Seven Quick Takes Friday

I just realized that D3 is allergic to egg yolk. I wish I had realized it on Tuesday, when she spent all day throwing up, but I thought it might be a bug. Now I'm sure about the eggs. Very, very sure.

Bummer.

Also, putting a baby in a backpack carrier is a really good way to get them to vomit. If they're waiting to vomit.

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DOB has dubbed our mid-winter vacation last weekend the "Little Girl with a Curl" trip. Two days were very, very good. We visited friends, napped, played at the park with the kids, and read.

And the last day was horrid, because I woke up too sick (or tired, it comes to the same thing) to get out of bed, leaving him to deal with everything, leaving both of us utterly exhausted by the time we made it home.

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A duckling hymn: "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wrench like me."

I don't know whether screwdrivers can be saved or not.

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This recipe is from The Tightwad Gazette. It's really easy, and really good. Faster than the bread machine or most "quick" breads.

Cuban Bread

5-6 cups all purpose flour (I use nearly all whole wheat)
2 T dry yeast
2 T sugar
1 T salt
2 cups hot weater
1 T sesame or poppy seeds (opt.)

Mix 4 cups of flour with yeast, sugar and salt. Pour in hot water and beat 100 strokes, or 3 minutes with a mixer. Stir in the remaining flour until the dough is no longer sticky. Knead 8 minutes. Place the dough in a greased bowl, and cover with a damp towel. Let rise 15 minutes. Punch down. Divide into two pieces. Shape into two round loaves, and place on a baking sheet. Cut an X ½ inch deep on top with a sharp knife. Brush with water, and sprinkle with seeds. Place on the middle shelf of a cold oven. Place a cake pan of hot water on the lowest shelf. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Bake 40-50 minutes until deep golden brown.

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D4 is now crawling on all fours. He's still kind of stiff, though, so he looks like Frakenbaby. D3 gets up on her knees and rocks, and seems pretty pleased with herself about it.

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And as a follow up to the first quick take: D3 has finished throwing up, taken a long nap, and is now back to normal. Exactly like on Tuesday. I'm going to have to think of something besides soft-boiled egg yolks to serve her for breakfast.

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The Christmas chocolate is nearly gone.

More Quick takes at Conversion Diary.

The Power of Repetitive Thinking

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that thinking about something X number of times (I forget how many) wrote the same mental pathways as having done it once. This was used to caution one against contemplating evil, and encourage the results of contemplating good.

What I don't recall ever hearing is the danger this poses to housework. By that logic, it only takes X number of times thinking about, say, washing the dishes, before you feel as if you have already done them.

And what could be more depressing than washing dishes that have already been washed?

Clearly the only solution is to stop thinking about washing dishes, so that one is not deceived into believing them already washed.

Miscellaneous

There is no better cure for the winter blues than sixty degrees and sunshine.

On the other hand, there's no worse inducer of the winter blues than a houseful of runny noses.

So I guess we're at least breaking even.

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One of D2's birthday gifts last year came with a free subscription to a parenting magazine. So I signed up for it, figuring it would at least be good for the picture file. It also gives me a monthly chance to be astonished at the world outside my bubble.

For instance: Did you know that they now have a juice that comes with extra water already added? So you can give your kids less sugary diluted juice without the trouble of pouring water in yourself.

First I'm horrified and think that if anyone does not have time to pour water into juice they really need to reevaluate their life. Then I think, "You know, that probably sounds wonderful to someone who has to have it diluted exactly right and they'll think I'm really mean for mocking it."

But then, if you're mean like me you can never give your kids juice at all.

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I hate those hyper-real dreams where you dream you're in a park during an earthquake and there's a chilly breeze blowing and then you wake up and find the covers have all come off and someone is shaking the bed.

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The babies slept beautifully last night, which would lend credence to my theory that it's church that messes up their sleep cycles every week and it takes us all week to get them back on track, except that even though we stayed home from church on Sunday they still wouldn't take their proper naps on time. But I will still take what I can get.

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What do you do with a child who loves to play in the mud and freaks out whenever he gets mud on him?

How To Do It All . . . Wrong

Yesterday afternoon we had to go to the chiropractor to meet the older two kids, who had been visiting Grandma. D2 had come down with a bad cold while he was there. We would arrive home right at dinner time.

No problem. I handle this kind of situation all the time. I put chili in the crockpot and cornbread in the bread machine. Then the babies needed some more vegetables, so I cooked a bag of broccoli and whipped it up in the blender right before DOB came to pick up me and the babies. Also I didn't want to waste money on disposables, so I kept them both in cloth, figuring that they'd already had their stinky diapers for the day.

I should have negotiated a better stinky diaper clause. (No more than one per child per day; only between the hours of 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. or 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., except for during meals or when out.) Anyway, no sooner did I pull D4 out of the carseat at the chiropractor than I realized he was stinky. But since the last time I tried to change a cloth diaper away from home I found the old one left in the diaper bag a week later, I decided to leave him in it. D1 and D2 were happy to see us, but very overtired and D2 had a horrible cough. D3 also had a stinky diaper, but we had not had the chance to notice it yet.

So we arrived home with four kids all suffering some combination of hungry, tired, stinky, and sick. We had an altercation just trying to get in the front door, a place where painful backlogs occur rather often when you have two spacey preschoolers, two very heavy carseats, a spring-loaded storm door, and a whole lot of snow. When we had all made it through the door, I realized I was smelling none of the smells that should have heralded hot, fresh cornbread and chili.

Turns out instead of setting the bread machine to bake quick breads, I had set it to make dough. So I had twice-kneaded and risen cornbread batter. (For you non-bakers, that's the exact opposite of what should be done with cornbread, which should be just barely mixed and baked immediately.) I also had forgotten that using the blender disrupts the crockpot's power supply enough to turn it off.

By the time the "cornbread" was baking and the chili was really heating, we had all four children screaming, something that fortunately doesn't happen very often. When it does, there's nothing to do but grit your teeth, quote the first stanza of "If" to yourself, and apply triage.

We did all survive. I'm even trying to use the crockpot and bread machine again.

Fun, fun, fun!

Dear Fellow Parent,

If you could peek inside your child's imagination, what would you see? Silly animals . . . castles and princesses . . . wishing stars and rainbows . . . towering birthday cakes and giant ice cream cones? Whatever might be hidden in there, no doubt it would be colorful, creative and fun, fun, FUN!

No, the blog didn't get hijacked, I'm just quoting from a current piece of junk mail.

Have these people ever been children? Have they ever had a child? This is not how I thought as a child; if the occasional random comments of the ducklings go by, it is not how my children think either. Left unassisted, the child's imagination is a mix of the curious, macabre ("You're dead so we have to eat by ourselves."), and mundane ("Let's play the place we drop off stuff we don't want anymore.") with a distinct lack of cutesy oversized animals in primary colors.

Children's imagination is not primarily a way to escape from the world; it's the way they make sense of the world. Mostly it looks like the real world combined in peculiar ways as they try to understand it without all the data yet.

This book is promoting how a certain kind of adult thinks children ought to imagine things. And if my recollection of being a child is anything to go on, children HATE that kind of adult, though most of them are too polite to say so.

I think we'll pass. The ducklings will have to survive without someone else's idea of fun, fun, FUN!

Seven Quick Takes Sunday

Because I'm perpetually behind.

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As expected, the bet over whether D4 would be crawling by the end of January wound up in a debate over technicalities (like most Duchy discussions). Is an army crawl a crawl? He's getting up on all fours, but still seems uncertain as to whether to use this power for mere crawling or as a platform for rocket-launching.

D3, meanwhile, has finally figured out rolling both ways but is most impressed with her ability to say, "Mama," although she's still not quite sure what it means.

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Today is the annual holiday known as I'm Glad We Don't Have a TV day. I know the internet can be just as bad in some ways, but at least the internet is QUIET. I hate background noise. And in another hour or two, the Superbowl will be over and peace (punctuated by screams) will return.

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A quotation from the Duckling Revised Standard: "And the Lord God commanded them to duke it out."

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Around here we have these sandwich storms: several inches of snow, then an inch or two of ice, then several more inches of snow, then some more ice. Then a few thaw/freeze cycles. It makes for interesting walking. Which makes for a lot of staying inside if everyone has short legs.

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Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, aka Candlemas, aka as the midway point of winter. I made a paper chain countdown to the first day of spring and immediately got depressed by how many days there were left. But at least now we have something to do on each of them.

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Chicken-Broccoli Curry Soup. Yum. (Except I left out the rice and used potatoes and carrots and didn't have cream so I made thick powdered milk. Still just right, especially for a cold and sniffly day.)

And While We're At It

Believe it or not, I got roughly 0 hours of sleep last night, since D3 and D4 carefully choreographed alternating screams of hunger. However, pondering random thoughts is easy for me when I have had little sleep. It's kissing owies that I don't have any capacity for when I'm tired. Fortunately no one is screaming at the moment.

Which relates, somewhat tangentially, to another idea I'd like to discuss: parenting time investment. Here's an article arguing that 1) parents actually spend more time interacting with their children now than in years past; and 2) it doesn't really matter how you parent, as kids turn out according to their natural bent in the long run, even though parenting style may make some difference in the short run. (Ruling out extremes of abuse and neglect, of course.)

There are a couple of things left out of this discussion; one is opinions rather than just personality traits. Whether you are devout or not might be more a matter of personality, but I'm pretty sure whether you're a Baptist or a Hindu is very strongly correlated with what your parents believed. Also even if your child turns out all right, most of us would like to still be on speaking terms with them and have them remember our time together fondly. So don't throw parenting out the window entirely.

That said, I do suspect that the modern standard of "good parenting" pushes us way past the point of diminishing returns (at least for most people). At least if I am interpreting other people correctly (and the time diaries cited in the article are correct) many mothers try to spend all or most of their children's waking minutes interacting with them. Some make this a conscious goal; others seem to just fall into it and then wonder if they should institute some time for them to play alone.

Which, if you like it, is great. But is it the gold standard of good motherhood?

I sure hope not, because it's always seemed so hopeless to me that I've never even tried. I'm not really a people person and I'm not at all a reality person.

And as I consider my own childhood, which was quite happy, I think: Did my parents spend every waking moment with me? Certainly not. Did I want them to? Definitely not. It was nice to have them handy in case of emergencies, but they were parents, not buddies. A good portion of my time was devoted to evading their notice, secure in the knowledge that parental notice would shortly be followed by chores. Having them try to enter into our games would have spoiled the fun. Adults just don't get some things; worse, they know too much.

There is, no doubt, an age differential here: I am remembering elementary age, while most of the mothers I've read talking like this have preschoolers or younger. I have read, for instance, that up to about age two children prefer to play with adults even over a slightly-older sibling; by three the preference switches. And I cannot speak at all to the situation of an only child.

But even at 3 and 4 D1 and D2 are quite happy playing by themselves for hours each day, with only occasionally including me or appealing to me to settle arguments. And D3 and D4 spend a good portion of the day just rolling around on the floor and watching. Maybe if I chattered with D3 and D4 I could nudge them ahead a bit in language development, but what would be the point? They'd use the same number of words as adults. And with daily focused activities I could probably have at least D1 reading, but why bother? She'll learn to read on her own soon enough, or if not, all the faster for waiting a few more years, and she'll be reading the exact same books at twelve either way.

This sounds like an excuse for laziness. It's not exactly (although I do feel like I fritter away a lot of time these days, but sleep-deprivation is not a good state to engage in any elaborate endeavors). You can spend as much time doing stuff together as is fun for all of you, and then you can not feel guilty about doing all the other interesting things that can be done with the children within earshot.

To Be and To Do

What if the whole debate over biblical gender roles is asking the wrong question?

A role is something all-encompassing, drawn out on every side. If you're playing a role, you must get inside that persona, forgetting yourself to become them down to the smallest detail. You must follow the script--and so must everyone around you. If you've studied for Portia and it turns out everyone else is playing Twelfth Night, confusion will reign.

But real life has an irritating way of not following a script. And the Bible doesn't hand out roles--individual character parts we must become. It gives examples and it gives commands.

Compared to a role, a command is both narrower and broader. Narrower in that it doesn't begin to try to define every aspect of your life. Broader in that it applies in every situation, not just a particular script. "Thou shalt not covet" applies to your neighbor's donkey and your neighbor's SUV. More than that, the fact that a command is given to some does not necessarily mean everyone else is exempt. (Although small children hold firmly to this theory as long as possible.)

Is it just a semantic distinction? I don't think so. If we go to the Bible looking for commands, they're pretty easy to see. We have freedom to apply them to the different situations of our lives; we also have freedom not to worry about the areas that aren't covered. We can give other people the freedom to apply them in their situations.

Also if we look at the specific commands to men and women, we can see they are all applications of broader commands that apply to everyone (we all are to love one another; we all are to be subject to one another and clothed in humility). We don't suddenly become exempt from a general command because we are following a specific application of another one. We can't turn up our nose and say, "Well, that's not my role" when something ought to be done.

On the other hand, if we are looking for a role, the commands alone will not give us nearly enough information. We must rip the book apart looking for every clue that might help us flesh out every aspect of our "role": taking analogies long past the point where they break down; trying to deduce duties from descriptive statements; following examples as if they were paint-by-number pages; torturing every obscure allusion out so that we can fully develop our role. And then when life doesn't follow the script we are expecting, we're at a loss; or when other people's situations don't fit the role we've developed, we're unreasonably critical.

Family life is not a play, and there are no roles and no script. Do what's right. Be the children of God.

Heads Will Roll

Happily Ever After

One should perhaps not ask too much of fluffy, popcorn movies, except that they be suitably light and fluffy and everything turn out all right in the end. But there's one thing that annoys me about the modern version of these movies, perhaps because--to my mind--they no longer come out all right in the end.

In an older movie of this type, if you were to encounter an estranged couple, especially with children, you knew they would be back together by the end of the movie. If there was a single parent, and some adult of the opposite gender became good friends with the child, you knew that a romance with Mom or Dad was next on the agenda.

Now it seems the rule is quite opposite. If there's an estranged couple, the apparently less-cool parent will have a cool new romantic interest by the end of the movie (curiously, this is true even if the other parent seems to have realized their mistake).

And as for the single-parent movies--well, last weekend we watched The Pacifier. Watching a Navy SEAL get some discipline into some spoiled suburban kids while getting in touch with his softer side and foiling some international spies is fun. (Do the SEALs rent these guys out?) Watching the basically fatherless lieutenant learn to father the kids he's guarding is heartwarming.

So why can't he just marry their widowed mom? Why bring a totally different (and not particularly interesting) romantic interest into it?

Do not talk to me about what is realistic. This is a movie. The bad guys always lose, kids can take on international spies successfully, and people can drive like maniacs through the city and only attract police attention when it is needed. It's not about the way things are, it's about the way we want things to be.

Do we no longer want children to grow up in the same house with a mother and a father? Is it happily ever after enough to have someone promise they won't forget you?

(But I made up my own ending. He sticks around town, dates the principal for awhile, it doesn't work out, he keeps visiting the kids and falls for the mom later on. So there.)

D1 the Personal Trainer

(D1 and D2 have just finished cleaning their room and are running in circles on the newly-clear floor. QOC enters.)

QOC: What are you guys doing?

D1: We're running in circles! You should try it! It would get rid of your tummy!

Whence? Wherefore? Whither?

Somewhere in the last month we crossed the line from little babies to big babies, and now we have to be messing with all those pre-toddler difficulties of supervising, keeping things out of reach, preparing meals, changing nasty diapers, and setting boundaries. On Sunday DOB overheard a delighted cackle, followed by a thump and a howl as D4 propelled himself off the bed. He was uninjured and probably undeterred from a future hobby of bungee-jumping. (Not to be outdone, D3 got a case of nursemaid's elbow the following day, requiring an emergency trip to the chiropractor. She then put it back in place en route.)

The internet is a discouraging place for a dormant writer. Everybody wants to be a writer on the internet. (Unless they want to be a videographer.) Some of them may have something worthwhile to say, but it would take a cryptographer to deduce it from their convoluted writing. Others are technically proficient but when it comes right down to it, aren't saying much. (This would probably be me.) Most are competent enough and have useful information, but there's only so many useful things to be said.

Indeed, why bother? The trouble with writing is it never goes away. You're not just competing with your contemporaries, you're competing with every writer from all time. In a world where Shakespeare and Plato and Chesterton are available at the touch of a button, what's left to be said but blather? (Making an exception, of course, for useful, practical advice, but I am not a practical person and can offer very little.)

This is not an anti-internet, I'm-leaving-now post. I've got four small children alone with no car or tv for twelve-hour days and it's 15 degrees outside. I'm not cutting off my one contact to the outside world. But I am pondering what is worth doing and saying.

Then again, the main purpose for this blog has been to keep in touch with my scattered family and friends. So it's not so bad if it often degenerates into nothing but baby pictures and kid quotes. The world only has room for one Shakespeare, but there is room for an infinite number of letters to Grandma, profound or not.

Likewise there is only a need for so many recipes, but there is a need for dinner every night. There may be only so many stories worth being told, but they must be told over and over. Every child must be raised, every garden must be planted, every floor must be swept, by the person who is there. It cannot be turned over to someone else who might do it better just because they write about it better. The field of competition in my own back yard is very small.

And so, one cute picture to go on.

Seven Quick Takes Friday: The Interview Edition

It is Seven Quick Takes Friday over at Conversion Diary. It is also the twins' six month birthday, at which time it is our custom to interview the children for the first and last time. (After this age, we might not like their answers).

So in the interests of blogging efficiency, we combine the two with Seven Quick Questions for the Babies.

1. What do you each think of the world, as a whole, now that you've been here so long?

D3: The world is full of fascinating things to watch.
D4: The world is full of fascinating things to grab and drool on.

2. What's the most exciting thing you might see in the course of a day?

D3: Papa! Hey, over here! See my special Papa grin!
D4: D2 left his toys behind. Woo-hoo!

3. How do you get along with your twin sibling?

D3: He's fun to watch.
D4: She's great to chew on.

4. How do you get along with your older siblings?

D3: They play games and talk to me.
D4: They leave toys lying around. I like that.

5. Solid foods: Yea or Nay?

D3: Umm, OK I guess. If I must.
D4: Really? Was this necessary? What was wrong with milk? I like milk. I can drink milk all night long!

6. Any particular skills you're especially proud of?

D3: I can cross my fingers. This will come in handy once I figure out how to talk.
D4: I can pull toys out of toy bins up on shelves.

7. What worries you these days?

D3: I overheard Mama talking about us getting itchy red spots soon and I'm worried about its effect on my flawless complexion.
D4: Forward movement. I can go sideways. I can go backwards. Why not forwards?

Communication Problems

As was briefly mentioned below, DOB lost his voice last week. He hasn't found it yet.

I will gloss over the difficulties this poses him at work (where he had to contact numerous clients to make essential adjustments before the end of the year, and where he's added a new boss starting this week) and focus on the important part: me.

Many romantic young couples believe they can communicate without a word, so deep is their level of sympathy. We thought we had a deep, instinctive level of understanding early on, too. It turns out this is not the case, which is good, because what is the use of being married to someone who thinks just like you do? Not only is it boring, it's terribly narrow-minded. We practically always agree once we've talked through everything and have a far better view of the world from having considered it from the other's perspective.

But if we can't talk--well, we're two trains travelling on different tracks at different speeds from different stations and you don't even want to do the math.

Furthermore, I hope I never go deaf, because I am terrible at reading signs, signals, lip movements, or the finger alphabet. (I can USE the finger alphabet, I just can't READ it. Unfortunately, I'm not the one without a voice.)

So a conversation with DOB goes like this:

DOB: (Gesture)
QOC: Um . . . D?
DOB: (Gesture)
QOC: V?
DOB: (Shakes head)
QOC: P? That's not a P.
DOB: (Gestures harder)
QOC: I don't care what you think, that's not a letter.
DOB: (Gestures some more)
QOC: Oh, you're counting. Um . . . Two? D . . . 2? Oh, D2! What about D2? Do you want me to tell him to stop what he's doing? I told him he could do that.
DOB: (Shakes head, more indistinguishable gestures)
QOC: Um . . . so . . . what else should I do about D2?
DOB: (Gives up in disgust.)

Fortunately DOB got a surplus laptop so we can now communicate via instant messenger. This should be very romantic, as this is how we first met. However, back then I believe we both had the opportunity to engage in an activity known as "sleep" which we have since forsworn. In consequence, our communications were far wittier back then. Now they go more like this:

QOC: I'm tired. We should put the kids to bed.
DOB: You have to. I can't talk.
QOC: You have to. I can't move.

It's OK, though, because D1 and D2 have discovered they can put themselves to bed, without any adult involvement. In fact, it's more fun without it. So please don't investigate such matters as Thoroughness of Teeth Brushing and Doctrinal Correctness of Bedtime Prayer.

There is one finger letter I have mastered: "T." It stands for "tea." As in "a big, hot cuppatea please, preferably with honey and lemon." That much, I can do.

Old Year, New Year

With this Christmas, we can at last say that fully half of Duchy Christmases have transpired without anyone present throwing up. That alone is almost enough to make it a good year.

Fortunately time blurs the edges, and even if I write it down we won't really remember that this was the Christmas we went for three weeks without sleep because the babies decided they need to eat all night. (I think it's starting to get better. Maybe. A little.)

I tell them they don't need to grow any more, they're just fine the size they are, in fact they probably should have stayed a little smaller and less mobile, but they refuse to listen. D4 has discovered rolling for transportation and is trying to make it do until he figures out crawling. D3 got started babbling and then decided she should quit working on that and try to figure out how to catch up with D4. Secure gate for the stairway is on order.

It's hard to take a picture of sleep-deprivation, or the fifteenth meal in a row interrupted by an urgent plea for help in the bathroom, and DOB looks pretty much the same even when he's lost his voice. So we'll just rub those things out of the memory book from this year and put in things like this:

D1 and D2 never could figure out the vowel sequence of everyone's favorite Christmas cookie, krumkaka, and finally settled on calling it "Cream-ka-ko."

D1 saved up her own money and bought the purple bear for D2. Then she told him what it was as soon as she got home from the store on Christmas Eve, despite everyone's best efforts to insist on the virtue of surprise. D2 was still surprised.

DOB and I got our first date in almost six months--we went grocery shopping alone together. We were even able to hold hands for a few minutes before the cart got too full. (I guess technically on our anniversary we went out to get pizza, but that was an even shorter trip than grocery shopping.)

The older ducklings were finally old enough to participate in our tradition of making predictions for the New Year by writing various persons, places, and activities on slips of paper and then drawing them at random. D1 still walks around cackling that she's going to be painting in Seattle with Winnie-the-Pooh.

We went to see the zoo lights, rode on the train (riding on a tiny train over sheer drop-offs in the dark with a bunch of little kids is not easy on the nerves) and got a peek at the giraffes in their winter quarters.


I'd like to resolve to eat less and exercise more, but that will have to wait a few months. I'd like to resolve to read some great books, but I think I'd better wait until I have enough sleep for them to make sense. I'd like to tackle some great new projects, but I know they'd just get abandoned midway and then torn to pieces. I'd like to create a calm and peaceful home environment but I need a little more cooperation first.

So I'll just try to do less and enjoy it more, eat and sleep when I have the opportunity, savor any quiet moments that come, and live as happily as possible whether the moment is photographable or not.

Memorable Gifts

So what's your most memorable gift? Probably something tacky or horrifying, human nature being what it is.

But the gift I remember best I was neither a giver or a receiver. Just an innocent bystander.

It was the year my parents gave Toolboy his first Real Hammer. We were farm kids, and Toolboy has always been Toolboy, so I'm guessing this would have been the year he was six and a half and I had just turned eight.

Being a normal six-year-old boy, he left his gifts lying on the stairs.

Being a slightly more astute eight-year-old girl, I was dashing up and down the stairs squirreling away my loot.

And on one of the trips, came down like a ton of bricks (I always moved like a ton of bricks, even when I weighed 75 pounds) on the claw of the hammer.

I distinctly remember spending that Christmas evening on the couch, watching a festive holiday video, my foot bandaged and throbbing.

Yup, that was a memorable gift.

It's about three years until D2 is old enough for his own first Real Hammer. And it had better never get left on the stairs.

Cheap Food for Parties

Fondue reputedly started out as a winter survival food of Swiss peasants, who discovered stale bread and cheese tasted better if you melted the cheese and dipped the bread in while all huddled around the pot for warmth.

It seems to be a common trend, that the cheap food of former centuries becomes a luxury or celebratory item in later years. Like the lutefisk my grandmother hoarded at Christmas (she said it didn't stink if you learned how to cook it properly), which must have begun as a way to try to consume dry fish over a long, cold, Norwegian winter.

The main reason the price goes up so much is that we are no longer in the same area or willing to do the work ourselves. If we milked our own goats and grew our own rye, no doubt it would be just as cheap to use up the leftovers huddled around the fire.

This does not describe the food that is currently cheap, which is instead mass-produced and shipped everywhere.

So it probably isn't true that future generations will have pricey but treasured bowls of steaming Top Ramen as a special feast day tradition.

Seven Quick Takes Friday

You'll notice that I always spell out the first number, even though nobody else does. This is because the Grammar Commando won't let me use a numeral to begin a sentence, or even a phrase. The Grammar Commando is strict that way.

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I'm not one to bash on insurance companies too much, but last week I got an envelope from them with a special message on living with Type 2 diabetes. Interesting, because I don't have Type 2 diabetes, or Type 1 diabetes, or Gestational Diabetes, or Leprosy. I think this, along with the Creepy Nurse who called up every month while I was pregnant, is part of their general wellness programs, and I really think they could spend less money on that and more money paying off claims.

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Wondergirl arrives this afternoon. It should have been this morning, but the flight from Cleveland was canceled.

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That means I have more time to clean the bathrooms and sweep the floor. Which I clearly am not doing right now. I'm waiting for the babies to go down for their nap. Yes.

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They got six inches of snow in Washington last night, and ours all melted this morning. Quite unfair.

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Have you tried Pandora? You really must. Forget that favorite Christmas CD business, you can just sign up to listen to all of your favorite style of Christmas music all day long. (HT to the Deputy Headmistress, I think.) I wonder what it would give me if I told it to design a radio station based on Pigorian Chant?

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The older ducklings have wormed the full tale of Santa Claus out of us now and spent all morning yesterday playing elves, packing up gifts to distribute. Except they pronounce it "Elles." Why is it that every creative thing they think of to play involves dragging out all the toys they can find and mixing them together? Why do they never decide to play Impoverished Children With No Toys?

More quick takes at Conversion Diary.

Third Time Around

This blog is the closest thing I have to a baby book. With a little math, I can go back and compare the current round of babies with previous models. Thus I discover that although I thought my decision to start sweet potatoes this week came far too early, a careful reading of the archives discloses that it is only a week earlier than D1 started and three weeks earlier than D2 started, and since the twins were born a week later than D1 and three weeks later than D2, it all comes out even, right? Regardless, we seem to have hit the Growth Spurt That Never Ends, which means it's time, alas. Also they react to it much the same way: Choke, gag, splutter. But having two babies gagging at once is a new experience.

Also although I thought D4 was being terribly precocious in rolling all the way across the living room this morning, it turns out he was only a month ahead of D1, which is not that impressive for someone who's been trying to crawl since he was five minutes old. He did roll both ways a lot sooner, though--perhaps the use of the skill for locomotion requires a certain amount of mental as well as physical development.

I thought they were far too young for all this, but apparently I'm suffering nothing more than an acute case of My Babies Are Growing Up Too Fast.

D3 has gotten quite a bit more wiggly the past few weeks, although she's still not rolling even one way if she can help it. (Her charm-the-socks-off radius is about ten feet, though.) I have read people boasting about how their food and environmental choices result in faster child development. Well, I'm sure it helps to feed yourself and the babies properly and let them play where they can move. But having very UNidentical twins makes it clear to me that babies do their own thing at their own speed and there's not all that much to be done about it.

Because I Haven't Done This In A While

D1 and D2 in a moment of patriotic myopia. D3 and D4 getting alarmingly big. Beware, Random Objects on Floor! Babies are on patrol!

Alas

I was wrong about the absence of giant inflated figures this year. Apparently everyone just waited a couple of weeks to put them up. (Well, two weeks is better than all month.)

And the people across the street have put up two hideous giant figures. Their lights shine in my bedroom window at night.

I'd like to sneak over there and stab them repeatedly. But it's the home of the chief of police.

Probably not a good idea.

Seven Quick Takes Friday

1. It would, of course, be the night we were finally making progress at Teaching the Babies About Bedtime and Getting to Bed on Time that we would be awakened every hour by a malfunctioning CO detector (which we THOUGHT was a malfunctioning smoke detector), resulting finally in dragging everyone out of the house at 3 a.m. while the fire department visited (too late to go back to bed, too early to get up). The kids, of course, had a great time, and it provided a nice rehearsal for our safety plans we've been discussing lately; the babies were thrilled that we all recognized the need for some activity at 3 a.m. But the parents, they were not pleased.

2. The older ducklings also had a wonderful time last night at a Christmas party complete with magician and balloon-tier. And I declared today a Pajama Pancake Party. And there's another party tonight. It's a good time of year to be 3 and 4.

3. Making pancakes reminds me why I declared I would not make pancakes again until the babies were much older. This takes forever. It also reminds me of my sole pregnancy craving: the day I made and ate an entire batch of pancakes. Why do I never get to eat like that any more when the babies are about eight times as big? Probably because I actually get to keep down my normal meals.

4. I wonder if there's a Guinness Book of World Records entry for Most Pounds of Baby Exclusively Breastfed. I bet we're getting close. Well past 35 pounds already, although I haven't measured in a month.

5. I'm in no hurry about that solid food business, either. Having had babies before gives better perspective. Yes, it's nice to fantasize about sleeping through the night, getting away for more than ninety minutes, and seeing those fat little legs develop self-propulsion. But it's also easier to remember that it will never be this easy to feed them again (until they learn to cook) or this easy to find them.

6. D2 is already stressing out over the babies touching his toys. It was my experience with D1 and D2, and I think it's going to be true again, that the older child doesn't have any trouble with the newborn but starts feeling threatened when the baby gets mobile.

7. D1 has started experimenting with different ways to spell and write her name. I thought we had another decade for that.

More Quick Takes at Conversion Diary.

Songs of Praises

My wife found Jesus tonight.

Well, actually it was just the representation of Him for the mantle nativity...

School of Hard Knocks

An article in a parenting magazine I got yesterday included tips on winter sports: little kids should, of course, always wear helmets and only use sleds with approved steering devices.

Cue the curmudgeonly muttering: when-I-was-a-kid-clonking-your-head-while-spinning-in-a-garbage-lid-was-considered-part-of-the fun. (I'm pretty sure that sledding in the dark in a field with barbed wire fences would not meet modern safety rules either, but I at least was never stupid enough to try that.)

But that's trite. No, what I'm thinking is that the ducklings are far, far more likely to conk their heads badly walking in stocking feet on wood floors around solid furniture than they are to injure themselves spilling out in a snowdrift. In fact, at least one of them slips and hurts their head at least once a day.

If we're really concerned about safety, shouldn't kids be wearing these helmets every time they're out of bed?

Christmas Without Jesus

No, this isn't going to be a devotional or anything like that. It's just that we need to find Jesus.

It started last Friday evening, when I had two hungry and wet babies and company coming any minute. I caught the older kids on top of the loveseat, giggling in that silly way that you know means children are allied against grownups everywhere.

"D2 hid baby Jesus!" D1 exclaimed. Sure enough, the nativity set on the mantle was missing the central character.

At a moment like this, I realized I had two choices: an interminable discipline/interrogation/hunting session, or walking away in disgust. I chose option B, went and changed and fed the babies and was ready for company.

Unfortunately, I forgot all about it for two days. By that time, the ducklings had apparently forgotten where they had hid the figurine. We hunted all the likely places in the vicinity and turned up nothing.

So we issued an ultimatum: No candy until they find Jesus. Or the New Year, whichever comes first.

Edited to add: I found baby Jesus in the library book basket, along with half of a plastic red pepper, a small hot rod, and a toy credit card. And a lot of books, of course. I have not yet heard whether I get the prize, but the ducklings insist I do not get their candy.

The Christmas CD Meme

From Wendy at Zoom Times:

If you were trapped on a desert island and it was Christmas and all you had was a small generator, Christmas lights for your coconut tree, an endless supply of Christmas cookies and eggnog, your CD player and 6 Christmas CDs , which 6 albums would you want them to be?

Ah, difficulty. Let us begin with saying that Christmas music is all about nostalgia, and therefore selections are not to be critiqued based on any particular aesthetic or associational standards. It is what it is.

Therefore:

1. Come On Ring Those Bells (Yes, I know it's an LP, but Santa made me a CD version.) This went on the record player--when we still had a record player and actually used it, back in the dark ages--the day after Thanksgiving while I deep-cleaned the living room in preparation for Christmas decorating.

2. I don't even know the name of this one, but it would be the CD version of the record from my mother's and aunt's childhood of Christmas selections, including such rarities as "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Mamba" (What's a Mamba?). We always played it during Christmas cookie bake, and when the LP itself became too scratched my aunt found the various recordings on other CDs to roughly recreate it.

3. The first volume of the Messiah (which I have lost this year! Alas! Alack!) Also: Important exception to the No Christmas Music Until After Thanksgiving Rule: The Messiah is OK any time of year, especially appropriate at Easter and during November while waiting for the rest of Christmas music to be available.

4. Good Christian Men Rejoice. I'm a sucker for men's chorales. (I confessed this after compelling DOB to confess he preferred women's groups.) Plus, my brother used to sing with this group, although he's not on this CD.

5. White Christmas. It's not Christmas for DOB and me without White Christmas, and it's not White Christmas without Bing. Although if we had a Dean Martin Christmas CD Bing might be out of luck.

6. OK, so far this post is practically an autobiography. And I'm not ready to fill slot number six yet. I still have room for another Christmas CD in my life.

Now I tag . . . anyone brave enough to list their favorite Christmas CDs.

Contemplating Vandalism

Fewer giant inflated structures seem to be around this year, for which we can all rejoice, whether it's because the fad is passing or because times are too tight to pay for the blowers. Passing a giant inflated Homer Simpson dressed as Santa really strained my belief in the Common Man.

However, this neighborhood sight has been distressing me for two years now. It's actually rather quaint and folksy and would be charming (and much better than inflated Homers) if it weren't for the eyes. Apparently it was designed by some basement recluse who had never looked a human being in the eyes and therefore envisioned pupils as tiny pinpricks. The result: Mary and Joseph the zombies.

A quick moment with a Sharpie marker ought to solve the problem, converting it into a charming bit of folk art. Would I be justified? Should I wait until the snow melts?

Seven Quick Takes Friday

1. I now have two mei tais, so I can go outside with both babies. The sequence of getting coats on, babies tied on, mittens and zippers on big kids (at some point when still able to bend over), and all fast enough so no one overheats in their coats (me particularly) is mind-boggling. I should have it figured out by spring.

I need a picture of it, but it's a little much to add to pull out a camera on top of everything.

2. DOB is afraid this will be misconstrued, so don't misconstrue it. We have not been sleeping well because of babies having colds. So one night this week we fell asleep with D3 still in bed with us. At about 3 in the morning we heard the familiar noise of someone wanting help on the potty. And experienced the unfamiliar sensation of being on the Wrong Sides of the bed, D3 still peacefully slumbering between us. Apparently we had decided to play Musical Chairs in our sleep because just lying still and resting was too dull.

3. Do you listen to Christmas music in foreign languages of unfamiliar tunes? I do (medieval Hungarian right now), but then I wonder why, because it doesn't sound very Christmasy. It does explain why I can continue to count Grunt as a Christmas CD. At least I can be assured the CD will not contain "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" or "The Little Drummer Boy."

4. We taught the kids to play Yahtzee last week and D2 got three yahtzees. He now has a warped view of the game.

5. The babies napped for an hour and a half yesterday morning. Today they napped for forty-five minutes. They are very cranky. They are also dancing around the edge of being able to make it to 8:00 without needing an evening nap, but they are not quite there so yesterday evening they were very, very, very cranky, too. Infancy is just one new problem after another, best enjoyed in retrospect or in other people's children.

That sounded terrible. Really, they're very sweet babies and I love having babies. Or at least that's what I remember when I don't have babies.

6. After a month or more of using the baking soda and vinegar regime instead of shampoo, it's 18 degrees outside and dry and my hair is not frizzing. This has never happened before. I'm impressed. How many things save you time, money, weird chemical exposure, and make your hair look better at the same time?

7. I'm trying to make my own sauerkraut. So far it doesn't smell, but it still has quite awhile to go. Supposedly the enzymes or what-not in the homemade, non-processed kind are very good for you and I actually like sauerkraut, so I figured it was worth a try.

More Quick Takes at Conversion Diary.

Photos Finished

I ordered prints of pictures this week. I do this once a year, so by the time it rolls around again I can't remember how I did it last year.

As far as I can figure out, to get prints from Target you have to sign up for Photobucket, and to get them from Meijer you have to sign up for Snapfish. Photobucket has better photoediting tools, but Meijer has cheaper prints. So I wound up uploading everything to Photobucket, editing it, copying it to the hard drive, uploading it to Snapfish, and ordering prints from Meijer. And being convinced there had to be an easier way to do it.

Any words of wisdom?

Meanwhile, while we're on the picture topic, here are some from the trip to the conservatory. We also have a membership at Imageshack now. Things are getting out of hand.

Some Links

Don't follow this one while hungry.

What personality type is your blog? This one came up as ESTP "the doers" and my other two as ESFP, "The Entertainers." (In real life, I'm an ENTP, whose nickname is more along the lines of, "The Endless Theorizers." "S" is the real world option, "N" is the abstract one. I have no "S.")

Comings and Goings

We didn't go to Tennessee after all (and no burglars stopped by, either). We had a Thanksgiving Chicken with DOB's mother and the few siblings who didn't go elsewhere. Very strange, but a nice, quiet day.

Since we didn't do a five hour drive on Wednesday, we decided to go to the local Conservatory instead. It had two key attractions: it was indoors, and it was free. When we arrived, we discovered a third attraction, a room dedicated to a large Christmas display, including a couple of trains. The indoor jungle was also quite intriguing to the ducklings.

The wedding all came off well, with the bonus for us of two extra lasagnas to take home. D1 and D2 like playing wedding, but they both want to be the bride. I can't blame them, as I think Army dress greens are one of the more boring uniforms in the history of warfare. (Don't shoot me, I have a brother AND a brother-in-law in the army. I just have my uniform aesthetics informed by comic opera.)

Happy First Day of Christmas Music!

It's an official holiday in my book.

Numbers Large and Round

Earlier this year I commented to DOB: "It seems like an awful lot of people are turning thirty this year."

"Well," he said, "Remember all those people who were twenty back when you were twenty? Guess what! Now they're turning thirty!"

Aging is the opposite of accidents. It never happens to other people. They remain pristinely the age they were when you first met them, which is why mothers are such an annoying species. You may be working on your second PhD, but to your mother you're still the child who refused to have anything to do with the potty until the age of five, and if you were so foolhardy as to introduce her to your faculty adviser she would undoubtedly repeat the tale to him.

But somehow ten years have passed and all those college students I used to know and used to be are real grown-ups now, not just pretending as we all were a decade ago. Jobs happened. Marriages. Children. Mortgages. Above all, Time. I find myself saying things like, "I haven't done that in twenty years" and stopping with horror to realize my memory goes back twenty years.

Articles promise me "Age-defying secrets for your skin at 30!" and "What not to wear after 30." (I checked my closet and I never had any of that stuff in the first place. I seem to have missed my frivolous youth and it's too late now.) On top of that still inescapable feeling that I brought the wrong body home from the hospital, this is not what I want to hear. La la la la la. La la. I don't need age-defying skin secrets, thankyouverymuch.

There's really nothing to complain about in being thirty. I don't feel old and creaky yet and I haven't found any gray hairs or wrinkles (though I haven't looked very closely, la la la). It's just so final. This is my last day to ever be in my twenties. Even thinking optimistically, a third of my life has passed.

To the people I see regularly, I'm the quintessential stay-at-home mom, unshakably responsible and with little time for anything but dishes and child care--but this is still such a small part of my own life, only one-sixth. In my head I'm just as irresponsible as ever, propelled by a kaleidoscope of ever changing new ideas and completely indifferent to when the dishes get done.

I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I still don't really know what I'm doing, but I've faked it for so long I'm beginning to fool myself. I still have a lot of dishes to wash today.

Morbid Math with D1

D1: I have twelve children now and I had two that died, so how many children did I have?

(I read on someone's blog the note that telling the Thanksgiving story in any form involves talking about a lot of death what with all those pilgrims dying the first winter. So, yes, we're discussing people getting sick and dying around here, too.)

Seven Quick Takes Friday

If you're writing a children's book, do NOT write it in rhyming couplets, unless your name is Dr. Seuss. Insipid prose is not improved by rhyming it. Children's minds are not improved by hearing doggerel. I should not be trying to read poems about disinfectant* with a straight face.

(A limerick about disinfectant, now . . . disinfectant, expectant, protectant . . . )

*It was an alphabet book about zoos, if you must know.

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I figured out what would make my days much easier. Just borrow someone else's 2-year-old for a few days. It would work on the same principle as bringing the cow inside for awhile, but I doubt anyone has a cow I could borrow.

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Also we don't have a video player and our tape player developed a taste for crinkled tape (and once they do that, you never can trust them again). But! I found this website, which has some excellent stories read aloud (and, very nicely, the text of each so I can preview to see if the kids would enjoy it). Google "free audio books kids" and there is a lot out there.

Except I billed it to D1 as a surprise and I think she was disappointed, hoping for something to eat or fight over. But when the first story ended she asked why we weren't listening to another one, so I expect she will develop a taste for them in time.

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We're having an early Thanksgiving for part of the family here tomorrow, driving five hours for another Thanksgiving next week (yes that's right! Five hours in the car with two children just barely potty-trained, and two who need to nurse every two hours),* and just found out that B5 is getting married next Saturday (date moved up for military paperwork reasons). After the next two weeks, just being stuck inside with the kids should seem like a piece of cake.

*Note to Thieves' Guild: We still don't have anything worth stealing (see above), so don't bother. There is this computer, but it's really old and doesn't have much resale value. We put all our money into children, and we're taking them with us.

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This is my first time to host Thanksgiving, or any Holiday Involving Turkey, and I should be past the new-bride stuff, but I did do a creditable job of boiling over the broth for the dressing all over my nice clean stove. I did not burn the carmelizing onions, though. The turkey is not thawed, despite being in the fridge since Tuesday. The pumpkin cheesecakes are done, but I'm very uneasy about the crust consistency.

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The advantage small children have in learning is not some more accelerated brain function, it's simply that they are not embarrassed by doing things badly for awhile. My Hebrew teacher used to say you have to become as a little child to learn a new language, but really you must become as a little child to learn anything new.

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Six again. The babies are fussing. I should be folding laundry and cleaning up that mess in the kitchen.

More Quick Takes at Conversion Diary.

D1 Discovers Philosophy

D1: Is the neighbor's house still there?

QOC: Um, yes, were you expecting it not to be?

D1 (covering her eyes with her fingers): No, I mean, is the neighbor's house still there when I'm not looking at it?

QOC: Well, I'm still looking at it.

Where Do You Get More Rope?

Rope, End of: Where I realized I was yesterday when the older ducklings were asking to use the markers and it was all I could do not to pick up the cup of markers and fling it out the window, followed by the ducklings. (The falling snow had not managed to construct drifts, so this would not have been good.)

It feels like lack of sleep, but it's not; at least, I'm sleeping better than I have in a year. (Which is still only about six hours, so perhaps it's just catching up with me.) Probably it's nothing more than cabin fever. I don't do well if I can't get fresh air every day, and bundling up all the kids to go outside has been too intimidating thus far. It's going to be a long, long winter.

Whatever the cause, the question at a moment like that is always what to do next before one winds up on the front page. People tell you to call them if they need help, but you know what this means: Oh dear, I'm terribly sorry, I'm busy today, but I could come by next Thursday. When what you need is some other person Right Now. By next Thursday--or even in the best case, by the time another person could drive over to your house--the crisis will be past.

What I did yesterday was shut the older ducklings in their room, leave the babies on the floor, and went outside to walk around the house several times. This helped enough that I was able to consider the possibility of tea as being a helpful beverage, so I came in and made some and we had a tea party with graham crackers even though it was almost lunch time.

I wish there was a truly happy ending with a nice moral to this story, but there isn't except that we all made it through the day intact. By naptime I was over the edge again. It was only green tea; perhaps more caffeine would help? I hate coffee and carbonated beverages, but I think I could learn to drink black tea. I'm a little concerned about its effect on the babies, though. DOB is also going to try to see that I can get a long walk at least three times a week.

Still, these moments happen. At least to me. Where do you go for more rope? Or am I the only one who suddenly finds themselves this far out of it?

Can you tell

It's the end of the photo shoot?

7 Quick Takes

I have now had a poison ivy rash somewhere on me for a full month. I'm trying to figure out where the new breakouts are coming from. Shoelaces seemed a possibility, but do I ever touch the inside of my elbow with my shoelaces? (Maybe fingers to elbow, then washing hands?) Perhaps DOB is right and I just have a new horrible skin disease.

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If you're not already addicted to the Year of Crockpotting blog, you really should check it out. Especially the yogurt recipe. I have always wanted to make my own yogurt and it is so. easy. I tried adding a cup of powdered milk this time, and it came out nice and thick.

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D2 on the swing: Push me higher! So I can be God!

QOC: What did you say?

D2: Um . . . push me higher so I can pretend to be God!

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I avoid controversial topics on my blog these days, not because I don't love an argument, but because I love them all too well and the last thing I need is a reason to lie awake at night thinking of brilliant rebuttals. Now I need to learn to avoid those discussions in forums, too. Because when you spend all day explaining basic safety and hygiene to preschoolers, it's just too much extra stress to try to explain basic human rights to someone who thinks the government should license parents. I suspect to some people "reproductive freedom" means only the freedom not to reproduce.

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Check out our cool puppets we made in our new basement project space!

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D4 can roll onto his stomach pretty easily now. He still has trouble remembering how to roll back, though, and then he gets annoyed. D3 puts her fingers in her mouth and looks at him as if to say: "Why not stay on your back if you like it better? Then you're better situated to attract the attention of all passers-by." Despite the extra movement and never seeming to stop long enough to eat, D4 has almost made up the weight gap.

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It's hard to come up with seven things. Actually it's hard to come up with any specified number. If it had been three, I would have been stuck at two.

But I was trying, because of this 7 Quick Takes linky at Conversion Diary. We'll call this number seven.

Advent Activities

One of my favorite childhood Christmas memories is the Advent box. Inside there was a box to open each day before Christmas; each box contained a small toy or object and a slip of paper with a related devotional. This is perfect for the preschool age, for whom the primary excitement about Christmas is the opening, regardless of what is inside. Around here, the grownups are very, very tired by bedtime and for anything beyond teeth-brushing and pajamas to happen, the energy has to come from the kids.

I don't know where my mother got the original idea--out of some Christian magazine, I presume. Over time I decided I disliked the specific devotionals we used, as they had no coherent organizing principle. I hate random sequences of Nice Thoughts, which is why I never read devotional books. But I loved the excitement of the new box to open every night.

So I wrote my own, naturally. Mine is organized by first going through key Old Testament stories chronologically, bringing out the portion that foreshadows Christ. Then it looks at specific prophecies, and in the final week before Christmas reads through the Christmas story in short sections. To make it even easier to get through on the spot, I even copied in most of the scriptures. (Although they're in KJV because we like the way it sounds read aloud, but others might prefer a more modern translation.)

We did this first two years ago, but I didn't have it all prepared in advance and didn't have enough small boxes, so I sort of recycled the boxes through and they never got the excitement of seeing the Whole Thing together at once. It wasn't prepared enough to use at all last year. This year I'm down to locating two more objects into boxes and we're done, and then it should be easy to use for all subsequent years. Little jewelry and chocolate boxes are the best, as they look decorative without needing to be wrapped. If you wrap the whole big box in pretty paper, it can sit under the tree and look festive and stay handy all month long.

For those with older children, Mama Squirrel has put up a very intriguing looking Advent Calendar using Advent as a time of spiritual preparation.

A Thanksgiving Moment

D2: I am glad for everything God gives us, except potatoes.

Cheap Thrills

I'm trying out this using baking soda to wash your hair idea that's going around. Supposedly it takes your hair awhile to get used to not using shampoo, but mine looks normal so far (i.e. sticking out every which way, but that's my hair). It certainly feels clean.

I'm a little disconcerted by all these possible uses for baking soda, though. Is it really appropriate to use the same substance to wash your hair, brush your teeth, scrub the sink, deodorize your fridge, and bake your biscuits? What if it turns on us? Will we fall under the control of Big Soda?

The babies have also been wearing cloth diapers for a few weeks now, at least during the day. Fortunately, the existing stock of diapers is quite adequate to last them both two days, which is about time to run a load anyway. I calculate on the most expensive possible wash and dry, it could cost $1 to run a load of diapers, whereas it would cost $4 to keep both babies in the cheapest disposables for that amount of time. Since I didn't have to buy any new diapers, that's $1.50 a day I make by running one extra load of laundry every other day instead of taking out the trash. And no more blowouts! I'd much rather wash a load of diapers than agonize over another ruined t-shirt. (So we can add savings on stain remover, too.)

A friend from church volunteered to come over and help, specifying that she didn't like to cook, but did like to clean and organize. No problem there, cooking happens anyway and cleaning doesn't. So with her help we tackled the basement to make a play/project area for the kids. I really have a ton of activities for them to do, but they're usually stored somewhere inaccessible and stymied by the need to clear the dining room table first, and then clear it again before lunch.

Hopefully now that the paint is set up right next to the basement sink it can become a more regular event.

Over the Line

One of the things all the How To Raise Twins books agree on is that you must never, never, never call your children "the twins." No. That's bad. Use their names. They're individuals.

The How To Raise Twins books writers obviously only had twins. Everyone with more than three children has collective names for groups of children. This is partly because it's quicker and partly because they can no longer remember all the names. Nonetheless, few children from large families suffer from having their individuality stifled. Parents of large families don't have the time.

Right now we can use "the babies" and then in a year or two the "little kids" versus the "big kids," but sooner or later they will refuse to be the little kids anymore and then where will we be when deciding which parent goes through the museum with the fifth grade or the second grade class? Maybe we should allow them to choose team names instead.

I don't think we're quite in big family territory yet--I think the cutoff is five--but as I was sorting laundry today I realized I'd passed another marker: having to pay attention when sorting laundry. Now that the weather has cooled down and the babies are dressed in more garments than a t-shirt that snaps underneath, I actually have to give a glance to the size of the blue jeans and pink leggings to be sure which pile they go in. In a few months, I'll have to check the tag.

It's really alarming how fast babies grow. They are now collectively as heavy as D2. Which means I've been lying to him when I said I wasn't strong enough to carry him any more. I hope he doesn't realize this. Or ask me again.

These Things are Good Things

They have come here to play.

They will give you some fun on this wet, wet, wet, day.

Or whatever kind of weather you're having . . . actually it's dry and warm here.

D1 and D2's costumes are confusing to illiterate people, but true Cat in the Hat afficionados will recognize them.

I am the mother, of course.

By the way, D3 and D4 do look awfully alike in these shirts. We had to switch D4 to a two-pom-pom hat so we could tell which baby we were holding at a glance.

Things You Can Learn from YouTube

A couple of months ago DOB determined that his ankles had reached the point that riding an exercise bike was no longer possible. This meant it was time to bite the bullet and get a gym membership so he could swim. (Without some form of aerobic exercise his general health deteriorates very quickly.)

There was one problem with this: He didn't know how to swim. In fact, up until a few years ago, he didn't even have enough non-bone-mass in his body to float. Several years of diligent feeding on my part have helped him somewhat, but it's still not easy. And the gym doesn't offer lessons.

This, of course, is no barrier to DOB if he has it in mind to do something. We hunted up some YouTube videos and a Dorling Kindersley book. (You can find those on any topic.) The YouTube videos were not entirely clear, though--one had good photo quality but all the instructions were in Japanese, another one was evidently done in someone's backyard by a bunch of junior highers. And books don't make motion clear.

The library has some videos of a college swim coach giving instructions; the video quality is terrible but the swimming instruction is pretty clear. So with these and a lot of experimentation, he is finally able to move forward. Literally.

I've been trying to figure out something from online videos, too: how to wear a baby on my back. There's usually a couple of fifteen-minute segments in a day where one baby is happy sleeping, playing on the floor, or being held by someone else, but the other baby is antsy though not currently in need of food. If I can get them up on my back quickly, I can use those fifteen minutes to make some serious progress in the dishes/meals/laundry departments.

After not making progress for some time, I asked for a demonstration from the Nigerian lady at church. She grabbed the handiest baby and a blanket off the nursery floor and had him on her back in no time, the blanket tucked in casually in front. "Now you're ready to go search for water!" she said. (Actually she now works to dig wells so that Nigerian women don't have to walk miles to search for water.) I could see that my problem was not so much a lack of theoretical knowledge or proper materials as a lack of having done this regularly since the age of ten.

But with a little practice and finally finding a video of a method that seems to be within my mechanical abilities, I'm finally making it work.

And the ducklings should not have any difficulty when they have kids. They already have it down with any handy blanket:

Updated to add: I hope an old post is OK to enter the Adventures in Babywearing drawing for the Noony & Boo sling. This picture is just too perfect!

Wearable Blankets

When our thermometer suddenly jumped into the fall zone, I realized the babies did not have warm enough sleeping arrangements. Tucking in a blanket was not going to work with two in the bed. They make these, of course, but I wasn't about to spend $40 on those when I can hardly take a step without tripping on a pile of blankets. (We used to go to a church where all the old ladies crocheted. D1 received a lot of blankets. And then D2 got some more. Mostly they have been used for dress-up.)

Instead, I figured out how to convert two of their existing blankets and some fleece scraps into homemade sleep sacks. Deducting the time for figuring out what I was doing, hunting up thread, oiling the sewing machine (which hadn't been done in years and I hope machine oil is all the same because all I could find was the oil for the hair clippers), and making mistakes, it's probably about a ten minute project.

Materials:
One 36" square double-thickness cotton knit blanket
Two lengths of fleece, about 3" by 7". Make sure these are cut along the length of the fleece, so that the stretch is sideways--otherwise they'll stretch out of shape before you've got them on the baby. You might want to experiment to see how snug you want them to be.

Instructions:
Fold the blanket in half, right side out. Pin the right side of the fleece scraps to the wrong side of the blanket to form shoulder straps. Sew.

Turn the blanket inside out, and sew just up the side. The blanket is long enough and snug enough that they aren't able to kick out of it. (And D4 tries, oh, he tries.) But with the bottom open, you can slide it up to change the diaper if needed in the night.

To put it on the baby, just slide the baby in the top and slip the shoulder straps over their arms.

I put a zipper in the first model, and quickly realized it was completely unnecessary. If you do want a zipper, put the shoulder straps on either side of it so that it's down the middle where it might actually help.

We've been using these the rest of the week, and the babies have stayed nice and warm and sleepy.

Random Pictures and Quotes

This is D2's first piano recital. I didn't know he knew how to play, but at a Suzuki recital I'm not sure you need to know anything more than how to bow. D1 has been going to them for a couple of years and you can see she has the bounce down. I'm still meaning to get to one someday . . . right now they go with Grandma and sometimes Papa.


D1 said on the way to church the other morning, "Today we are going to be very have in church."

We started Little House in the Big Woods last week and D1 and D2 were inspired to go chop down all the trees in our neighborhood.

D3 would like people to note that she can roll over, too, she just doesn't like to do it very often.

We are getting to wear those long-sleeved outfits after all. It was a high of 80 a week ago, a high of 57 today.

Planning

Ever had the sort of a day where you have fifteen things to do involving five different people and/or locations and some things have to happen before other things and some things take a long time to do and some are more important and you can't figure out which to start first? (For me, that's a trip to the back yard. Or fixing supper.)

Mathematicians have devoted some thought to this kind of a problem, asking, Is there a quick way to figure out the best way to arrange the tasks? For example, what if you always did the most important job first, or the one that took the longest, or the one with the most other things dependent on it?

So far, the answer has been there is no easy way to find the plan that will get you through all the tasks in the most efficient way. (And that's without adding the random-stinky-diaper variable.) You could, of course, write down all the different ways to do the jobs and then pick out which one worked the best, but that's not very fast.

Until the mathematicians figure it out, the moral is that it's probably faster to just start working on things in an inefficient order and get it done rather than sitting around pondering what order to do it in. Otherwise you'll end up like this.

Just what I need

Another blog! And a big new project! I can't help myself. I like big new projects. And new blogs.

Anyway, the time seems to have come to start taking seriously the prospect of growing food in our backyard. It saves money. It's educational. It gives us all something to do outside. It's fun. My Garden Grows will document our garden plans, problems, and produce, along with efforts to identify the plants in our backyard, book reviews of garden-related books, and whatever else seems to fit.

By the way, I'm getting addicted to Wordpress as a blog host. Who knew you could do all that stuff so easily? I hate changing addresses, though. Sigh.

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 . . .