Lessons Learned

1. When you are having a good day at home, don't mess with it by going out. Even if you told your friends and spouse you'd go, they aren't the ones who have to actually do so, or deal with the consequences.

2. Pouring rain will not make the going out process any easier. You will only end up being somewhere that you didn't really want to be while wearing wet pants and sporting an unstylish mop-like hairdo.

3. Being late will not make the going out process any easier. You will only end up late, feeling awkwardly ready to chow down while everyone else is already on dessert.

4. The promise of good food will not change the fact that you are wet and late. It will only make the hunger more gnawing.

5. Public potties are scary to a two-year-old who has just learned to use them. The fear combines with the need to pee to create a plaintive, pitiful cry.

6. I am hard-wired not to tolerate plaintive, pitiful cries.

7. When I am wet, late, hungry, and intolerant, I do not like to add marching back and forth to the bathroom with the plaintive, pitiful child. This makes me embarrassed, stressed, and irritable, none of which contributes to the calming of said child.

8. When I am wet, late, intolerant, hungry, embarrassed, stressed, and irritable, I cannot hold a conversation with my friends, no matter how much I would like to think I can. Superwoman's job belongs to someone else.

9. Babies need naps. Babies who have not napped do not sit happily in the car seats while their mothers are marching their siblings back and forth to the bathroom. Who knew?

10. I can eat a lot of food in a very short period of time. I can also come up with a lot of ways to spend ten dollars other than on food that I have to eat in 30 seconds while standing.

11. A whole lot can happen in 40 minutes.

12. A whole lot can be improved by giving up and going home to dry clothes, home potties, and an afternoon nap. Dorothy had it right all along: there's no place like home.

Thinking Positively

Up: We were finally getting our shower fixed.

Down: I had to cancel our outdoor class and stay home with the kids to do so.

Up: The plumber is running late, so we can have lunch with Daddy instead.

Down: We will now having to stay home in the afternoon after staying home all morning.

Up: The plumber arrives during an unusually long nap time, so no screaming children to wrangle.

Down: The plumber cannot fix the shower because we have the wrong valve. Now we will have to stay home for the rest of the day, courtesy of the unusually long nap time, and another day as well. And the shower is still not fixed.

Up: No one was injured in the course of these events.

We have both liftoff and landing

I set K down on a blanket yesterday and right before my very astonished eyes she wiggled herself onto her knees. Over the course of our play date, she pushed herself up, back, and around, and even did a few impressive push-ups. She really is growing up too fast. Stop please, someone, anyone...

Oh, and landing too. Poops. Whoa poops. Not only am I calling M officially poop-trained, I also have to brag just a bit. He counts them as them come out. Three whoa poops. One little poop. So on and so forth. Makes potty training just a little more fun.

Foot follies

As I'm sure many other parents do, I have a habit of playing with K's feet. They're cute, soft, and convenient for hiding behind, tickling, and generally making merry. They're also stinky. Very stinky. They have this stinky little baby feet smell like they've been doing some lightweight exercise, which in her case can only involve kicking around on the ground. I make jokes about them, but really, how in the world can a little baby have such genuinely stinky feet?

Here's the kicker. I can't stop smelling them. Every morning, I check. We laugh. I smell again, astonished. We laugh some more. I've gone over the edge, at last.

Interpretations welcome

Last night I dreamt that I went over to my parents' apartment. They don't have an apartment in real life. They have a nice, big house where I grew up. But in this dream, they had an apartment to which I went for dinner. I left the kids at my apartment. I don't have an apartment either. I have a nice, small house where I live with my husband. But in this dream, I had an apartment too, just me and the kids. I left my apartment for their apartment, desperate to get away for a little while. Once I was there, I assured my parents that I had just had to get out and that I had left the kids in a safe place. Only when I started to think about it, I couldn't quite be sure that I had actually left them in a safe place. It seemed like I had left K on the floor, which, considering her new found skills in rolling, pushing, and otherwise moving about, is most certainly not a safe place. When I really focused, I finally remembered that yes, I had put both kids in their cribs. Only I had put M in a crib that was very high and easy to jump or fall from. For a toddler, this is even worse than the floor. Well, it's at least as bad.

I went home to take care of the kids, feeling guilty. I tried to stay focused. Time passed. I went to get K up from a different nap. When I went into my room, which was where the crib was, at least in the dream, I found the TV on. How strange, I thought, until I realized that K was chewing on the remote. On the bed. Inches from the edge. I'd apparently left her there to nap instead of putting her in a crib.

That was my dream last night. Think maybe I'm feeling a little anxious? Distracted? Both? I'd try to figure it out, but my mind is obviously overtaxed as it is.

Dang

Me: It can't be normal to be this tired.
B: Oh yes it can.

I was so hoping there was another explanation. This whole tired conversation has replaced our previous conversations from before we had kids, where I would talk about how stressed I was and how things would go back to normal when [blank] was over. Only then there would be something else. And then something else. I finally realized that maybe my "normal" was stressed. Now I've traded stressed for tired. If only I could find a way to trade tired for fabulously beautiful and wealthy. If only...

Speaking of time

Minutes spent gathering laundry: 32
Beds changed: 4
Towels collected: 9
Hampers emptied: 3
Actually loads of laundry started: 0

Am I the only one who feels like clothes should be disposable?

Brilliant observation, Sherlock

So last night I was awake, again, despite the fact that my sleep over the past week has been broken, patchy, and otherwise nonexistent. I couldn't stop mulling over the events of the past week. See, in a less-abbreviated explanation, I was away visiting family who had come from overseas. This wasn't just any family, but my sister and her boys. We see each other once every year or two, and considering that I admire her enough to have named my daughter after her, you'd think this would have been a week to remember. Well, it was, but certainly not for the reasons that I'd expected. Between all the sickness, tension, whining kids, and space issues, it seemed like the week just fell apart at the seams.

Anyway, I'm mulling this over last night, unable to let it go, grasping for any way to make sense of my growing discontent. Then it hits me, the answer I was searching for:

Time sucks.

I know--how obvious. But it really ended up being the only satisfying answer I could settle on. I even came up with reasons. See:

1) Time is completely unforgiving. If you mess something up--say, the greeting of an old friend, or the famous first impression--there's no way to go back and fix it, regardless of how perfectly you can re-envision the event. If you're like me, you're constantly returning to moments in the futile attempt to have a do-over in your head. This is pointless, of course. Time doesn't do do-overs.

2) Time goes too fast. Everyone knows this. Beautiful days slip away. Vacations always seem three days shorter than they were supposed to be. Lists of household chores and plans for family get-togethers get no further than item 1 or 2 before you realize that the time allotted has too quickly passed you by.

3) Time goes too slow. Wait--what a conundrum! But it's true. Afternoons without a nap, a week with a baby in the NICU, the dreaded middle of the night feeding--these moments creep along as though each second is subdividing a la the magician's apprentice. As quickly as good moments pass, bad moments seem to drag endlessly.

4) The present is hardly ever present. Despite constant chiding to "enjoy the present," this is nearly impossible. The present, that magical moment of totally aware existence, almost always seems lost under the shuffle of dinner, diapers, spilled milk, crying babies, laundry to be changed, etc. I live constantly in the present without really experiencing the present. I'm too busy experiencing all those things that happen in the present. This is not the same thing.

So time sucks. There's too much or not enough. There's no going back, and no going forward. There's no just being. Realizing this actually helped me go back to sleep. It's not me! There's nothing I can do! I'm a victim! Okay, there are lots of things I can do, but who's got time for that?

On a related note, it made me think about heaven in a slightly different manner. I have always imagined that time does not exist in heaven. Previously I interpreted this to simply mean that time just went on forever. Truly, though, if time doesn't exist, then we can do all the things that we can't here. I can redo a moment a thousand times until it's just perfect. I can skip over those doldrum days to relive endlessly those days I would like to keep forever: that day at the fair when I was 16 and in love, the birth of my children, our first family vacation. Talk about heaven.

Excuses, abbreviated

In no particular order:

1. Smoke, ash, and other fire related misery
2. Asthma
3. Sleep deprivation
4. Stomach flu
5. Family
6. Halloween
7. Traveling
8. Fever
9. Laundry
10. Weather

That's why it's been so long since my last post. Nuff said.