toil and trouble

to set the scene for this next tale of woe, you have to know this: my Mom irons her sheets. yes, you read that correctly. give me a break, right? putting them on the bed "irons" them and the first fall of your body creases them, so why bother. but back in the day, she also ironed her father's handkerchiefs and UNDERWEAR too, so i guess she has mellowed some. anyhow, i iron nothing. that's not too much exaggeration -- every once in a loooonnnngg while, i might press a dress for a wedding, but that's IT. but i borrowed my parents' mountain cabin and the beds therein and therefore i had to iron sheets.

so i've had the sheets three weeks now and Mom and Dad need them this week and i finally got a moment at our family gathering this weekend at the lake to do the deed. if I weren't so ticked to be using my time in such an insane manner, it really would have been comical. first of all, because i forgot mine (damn!), i showed up with a brand new ironing board (still wrapped in plastic) prompting my parents to ask if it had been a wedding gift that i was just getting around to opening. (note my profile... heading rapidly toward the 14th anniversary, geesh!) secondly, i almost lost the wrestling match -- the fitted sheet was especially crocodilian to manuever over the narrow board. then my mom came around the corner while i was at work and I bent down to pretend to talk to the little mice on the floor (introducing myself as "cinderelly") and we both got a good chuckle out of that, har...

but the fun ended about there. i was really a bit cranky because by the time i was halfway through the pile, the entire rest of the house was napping -- my parents, my three kiddos and hubby and my brother's whole family. i was the scullery maid left to slave in the steaming laundry while the well-to-do lounged and played parlor games. i felt really sorry for myself and started to iron about eight layers at a time. i folded some of the wrinkled parts in on themselves to hide the evidence. but, though easy in my own home, i couldn't in good conscience keep up the slacker routine. that felt pretty selfish. my parents lent us the cabin for pitty pat's sake. free for our family and our friends' family, too. so i slowed down and just let my brain slip into idle. i pressed some pretty clean long patches -- a few of the sheets you could have packed behind a 200-ct percale label and put on the shelf at bed, bath and beyond. and by the time i was done, i was kind of relaxed really. it was pretty zen, very meditative.

however, i find housework to usually be the opposite of that because there's just almost nothing zen, meditative or idle about it. i'm mostly running around a step behind, jumping from one mess to the next with my three kids constantly adding their needs on top of it all. it is almost never relaxing. i'm wondering if I should take up ironing.

triplets in tears

it's hard to fathom what it would be like to have triplets. but i can approximate how incredibly helpless you feel when there are three children in your proximity all crying at the same time. you want to scream, you want to cry yourself, you can't help but crack up laughing. that shaky, maniacal, snorting laughter, reserved for when you're nervous and totally out of your element. how can it get so wild?

all three of mine went at it at bedtime tonight -- oldest because he gotten a big whomp to the head when a wooden easel fell on him (kinda hard to feel sorry for him, he was ignoring me and he was doing that nutty thing he does when he drags his forehead on the floor and crawls along not looking where he's going -- another thing that makes me want to scream, cry, crack up... chuckling now thinking about it), middlest because he was supposedly still hungry (his favorite stall tactic) and youngest because he's a baby, he was legitimately tired and he was completely within his rights to let loose squalling when the zoo monkeys started their bizarre brand of caterwauling.

so off to bed. the only solution. cue the sob story violins though -- hubby is out of town and now i've got to shake all these sobbing kids off of me so i can make a change. it got uglier. oldest (cradling his big bumped head in a bag of ice) started to boo-hoo about how i never snuggle him anymore, how he comes to me first thing in the morning and i never roll over to hold him, that i must not love him anymore. i've put youngest down on the floor where he proceeds to climb up on the CD player and attempt to electrocute himself drooling into the open CD slot. middlest comes flying across the bed to grab me as he always does when i'm giving either one of his other brothers a moment's attention. it's a real disaster. the one i need to hold is crawling away. the one who needs me to hold him is getting downright hysterical. and the one who needs to just be held all the time is, well, trying to be held again. it's arms and legs leaning, flapping and dodging every which way.

my solution was to put littlest to sleep first then lay down with the two oldest. they both needed a little extra mama today. and though they were the last thing i needed a little bit extra of, i'm proud to say i gave. wasn't easy. wasn't pretty. but tomorrow is another day and i'm going to start it with a big hug for all three.

i have a real soft spot for moms of multiples. there's no amount of sleep or patience that can get you gracefully through a freakshow like we had here tonight.

progress and technology/rant alert!

why, oh why, did the guy (had to be a guy) who invented the HP pavilion a562n CPU put a fancy, blinking blue light on my power button? my baby so wants to push that button. all. day. long.
and thank you cell phones. because of cell phones, every phone number out there is now 10 digits. growing up, i only had to learn 7 digits and still remember my number from back in my early kidhood mercer road days (981-6213, baby!) my poor middlest -- he's trying to memorize our phone number. he's got the first seven digits down but flounders on the last three. coincidence?
and finally, we recently entered the 20th century and got cable TV. (this after five years of no TV and five years watching PBS and videos, but that's another rant for another day...) anyhow, i'm a total cable grouch. frankly, i hate it. it's just another addictive vice. something else i have to police for the kidlets. argh. the worst part has been the commercials, believe it or not. oldest told me i ought to try jenny craig. he also came and asked if we could go to sonic. "they have a huge variety of food and desserts and they're open late just for us," he roboted. my own little marketing stepford son. today at the grocery store, middlest ran over to a display of fabric softener and tossed a giant bottle of downy into the back of the cart. i was completely mystified. i've never bought fabric softener in my life. "i want to make a snow angel, mom," he smiled. still mystified. "a snow angel on the bed," he insisted. oh my gosh. the downy commercials show a little girl so piled in soft, good-smelling cotton glory that she is able to make an angel imprint in the sheets. my son wanted a piece of the action, too. sigh. sigh. that ubiquitous motherly sigh.
done ranting. cheers!

wet wakeup

middlest just wet the bed. he does that sometimes. maybe all 3-year-olds do. so i've tried to pinpoint just when he does that, thinking i might be able to save myself some laundry time if i can solve the riddle. but we can go out and eat salty pizza and he can wake five times in the night crying for water (this has happened) and still he doesn't wet the bed. he can take a bath and chug cupfuls of soapy water but wake up dry and happy. so the only thing i've noticed? he seems to wet the bed when i've personally placed him on the toilet the night before. he almost always just sits there, soundlessly if you catch my drift, and claims he just went a little bit ago. this happened last night and now i'm headed down with a big pile of soggy bedding. there's a lesson in here somewhere. maybe if i just stay out of the way, these boys can raise themselves just fine without me? maybe it's that middlest has the bladder of a gray whale -- it's big and it holds a lot, but geesh, even a whale (with all that water splashing around) has gotta go sometime. or maybe, the bed wetting mystery is just one more thing to put on my list of reasons why i deserve a trip to lake louise someday!

cure for what ails ya...

i think i caught the back-to-school malaise. maybe it's a real illness from all those errant, exotic germs my 1st grader hauled home on his backpack and grimy water bottle, but i'm just so emotionally drained this week. i remember the friday night after robby's first week of kindergarten last year, i just cried and cried and cried. i let loose and wailed. thought it was just hormones (preggo with the littlest at the time) but now i just know that routine change is a real booger.
so on friday after the threesome's bedtime, i took off for a walk and ended up in the back of our neighborhood (nothing like our box-house, stripped down suburban sameness... it's thick pine interspersed with farms and horses, reminds me of where i went to camp in middle school.) anyhow, what a respite. i got to fantasizing. (hoodlum hubby started salivating when i told him this, but, poor guy, we fantasize a bit differently!) i really want to live somewhere beautiful. and less inhabited. and out of the blacktop barrage. maybe with the kids in college we can get a place in the N.C. mtns. or heck, montana. whenever i go nuts over scenery in movies, it's ALWAYS filmed in montana. except today -- PBS travel special the oldest flipped to. new fantasy! i want to go http://www.fairmont.com/lakelouise/ it doesn't have to be this particular resort, but it has to be really nearby. i am already counting down. for now, i'd settle for someone turning down my bed and leaving a tasty chocolate mint.

blogging when i should be jogging...

or sleeping... or doing sudoku puzzles to enhance my brain power... i never thought i'd become a blogger. but here's my story....
so i'm at this backyard barbeque last night, munching on this savory salad -- fresh tomatoes, little broccoli bites, sliced hardboiled egg, big hunks of tangy parmasean all topped with my homemade honey balsamic -- while my sister-in-law's uncle is describing his wife's cancer.
she can barely walk. she's on morphine. the pain is horrible. she has to make herself get up and get out. he has given up his favorite chair and that's where she's camped out -- it's the only thing comfortable enough on her back because her spine is riddled with cancer. i can hear myself crunching. the pleasureable little bites of greens are starting to feel guilty. i'm shaking my head and making myself slow down on my salad. he's saying there's nothing anyone can do. i'm saying how sorry i am and that is so damn lame. and so not enough. i'm eating a really good salad and she's dying. what's wrong with this picture?
it seems odd, but this is the event that precipitated this blog. i have so many thoughts in my brain that jumble about, whirling like the soupy mess in my washer on spin cycle. eating salad while pondering death is only one of them. here's hoping that moving that mess to "paper" will make room in the old noggin for some sanity. because real paper isn't working (how many half-used journals do i own?) and because trapped inside, it's started to feel a bit cramped.
this blog is called the mamacoaster because that's the ride i'm currently on. a lot of what you'll see here will be thoughts about my kids -- the three hooligan boys (and the big hubby hooligan too) are what dominate my days (and unfortunately, some of my nights!) but some of it will be just me. a lot of what you read might seem depressing. don't worry about me -- writing is a way i get it all out. i fret and fuss with words, but i also lay down every night and thank God for the goodness he has given me. i even have a bumper sticker on my mamamobile that says "life is good!" really. cuz it is!