That's BAgina to you, buddy

Oliver has been really into taking photographs lately. Recently, while at Yosemite, the Mister and I asked him to take one of us with a view of the valley behind.

He snapped this:

Then looked at it and said, "I tried to get you both, but I only got mom's vagina." And that, my dear readers, is the danger of teaching your kids anatomical terms.

Where I answer nearly all your questions and survive house guests

A couple of things:

I am not dead. I am blogging for Baby Center four times a week and getting ready to take a red-eye to the east coast for a little family vacation. And those two things, along with the twins, are about all I can handle. More than I can handle, actually, if today's parenting techniques (mostly yelling with the occasional vacant stare into space) are any indication.

Oh, plus we had house guests. I forgot about the house guests.

I promised I would link to my Baby Center posts and so here I go. You can gorge yourself. You can live vicariously through me for hundreds and hundreds of words. Or you can buy things. Every Friday I write about cute things on Etsy. Your choice.

Read about:

My kids being total jerks in public

Why I was a jerk to the Mister (hint: I had a good reason)

How I keep from turning into the Wicked Witch of the West

All the other stuff I write about is here.

Feel free to write comments over there. It makes me look good.

Oh, and wish me luck on that red-eye. Maggie has a cold and I have a bad attitude, so it's not looking good. But we will discuss later. At length.

It pays to sit around in your underwear blogging

The last time we met, my family and I were about to go camping and I promised some exciting news upon my return. Well, I'm back.

And here's the news: I am now a blogger for Baby Center's Momformation channel (just between us, I think "Momformation" is kind of a lame name, but the site is great). I get to do exactly what I do here, there. And they pay me for it. Which is more than I can say for you people.

I'll be there four times a week. On Fridays I'll pick some things out on Etsy and encourage you to buy them. The rest of the time I'll just be rambling on about me and my kids. But in a funny and erudite way.

I do hope you'll join me. Really. I'll even post links to all my posts there, here.

And I'll still be posting here sometimes so you should be sure to check back. We can talk about all the things we can't talk about with them. We can bitch about working for the man.

Oh, and about that camping trip. You can read all about it here. And no, the nail scissors didn't turn out to be necessary, but boy was I happy to have the alarm clock/ipod dock.

The pediatric ward hosts a feminist princess party

I don't know that I've ever been so happy to see my funky little house, bread crumbs on the floor and all. Oh joy, hallway rug that slips and burbles. Oh joy, broken soap dispenser and crowded bathroom sink. Helloo, paint-warped kitchen cabinets that won't quite close, come to mama!

We are home! Maggie, despite still looking pale as a Victorian orphan, is healthy and happy and catching up on her sleep and fresh fruit. Hurray! As grateful as I am for the wonderful care she received in the hospital, that place sort of sucked.

Maggie summed it up best in her thank you card to the staff: "the worst part was the needle. The best part was the playroom."

Below is a sample of how I managed to entertain myself in said playroom. Upon seeing my handiwork, the Mister said: "you really need to get out of here." Duh.

I am also, in my way, grateful for Joan Rivers

I, like Joan Rivers (have you seen the documentary? It's surprisingly good), believe there is humor to be found in absolutely everything. Your husband committed suicide (as Joan's did)? There's a zinger in there somewhere. Lost your job? That one's just easy. Teenager's a drug addict? A veritable gold mine of jokes. It's been said a million times, but seriously, if we can't laugh, where are we?

Except now I can't laugh. I am sitting in a dark hospital room watching the mesmerizing blinking of my daughter's heart machine while she tries to sleep tangled in the various cords and wires coming off her body. Before you get too worried: she's fine. They are figuring it out. We should be going home with our rapidly growing collection of My Little Pony stickers very soon and that pale, feverish girl with the dark circles under her eyes that they've swapped for my daughter, will go back from whence she came and my vibrant girl shall make her triumphant return. Possibly even tomorrow.

So it's not worry that makes this unfunny. I am surprisingly calm and unflapped about all the poking and pricking and monitoring she's been through in the last 24 hours. It is a feeling of intense gratitude that makes this all so seriously unfunny. I am thankful for everything right now. I'm positively gooey with it.

For medical insurance for one. For pediatric nurses who stand in a line as you enter the ward for the first time and greet your child by name as if they have been waiting all day just for a glimpse of her. For Japanese restaurants that deliver to the seventh floor of the hospital. For handsome Korean orderlies who push you and your daughter around the hospital in a wheelchair. For toy rooms with baby dolls and volunteers who read books. For doctors who introduce themselves using their first names and then take such detailed medical histories you feels as if they really, really care about figuring this out. I'm thankful for ibuprofen and antibiotics and in-room DVD players.

But mostly, of course, I am so thankful to have kids who are not chronically or critically ill. I am awed and bowled over by the good fortune that is good health. Every time I think about riffing on this hospital experience (and it's ripe with cute ice cream jokes and "buh-gina" references, let me tell you), I think about parents who have to spend a lot of time in the hospital with their children and I am snapped right back onto the straight and narrow. Because that, my friends, is suffering. And if you are not suffering in that particular way, you have much to be thankful for. And that's what I'm left with: one giant thank you, thank you, thank you Buh-Jeezus!

Why can't I be more like Angelina Jolie?

My kids are never sick (knock on wood, throw salt and turn around three times). Except for now. Maggie has been home with a fever all week, poor thing.

What this means, in addition to way too much screen time, multiple readings of Rainbow Fish, and yogurt for breakfast, lunch and dinner, is that I have been home all week with a sick child. Seriously, I didn't leave the house for two days. Not once. No fresh air. No clean underwear.*

Then, on the third day, I got to go to the corner grocer for some supplies and witness the astounding miracle of real adult humans moving about in public. The next day, still high on my recent exposure to the outside world, I also got a haircut and took my kids to see Toy Story 3. I paid dearly for it with much feverish whining and a serious case of popcorn bloat (me, not them).

All this is not so bad.

What's bad is when, on the fourth day, your completely delightful old friend from college comes to visit for the first time since the kids were born and you suddenly see your life in stark contrast to what could have been.

1991.

That's her on the far left. That's me, wearing pajama bottoms and pearls.

Her: Saving the world by doing important global peace-building projects with the U.N and other impressive NGOs.

Me: Trying to remember when I last administered the Children's Tylenol.

Her: Cocoa-colored linen suit with adorable flats.

Me: Ripped jeans, dirty underwear, clogs.

Her: Teaching at Columbia's graduate program in International Studies.

Me: Trying to teach my children to wipe their own butts.

Her: Hobnobbing with the rich, influential and powerful.

Me: Hobnobbing with two four-year-olds and the occasional corner grocer.

Her: Mother of one super-genius, chess-playing 7-year-old.

Me: Mother of four-year-old twins who try to impress guests by toppling the coffee table and throwing pirate hooks in the air.

I think you get the idea.

And I know that here I am supposed to write something about how worthwhile it all is and how I wouldn't trade anything for anything. But that's not true. I would trade being an unemployed stay-at-home mom (not the kids themselves, mind you; them, I like) for a career that required me to travel all over the world doing good work in a second. At this point I think I would trade it for a career that required me to get dressed in the morning and travel to downtown San Francisco.

All of which is to say that, when the time comes, I'm going to strongly suggest that my children don't major in English. Cause it's too late for me.

* having a sick kid does not preclude changing ones underwear, but really, why bother?

If mom folds five loads of laundry, goes grocery shopping, washes dishes, and bathes the children and nobody is there to see it, did it really happen?

Before we get started you should know that the Mister is out of town for a week and I am not at my best. This was my bedtime conversation with Oliver, who is very upset, missing his dad, and having trouble falling asleep.

Oliver:

It's just hard because dad makes all the fun and you just do, like, some things in the house and like, you're kind of boring because you're writer and all you ever do it write books and stuff.

Me:

pretending to be very neutral participant in this conversation

I play sometimes. I just have a lot to do.

Oliver:

I guess sometimes you're not blogging. But dad plays games and plays, like, the matching game and builds towers. But its hard to have two kids because we're always like, "Mommy do this, mommy do this."

Me:

It is hard, but it's great too. I love having two kids.

Oliver:

Well, I just wish you weren't so boring. It's hard.

The conversation continued in this vein for quite a while until I sang one last song and insisted he go to sleep.

Obviously I am horrified in about 27 different ways, not the least of which is because I spend so much of that time when I am ignoring my kids and supposedly writing books lurking on Facebook and trying to find the perfect pair of pumps online (they have a square heel and a square toe).

I am bothered too because this is the beginning of that age-old pattern of fun dad/task-master mom. He plays airplane, I insist on hair-combing. He builds towers, I limit the cookie intake and remind them to say "thank you."

I am chagrined by the sudden knowledge that my kids have heard me bitch about motherhood. At some point Oliver learned that I think having two kids is hard and that is not something he should really have to take on at the moment.

Mostly I am bothered because he's right. I am not a great player. I am sort of grouchy and boring. I'm distracted. I put them off. When given the choice, I almost always choose making dinner over playing with the kids while the Mister makes dinner.

I am often exhausted by simply maintaining basic order and getting everyone out of the house on time (for the record I don't even care if the shoes are on the wrong feet or if the outfits make a bit of sense), but also, I find playing boring.

Go Fish, restaurant, family, pirates—these are all games I am often asked to participate in. Sometimes simultaneously. And I do. For about five minutes. Then I notice that the floor needs sweeping or I feel like checking my email or I just zone out and forget to call Oliver "matey." I adore my kids ferociously but in all honesty, I prefer the company of adults.

Which was all fine and good before my kids got smart and perceptive and developed the power of speech. Now I can't ignore them and pretend they don't notice. They tell me. They think I am boring. They've caught on.

Martha Stewart is the devil on my shoulder

A few days ago, as I was artfully sticking my homemade "Please take me home" stickers on the gift bags I put together for my children's fourth birthday party, I had a familiar feeling. I was sort of enjoying myself, getting a certain satisfaction from the Martha-like perfection of the goodie bags, but underneath lurked a simmering resentment and impatience, a little throb telling me that my cutsie-pootsie project might not be the best use of my time.

As I stuck the stickers I started to suspect that such things, these bourgeois arts so trumpeted by women's magazines and Martha Stewart and a thousand design blogs, were just a giant diversion of creative energy. I imagine that no great artist, and certainly no one who has ever really changed the course of the world for the better, has expended much time or effort into making perfect goodie bags, or butterfly cakes, or wallpaper-covered file folders.

I'm all for an uplifted environment, by which I mean that I appreciate design and believe aesthetics make a difference (you should see my new faux bois rug--OMG). I get as much pleasure from a piece of beautiful Indian craft paper as the next girl. I adore a nice leisurely stroll through Design Within Reach or Etsy or Ikea. I even sort of like Real Simple.

I must admit, I'm sort of proud of my butterfly cake

But I also notice that men make and get credit for most of the "great art" of the world. Ditto on great scientific discoveries, adventures, environmental milestones, and feats of engineering. Meanwhile, women are encouraged to make the world a little cuter one scrapbook at a time. (Again, I appreciate a good scrapbook, but they are not the building blocks of a greater civilization, as least not as we currently view it.)

And the spaceship cake.

Of course not all of us were meant to design bridges or write the Great American Novel or become the next Beethoven. Most of us were meant to live decidedly less dramatic marks. And there is something to be said for doing something out of love, without regard for the praise or attention it might garner. All this magazine-style cuteness—wrapping forty presents, or making a spaceship cake, or laboriously calligraphing the place cards—might all be seen as acts of love. There is nothing wrong in wanting to delight someone else with a small effort toward beauty.

Still, I wonder. All this presentation is so fleeting and so fickle. Today's gorgeous cupcake tower will most likely be tomorrow's pineapple candle salad. Adorable goodie bags get torn open and disposed of with barely a glance. Spaceship cakes take 4 hours to make and ten minutes to eat.

I think of it this way: there are a million aspiring novelist in the country and I bet none of the male ones spend hours of their precious writing time making delightful goodie bags for four-year-olds.

Then again, I don't watch sports on TV, so maybe we come out equal.

P.S. The party was a complete success and much fun was had.

Why not just practice the rhythm method and see what happens?

from here

A lot of my friends are currently trying to decide whether or not to have a second baby. Actually, they are writhing in a sort of tortured late '30s angst trying to decide whether to have a second baby.

I get it. Here you are, you've got your mate and your career and your one completely, ridiculously doted upon offspring. You still get to go out with the girls every now and again. You're having sex once or twice a week. Your body is more or less back where it belongs. You've got it worked out. Why mess it up?

It's not a bad question to ask yourself. But I find that I have little patience for the dithering. Maybe because giving birth to twins knocked me off my axis so profoundly that I never really got to the part where I felt like I had it all worked out. Maybe because I'm jealous.

I imagine life with one baby as a kind of gauzy, pink-tinged Gerber commercial in which you have hours a day in which you are required to do nothing more than suck on perfect little infant toes. If I only had one baby, I tell myself, I would never lose my temper, or yell, or say things like, "when you learn to cook your own dinner, you can start complaining about the food" to three-year-old children.

I suppose what I am saying is, I am not the person to ask when you are considering having a second child. I always knew I wanted two children. I was wholeheartedly committed to the idea of two from the beginning. But that's not why I am not the person to ask.

I am not the person to ask because there are many times when I want to grab my friends by the shoulders and shout, "Don't do it." I want to tell them that it will indeed mess everything up in all the ways they suspect. I want to warn them about never really being able to enjoy a lazy Sunday, or eat an uninterrupted meal, or have twice weekly sex again. I want to tell them about that weird shrewish voice that will come out of their mouths when their children are bickering, and how the idea of going out to a restaurant with the whole family will seem like an impossible dream.

Half the time.

The other half of the time I want to tell them to quit their hand wringing and get knocked up already. Join me in my messy, wonderful suffering. Enlarge your heart. Join the human family. Get in here and root around a little.

Mostly I don't say any of it. Mostly I shrug and say I don't know. Because, of course, I don't. If you are waiting for the right answer, forget it. There is no right answer.

I am of the best-guess-and-no-guarantees school of decision making. Go with your gut and hope it works out. That's how I approached my marriage and my career and the decision to become a parent in the first place.

And really, the big decisions are just a mixed-bag of emotions anyway— moments of despairing defeat and moments of profound and blissful joy. And in between lots and lots of moments of folding the laundry or watching crap TV or running out to the all-night Safeway to buy milk. Sometimes you are the luckiest girl in the world, and sometimes you look over and think, "This? Really?" And there's probably nothing more we can ask for.

Icarus melts into a puddle of snot

*

So, one day you are bragging to the Mister about how lucky you are, and about how it's not just luck, but probably a form of super-humanness that has kept you from being sick all winter even though you spend two days a week working at your kids' preschool.

You muse about your superior cells and how you are being justly rewarded for living so well, for exercising so diligently, for simply being a really great addition to the human race. God is just sending you a personal little thank you note in the form of your virus-free season.

And then—BAM—the next day you are flat on your back, whimpering, ready to barter all future happiness for some medicine that will make the pain and the snot and the misery go away. You're thinking Oxycontin might be strong enough. You toss and moan through fever-dreams of Wurdle. You watch Papillon through blood-shot eyes and think solitary confinement, sure, but could Steve McQueen survive this cold? You fill trash can with your snotty tissues and miss your family trip to Tahoe.

You have this conversation with your three-year-old son:

OLIVER:

Mommy, I don't want you to die.

ME:

(looking up from my spot on the couch, crusty but somehow lovely)

Don't worry, I'm not going to die.

OLIVER:

Never?

ME:

No, never (no need to worry him now)

OLIVER:

Good. Because I think you are fantastic.

And then you emerge to blog another day. Your nose is scaly and your cough still gurgling, but you emerge from your cocoon of self pity. And thankfully, there are chai lattes and that weird kale and peanut butter soup the Mister made to ease your way.

Hello, world. It's nice to see you again.

* buy those pretty tissue box covers HERE.

She can do it!

Maggie has been working on this for months, years really. And now she can cross the monkey bars all by herself, just like a real girl. Oh the years of competition and broken arms we have ahead of us. The lying flat on her back in the tan bark, unable to catch her breath.

I am so proud. But she is really the proud one. When she hops off at the end of those five bars, her pink smiling cheeks glow like the skin of a bubble gum bubble.

Oh, Mags. You break my heart a thousand different ways.

Airhead

It's been an age. Thanksgiving came and went and I didn't even get to do one of those "what I am grateful for" posts.

Instead I cut both kids hair (an epic battle never to be repeated), wrote a "family beach towns" article for a travel magazine, ate oysters at Tomales Bay Oyster Company (Number 18. Check) and tried to make peace with my mind, which jumps around like a panicked squirrel these days, unable to focus on anything before darting off all wild eyed and nervous to store some nuts.

It's like this: I will think of something I want to tell the mister and by the time I get into the room where he is, like, say 1.4 seconds later, I've not only forgotten what it was I wanted to tell him, but I've completely forgotten I planned on saying anything at all. So then I start sorting clothes until the cookies catch my eye. Then I eat cookies until I realize the phone receiver should really be cleaned out with a toothpick. Then I clean the phone receiver until I remember that I haven't seen my red scarf in a while. Then I go looking for my red scarf....

You get the picture.

This is disturbing for three reasons:

1. I am too young to be losing my mind

2. I never really get anything done

3. I sound like Erma Bombeck (next I am going to be telling menopause jokes and elbow waddle anecdotes)

Only part of it can be attributed to overload. Yes, I have a lot of stuff stored in there (how many calories in and egg? 90. Annie Lamott's first book? Hard Laughter. Best coconut rice in San Francisco? Mandalay. Renegade Craft Fair? December 19. ) And my mental to do list is like a flotilla of random and unrelated flotsam and jetsam, but lots of people have a lot on their minds and manage to remember their thoughts for more than a fleeting second. But I...I, um, yeah...

Smashing things is anger management too

He will crush you

I just took an online parenting survey to help out with some Harvard child development research and, man, some of those questions made me feel like a real weasel. "I have never felt like smashing something in anger." Um, false. "I never get irritated when people express opinions different from my own." Yeah, false again. "If I thought I could sneak into a movie without paying I would do it." Well, yes, probably. I mean, I think so. I should try that, come to think of it.

My question is this: is there really a person on the planet who has never felt like smashing something in anger? Really? Never?

I bet even the Dali Lama has had his moments. He's having a bad day and then he gets his robes caught in an escalator and one of his monks laughs and then he spills his green tea all over his crotch right before he has to go on stage with Richard Gere and he knows everyone is going to thinks he's getting old and incontinent, and then someone raises their hand during the q&a portion of the program and asks a rambling question implying that he is really naive and not doing all he can to save the world and he's, like, totally jet lagged and celibate and he hasn't had time to meditate in days and, you know, it's just finally too much for one man to take. And somewhere in his huge and peaceful heart he feels like smashing something. You can't tell me he doesn't.

If you want to to feel like a weasel (or, what do I know, maybe you're an angel) you can take the survey yourself right HERE. Good luck.

Bless this mess

Since I seem to like airing a certain amount of dirty laundry online, I thought I'd share with you what my house looks like after three days of single-parenting (the Mister is on a very bromantic hiking trip until 5PM today).

I used to get so irritated at my mother's poor housecleaning when I was a kid. I would mop the kitchen floor and wipe down the oven doors just to satisfy my own standards of clean (oddly, laundry didn't concern me and instead of washing my clothes, I took to dousing them in Jean Nate and going to school smelling like a molding citrus).

But now I have a little more sympathy. In order to keep this place clean, cleaning is literally ALL I would be able to do. And frankly, washing the sippy cups, and cleaning up the wooden train parts, and folding the laundry, and vacuuming up the sand, and sweeping the crumbs, and putting the books away gets old real fast.

So, here you go, a before and after. Boy, will I be happy to see the Mister (and not just for his superior dish washing skills).

The house as it is normally (or a little better than usual)

living room

Our bedroom

The bathroom

The house after three days of going it alone.

The living room

living room (with diapers)

Our bedroom (Maggie peed on the sheets 48 hours ago and I haven't changed them yet)

The bathroom (why pick up the bath toys

when you're just going to get them all out again tomorrow?

The hall (sadly, you cannot see the grime on the rug)

The kitchen (this is looking pretty good, actually.

I recycled the paper and put the oatmeal bowls in the sink)