Even yet no one jumps to suggest I am having twins.) Every time someone sees me it's the same routine: "You haven't had those babies yet?" (What WAS your first clue?) "I've never heard of anyone going that long with twins!" Perhaps I should charge admission: "Step right up to see QOC and her uterus of steel!"

That and I get a lot of sympathy as to how miserable I must be. When in fact, I feel better than I have the entire pregnancy. Whether it's pre-labor hormones, better weather, or a more consistent exercise routine, I've had more energy the past few weeks than since last October. Plus I think I'm getting used to balancing. The only thing that is really uncomfortable is the occasional nerve-pinching in the legs, which is making those helpful long, brisk walks nearly impossible.

No doubt I really am uncomfortable, but I've rather gotten used to it. I'm sure I'll fully realize it later, like the peasant taking his livestock back out of his hut.

While we are waiting, Wondergirl has started on repainting the living room and we are making food for the Fourth of July. We are not planning on going anywhere. My mother stayed home from Fourth of July festivities the year my sister was due, and she wasn't born until the 13th. We did have a calf born that day, whom we named Uncle Sam, and then renamed Aunt Samantha when we were able to get close enough for a thorough inspection.

I have every classic sign of labor being imminent, but things just haven't started yet.

Miscellaneous

QOC, to semi-repentant D2: You should not have hit D1 with your bat. Bats are for hitting balls. We do not hit people with bats.

D2: But I couldn't find my ball!

**************************
When someone on the other end asks, "Can you please hold?" don't you want to wail and plead, "NOOOOOO! Don't leave me! I can't hold!"

**************************
It looks like we have passed the cutoff for having them born in June, which makes DOB happy since they won't share a birth month with D1. But he doesn't want them born on the Fourth of July, either. (Too hard for birthday parties, plus it will make D4's chosen name sound like patriotic overkill.) Cicero doesn't want them born on her birthday (tomorrow). Wondergirl doesn't want them born until she has finished preparing the house for the painting she wants to do while I'm in labor.

I want them born. Right. Now.

Another Try

My doula suggested that visiting the zoo was a good way to jump start labor. Not only did you have all the walking around, but the animal hormones in the air seemed to encourage things. With 39 weeks closing in and the babies edging closer to 8 lbs apiece (!) I am ready to try almost anything. But not castor oil. Not yet.

We were too cheap and tired to do a full zoo visit, so we went to see the farm animals at a county park. I had pineapple and raspberry leaf tea for breakfast. I walked around the animal pens, inhaling deeply (it smelled more like manure than hormones to me, but you never know).

Then, for good measure, we took care of some much-needed shopping: a booster seat for D1, a pair of "Uncle Steve" shoes (knock-off Crocs) for D2, whose feet have grown too wide to fit in the lovely leather sandals I picked up for him at a yard sale last summer. Then groceries and fabric store, to get fabric to try this. For two babies. Somehow.

Every time we passed a small baby, I pointed out to D3 and D4 how blissful existence in the outer world was. Unless the small baby wasn't looking too blissful, in which case I moved quickly on.

Now my feet hurt. DOB is passed out on the couch.

Still no labor. Does it really have to be the zoo?

D1 and D2 certainly had a good time, though.

To Each His Own . . . Nightmare

Last night I dreamed I had put up a couple of posts on the blog criticizing something. A few hours later, I realized they were full of bad writing and bad logic. I rushed back to the computer to edit them to what I really meant to say, only to find out that people had already read and replied ripping my original posts to shreds. Then I felt dishonest about editing them.

Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair is one of those books I've been meaning to get around to for a very long time. I finally did, much to my enjoyment.

In writing style, Thackeray feels most like Dickens, at least in the scope and detail of the picture he paints and general Victorian style. The colors are less intense, though; there is no broad comedy (though plenty of wit) and no dark images of despair. This can be something of a relief.

In plot, I was at first disturbed to find Vanity Fair very similar to Gone With the Wind: two women, one ruthlessly devoted to money and social position, the other so stupidly ignorant in her virtue that she becomes annoying, set against a backdrop of epic war. But Vanity Fair was a lot more fun.

Maybe it was because Becky Sharp is more consistent, coherent, and just all around villainous than Scarlett O'Hara. She knows exactly what she's after, she knows exactly what she's willing to sacrifice to get it, and she heads there with single-minded determination and unquenchable hypocrisy. It's wickedly fun to watch, and fortunately she doesn't take down nearly as many innocent people in her wake as Scarlett does. (It's a testimony to her nastiness that she makes her scapegrace husband look good by comparison.)

Or maybe the saving grace was that the see-no-evil woman, Amelia Sedley, finally does get thoroughly told off by the far too longsuffering Major Dobbin. Which gives somebody in the book a chance for happily-ever-after.

The Victorians were seldom subtle in their prose, and the theme of the book is right there in the title: the emptiness and deception of the big, glittering world. It gets hammered pretty thoroughly. But Vanity Fair is a fun place to visit, nonetheless.

Impatience

Yesterday I returned from a long waddle. (Three blocks out and back. That's a long way when every step hurts.) The ducklings were blowing bubbles with Wondergirl in the front yard. D2 came running to greet me and asked, "Can I hug the babies?"

"Yes," I said, "Hug the babies and tell them they can come out now."

"Oh!" he said, "Are they coming out now?"

"No. Believe me, if they were coming out, I would be making very strange noises."

"I want them to come out so they can hold my fingers. Will they come out when we go inside?"

"Probably not."

Nor did they.

A few other words of wisdom from the ducklings:

"Firemen put out fires and cowboys put out cows."

"Cowboys ride on cows to catch horses, but I don't know what cowgirls ride."

D1 Turns Four

We celebrated D1's birthday yesterday with a rather low-key celebration, just in case it had to be postponed. We missed our chance to have four children under the age of four, though. (Not that I had that as a goal.)

Alas, I forgot to make the birthday crown. But she had a snowman cake. (No, I don't know why. It was what she wanted.) She opened presents. She played with friends. In short, it was all that a birthday required.

As she has since infancy, D1 loves people. No need to prompt her to say "thank you" for her presents--she's ready to call up all absent family members on the spot. (In fact, the only time in recent memory she threw a tantrum was when I refused to let her take part in a phone conversation with my doula. She still has not learned that not *everybody* in the world wants to talk to her, or that we cannot randomly invite ourselves over to strangers' homes.)

She likes to read books with plots of her own composition, to write long words nobody else can read, and to sing songs never heard before. She knows what needs to be done, and she's happy to tell you how to do it. She can do practically anything around the house accessible to people under four feet tall, including folding and organizing her laundry more neatly than I can. She is baby-crazy and very eager to see her big sisterly role expand.

Waiting

Every once in awhile, at this stage, I feel a need to post just to say: Still here. Still in one piece. Still waiting.

We are also waiting to see if the ducklings are going to come down with the chicken pox. (Two weeks ago, Cicero had an outbreak of shingles right after babysitting them.) It would certainly be better to get that over with before the babies arrive. This situation has precedent, as DOB and his siblings began erupting just as their mother went into labor with B5.

One of the carseat covers is clean. The other does not seem to detach from the seat. That has got to be the stupidest idea ever--a non-washable infant car seat?--or else we are all just missing something obvious.

I have crossed the point of true desperation--where labor sounds like more fun than still being pregnant. Wondergirl sent ahead some matching outfits for coming home, both in newborn (5-8 lb.) and 0-3 m. sizes. If I snip the tags off the newborn size clothes and wash them right away the babies will wait until 41 weeks and be 8.5 lbs each.

The weather has cooled off enough to permit long walks and Wondergirl arrives tomorrow afternoon. Some people say fresh pineapple helps--it couldn't hurt to try.

Get Those Animals Out of the Muddy, Muddy

We read the story of the flood today. Later D1 was reading it to herself out of a "Bible." (Technically it was a Vest Pocket Rhyming Dictionary, but it was small and black and looked official.)

"And the Lord said, 'Take seven of all the clean animals and two dirty ones.'"

Identity Crisis

The ducklings have been insisting, with a surprising degree of consistency over several days, that each is the other. This sounds cute in the abstract. Switching places at the table was no problem. But what about comfort toys at bedtime--is that just asking for a midnight squabble?

When investigating the scene of a crime, how does one tell the difference between confession and accusation?

Toothbrushes--definitely the line must be drawn at swapping toothbrushes.

And then there's the whole factor of one being potty-trained and one not, which occasions much inappropriate small child mirth.

Eventually the parental mind becomes overtaxed with being corrected at every turn. "No, I'm not D2. I'm D1!" DOB was at last forced to declare a ban on assumed names until the grownups have more mental energy.

And privately commented that he had thought it most unfair long ago when his parents had enacted the same rule.

Things Containing Five

The rules:
1. Post the rules of the game at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

I was tagged by Wendy from Zoom Times.

What were you doing five years ago?
Five years ago I was finishing up my work at two different jobs (public policy research and teaching high school government) in preparation for getting married and moving across the country. DOB was across the country, trying to start a financial planning business. We didn't get to talk very much. It's nice to have him handier now--at least we can collapse in exhaustion together, even though we still don't get to talk very much.

What are five things on your to-do list for today?
1. Fix breakfast.
2. Fix lunch.
3. Keep the ducklings alive and reasonably happy.
4. Make sure the ducklings are ready to go to Grandma's house.
5. Nap.

What are five snacks you enjoy?
1. Popcorn, air popped with butter and salt
2. Smoothies or popsicles made with yogurt and fruit
3. Banana bread or zucchini bread with cream cheese (Oh please, please, please. I've been craving this for weeks.)
4. Baby carrots
5. Graham crackers with peanut butter

What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?
1. Buy an incredibly cool house.
2. Hire a garden designer to make an incredibly cool back garden with all sorts of surprises. And no mosquitoes. Or hardly any.
3. Hire a full-time housekeeper and maybe a gardener while I was at it.
4. Buy a second home on the Puget Sound and spend the summer out there every year.
5. Write books with DOB.

What are five of your bad habits?
1. Procrastination
2. Setting down books on their spines to mark my place (Evil, evil, evil. But I never can keep track of bookmarks.)
3. Reading or surfing the internet while I eat.
4. Ignoring everything around me.
5. Nit-picking the grammar and logic of perfectly nice and sincere people. (Not to their faces, of course.)

What are five places where you have lived?
1. Olalla, Washington
2. Olympia, Washington
3. Wilmington, Ohio
4. Loveland, Ohio
5. Cincinnati, Ohio

What are five jobs you’ve had?
1. Office manager for a homeschooling organization
2. Research analyst for a public policy think tank
3. Teacher at a Christian high school
4. Assistant to DOB in financial planning (Paperwork is NOT my thing, I discovered.)
5. Mother

Time to return to item number 5 on my to-do list, so I'll skip the tagging for now. Feel free to take it!

All-Natural Hair Mousse

All-natural hair products are hard to find. Especially mousse for some reason. What can be found is outrageously expensive. We didn't think there was any hope of us making our own, though, when we can hardly get dinner on the table. Until we discovered this recipe for homemade mousse:

1/4 tsp. plain gelatin
1 cup boiling water

Mix together thoroughly (that's the important part, it can take a few minutes for the gelatin to completely dissolve), allow to cool, and use on your hair.

That's it. We stored it in an old hair gel bottle and it works great. You don't get that fun foamy white stuff out of it, but it does hold hair steady very nicely. You can adapt the amount of gelatin if you want a bit stiffer mixture; DOB likes 3/8 teaspoon per cup of water.

Find more frugal tips at Frugal Friday.

The Guessing Game

After what happened last time, I'm a little nervous about posting this. But I refuse to be superstitious.

So, it is time to guess when D3 and D4 will arrive and how large they will be. Winner gets . . . can we award the same titles we used last time? If not, you'll have to be content with bragging rights.

Enter guesses as to: The date of their joint arrival, the time between their individual births, and each one's individual weight. If you really want to play outsmart the ultrasound technician and guess a different gender combination than we have been told, that's up to you.

Pertinent Facts:
Official due date is July 8.
Although twins proverbially come early, that's just an average and accounts for the larger number of people with complications. I haven't had any complications or any signs of labor so far.
I've never gone overdue.
I currently have no backup plan for induction or c-section. My doctor is committed to letting nature take its course, assuming there's no signs of trouble. I'm going to start taking long wobbles as soon as Wondergirl arrives on the 17th, though.
The twins have been measuring right on target for single babies of the same gestational age, with the advantage of an ounce or two going to the boy at last check. Ultrasound weights are notoriously sketchy, though.

We don't get it

Gone With the Wind. Supposedly one of the greatest movies of all time.

Why?

Every once in awhile DOB and I pick out a movie to watch just because of its alleged cultural significance (as opposed to the classic movies we watch because we do, in fact, like classic movies). We've been working our way through the Star Wars series, slowly and painfully, on this theory, but at least there I can see the childhood nostalgia angle.

But Gone With the Wind's popularity can't be coming from that. So what is there to like? Every single character in the film is either despicable or insipid. Or despicably insipid, like Ashley Wilkes. (Who really ought to be off being the Scarlet Pimpernel, anyway.) And everyone is so whiny. If the southerners were really that whiny, no wonder they lost the war.

We trudged on through hour after hour (not consecutively) of How Scarlett's Consummate Selfishness Caused Nearly As Much Trouble As General Sherman. We never did get it. I suppose it counts as tragedy, since she ends up with only the money and land she has sacrificed everyone else to get, but tragedy is only worth watching if the main character is somewhat interesting. Scarlett is just a brat, who transforms herself into a more cunning brat. A brat in nice dresses, yes, but that should hardly be enough.

At last we reached the end, and took heart. Tomorrow is another day, and the fourth season of Jeeves and Wooster has come into the library.

It's not what it looks like

We're really not running a gambling den for preschoolers.

But we do have some pretty shady characters around here.