Bad Tuesday

Not to be confused with Fat Tuesday, though we do have a lot of cheap, shiny necklaces laying around.

Maggie won't sleep today. This is a continuation of Maggie Won't Sleep Monday and Maggie Won't Sleep Sunday. It's a trilogy of sleeplessness and I lay it all at the doorstep of church.

Were I an atheist or a pagan, I suppose I would stay home Sunday morning watching real estate shows and NASCAR on TV. Instead, we haul our little brood to church each week, where the littlest one refuses to sleep. Church occurs about 30 minutes into when she would normally be napping, and that nap is usually 90 minutes long, so this is a pretty big interruption of sleep for her. Generally she takes 3 naps a day, but on Sunday she only takes 2, an early afternoon and a late afternoon one. She has been taking 3 naps for quite some time now, but this week she finally decided to give up that 3rd nap, so on this particular Sunday she took only one nap. ONE. This was not enough and despite my rigid adherance to her nap schedule on Monday, she is now veeerrrrrry overtired and napping like caca. It will take until Wednesday, at least, to get her back on track, and she won't really be back in her groove until Friday. Just in time for church to roll around again on Sunday.

This is where I would like to address the people who told me that the third baby is so mellow, so 'along for the ride.' Bull. She is the least flexible baby I've ever produced; not especially tolerant, not happy to be carted around wherever we go. She naps in her crib -- that's it. Nowhere else. She hates being along for the ride, i.e. in the van, and since she has recently discovered screaming, we are all aware of her displeasure. Three quarters of any car trip involve cringing as the screaming crescendos to almost unbearable decible levels.

The only place she has shown any degree of flexibility is in the church nursery, where she is delighted to be left. We think this is because the kids there are gentler than her siblings and she probably feels safer there than in our living room.

Of course, since she was in the nursery 48 hours ago, she now has a cold.

I am typing this, listening to her howl through the monitor because she's had so little sleep today. I am also periodically telling my other two to be quiet, be quiet! BE QUIET!!. It's not really a relaxing place to be today, our house. Thank God they've finally agreed to watch Peter Pan and give me 77 minutes of peace.

How come, if God wants us to go to Church, He doesn't make the way there smoother?

Hair Today, Goon Tomorrow

I am having a bad hair day. A real one, where my hair looks just awful, though I meant it to look much better. This is because I am in the frustrating process of growing out my bangs and I have reached the no-man's land of hair growth where I can't do a dang thing with it. It's too long to style and too short to blend. In a word, it's blech.

I've had bangs my entire life. The rest of my hair has gone from Little Dutch Boy to Mullet to Marcia Brady, but the bangs remain eternal. Until now. This is my first concerted effort at growing them out and they are now just at the base of my nose. My husband mentioned that he thought I should see what my face looked like without the lovely squared-off fringe that has defined it for so long, so I am gritting my teeth and pushing on, though I itch to just whack them off with the scissors.

Secretly I am afraid (and at least partially convinced) that I am one of those people who can't really wear bang-less hair. Even now, at this length, my part looks a little Alfalfa-esque and if I try to part more to the side I get a curtain of hair falling in my eyes about 5 minutes after I leave the bathroom, no matter how much hairspray I use. I can leave the lavvy with bulletproof hair and it still falls gently down in little stuck-together clumps. I am experiementing with clippies, but so far I look like Early Trailer Court. Yummy. I just need a cigarette and a houserobe to compete the effect.

I have made a deal with myself that I'll wait 'til they're down to my mouth before I do anything drastic. If they're still driving me loony by then, it's sayonara.

Wink Wink, Nudge Nudge, Say No More..

My hubby dropped off his fifth "test" sample today, in hopes of finally being declared sperm-free after his vasectomy. A vasectomy which occurred more than a year ago. A vasectomy which was supposed to make our lives more carefree -- or at least as carefree as we can be with 3 kids all sleeping within 12 feet of our bedroom.

The first few times he was tested, the paperwork necessary for dropping off the sample brought him up short. Particularly the little space on the form which asked "How was the sample obtained?"

What are you supposed to write there? As if standing there with a cup of semen isn't humiliating enough, now you have to discuss how you got it? The only thing I can compare this to is when I was having one of my c-sections and the nurse made me carry around a cup of my own urine for 10 minutes before deciding that they did not, in fact, need it at all. Then they just left it sitting on a table top in my room for about 5 hours. It did add a certain je ne sais quoi to the otherwise boring hospital room, but it didn't improve my mood one bit.

So this time, magic number 5, I told him to go right up to the desk and boldly write "PORN" in that little space and then wink at the clerk when he hands over the cup.

'How was the sample obtained', indeed. Sheesh.

Go get 'em baby!

Out of Contention

I am having one of those days.

The kind of day that really started last night, when I didn't get to bed until midnight and am now paying for it.

In a burst of the purely retributive kharma that accompanies child-rearing, the children always wake up earlier on the morning after you go to bed late. Even if you had a good, totally legitimate, responsible reason for staying up.

So everyone was pretty much awake by 6:30. Except me. I don't officially wake up until at least half of my morning coffee has been consumed. I am actually reaching a sort of zen stage with early rising, wherein I can make breakfast for the kids without being strictly conscious, per se. But not this morning. This morning I had yelled at everyone by 6:45 and by 7 was wondering whether it was possible to actually drown myself in my coffee mug or whether the heat would make me pull out prematurely.

I opted to drink it instead and the caffeine rush carried me through lunch. But now it's what Douglas Adams used to call the "long dark tea time of the soul"-- those last 2 hours before Daddy gets home and I am no longer a single parent. And Tim just called to tell me he might be late, so my personal twilight zone may last longer than anticipated.

This was not welcome news.

It doesn't really help to know that if I'd just gone to bed earlier, I'd be in a lot better shape than I am now.

I'm gonna write and withdraw my nomination for MOTY later today. At least I won't have that pressure hanging over me.

Overheard...

Dad: What did you do at Grandma's today?

Grant: Had a 'nack.

Dad: What did you have for snack?

Grant: Not doughnut holes.

Dad: Why didn't Grandma give you doughnut holes?

Grant: She not payin' attention.

Brace Yourself

Today, I visited an orthodontist. An orthodontist. I haven't seen one since I was sixteen, so that's about....well, a long time ago. I experienced a mild sensation of recoil watching a few teenagers get their braces adjusted, but on the whole it was less intimidating than I remembered. And the actual orthodontist was vastly different from old Dr. S---, who perpetuated untold tortures on my poor mouth.

Dr. S--- was a Big Game Hunter and his waiting room was filled with the stuffed heads of his various trophies. He had obviously been on safari a time or two, and judging by the giant moose head on the wall, the Great White North wasn't unknown to him either. Everyone in his family drove a Mercedes and he sported a wristwatch made of little nuggets of gold. Doncha wonder how he paid for all that? Hmmmmmm.

Worst of all, in the middle of the treatment area, clearly in violation of some health code somewhere, was a big, wrought-iron cage with a scarlet macaw inside. An unhappy scarlet macaw. A macaw that felt the need to shriek its displeasure periodically in a way that made the orthodontic assistants jump. Since this often happened while they were tightening my braces, the macaw wasn't the only one who was unhappy.

Why today's visit didn't give me flashbacks of my last gruesome experience with braces, I'll never know, but Dr. M--- might have been the reason. She was nice; she spoke to me instead of around me, and she didn't charge me for a consultation, which I thought was jolly decent of her.

Unfortunately, she did use the "B" word, and that made me go all crawly inside. Yes, it would be short term, yes, it would be only a partial set, but braces are braces and I don't know if I can face them again.

Certainly there are worse things than mildly crooked teeth. Being trapped in a cage in an orthodontist's office springs to mind.

I guess this is where I decide how vain I really am.

Drowning in Laundry

I managed to hurt my back a couple weeks ago when I rather stupidly tried to lift two laundry baskets at the same time. As a result, I couldn't bend or lift for more than a week, which meant I couldn't do the laundry even if I'd wanted to (I didn't). While I was out of action, the laundry accumulated to tsunami-like proportions and I am still trying to wade through it two weeks later. Sadly, nobody gives you pain medication for excess laundry. But they should.

When my kids grow up, I think they're going to remember that I was always doing laundry. There are 5 of us, so the fact that we have a lot of laundry isn't exactly breaking news, but I am so swamped with it right now, I'm starting to wonder if the kids cloned themselves when I wasn't looking.

It certainly doesn't help that one kid wet the bed 2 days ago, soaking the sheet, quilt, and pad, so that bedding had to be added to the backlog. And my eldest has a nasty dust mite allergy, so all of her bedding has to be washed every week -- including the quilt and the Hello Kitty pillow she can't live without. Any time bedding is in the mix, the laundry queue slows way down. At least it does at my house. Then there's the baby who can't finish a meal without smearing Gerbers all over whatever isn't covered by bib, and there's the boy who goes outside and rolls in the mud (and if he can't find mud, he makes his own), and there's the 5-year-old diva who needs a complete costume change 3 times a day or her psyche will be irrevocably shattered. Add to that the husband who wears one outfit to work and changes into another for the evening and the piles really start growing.

I remember with a certain amount of incredulity the days when I really liked doing laundry. When I bought my first place -- a little condo with its own laundry alcove-- I was tickled to bits to be able to do the wash without leaving my house. No more laundromats! When Tim and I were engaged, I actually volunteered to do his laundry. I must have been in love, 'cause now I regard that as a period of temporary insanity. I would never under any circumstances volunteer to do someone else's wash now. Heck, I wouldn't do my own wash if I could find a way to get out of it that didn't involve me either a) paying someone, or b) going naked.

The really awful thing about it, though, is that while you're doing it, people are wearing clothes and getting them dirty. It's an unbroken stream of dirty shirts, jeans, onesies...the Mount Never Rest of being a mom.