tedium, delirium and rarely in between

so i'm already thinking ahead to the christmas card letter as i do every year round about this time... what is the theme forming for 2008? we seem to be featuring dead animals (i think we're up to 8 lost litters of baby bunnies? and two of our cats have been cut down in the prime of their lives this year, sob!) injuries (nothing life threatening, but lets just say middlest really should stay away from horses at this point!) and unruly children (i spend way too much energy thinking about, discussing, worrying over and outsourcing opinions on my kids' behavior). did God know what he was doing giving me three boys?

babyest is just at this precious age where i can feel that tightly wound jade patina of my heart split another crack every time he smiles and gets goofy, which is thankfully often. and yet, he can shred a house room by room and usually i'm a room or two behind him weeping as i trip over the piles and detrius. middlest is two days away from his first day of kindergarten and has my stomach in a twist with these fateful words, "now, i'm only going one day a week, right?" preschool redux? yikes! and first born son has taken on a new persona: mr. argumentative. as in, duh mom, no, you're wrong. i can almost handle that, problem is... i'm not. are all 3rd graders so in-the-know?

this is where my multiple mom personality disorder comes out... half the time i'm punch-drunk pleased about how amazing my kids are. then some horrible judgement call comes in from the junior senators from georgia (hey guys! let's totally trash the game closet, upend everything mom spent two hours cleaning yesterday and climb up on the pressed wood shelves and see if they can hold all of our weight!) and i'm suddenly taking out classified ads and wondering why there isn't a humane society for kids.

it's the balance, i say. why can't someone bottle balance??? i spent three hours last night destroying 8 years of old records that are no longer necessary to our paperwork lives (were they ever, really?) and felt so proud of my accomplishment -- til i got up from the desk and noticed how badly the house had crashed around me in my absence from micromanaging the mayhem.

which (somehow) brings us back to the christmas card. i think. (i'm rambling, fo' sho'!) what's new in '08? not a thing. same as it ever was. tedium, delirium and rarely a lukewarm moment in between.

i'm BHHHAAAACK...

... and less clever than ever.
There is no way more than a year has passed.
But yet. It has. And I missed all of it. I'm a step above amnesiatic really, but I'm pretty sure I was a woman undone -- just floating above the whole thing with no roots and no place to light down.
About 17 years ahead of schedule, we moved from those black-tar suburbs out to this utterly other tiny town that is rural with a whiff of culture and redneck with a pinch of decent education. It's so much more to look at and yet, it's not quite Lake Louise. Still, it's a step in the more scenic direction.
Expect a decidedly neo-ruralist slant in the words and adventures to come.

Blessings on Aunt Joan's Family

The woman who indirectly inspired this blog died last week. I haven't written in awhile. Do I let it die too? There are only so many hours in a day.

I wish I could get up in the morning and say "Today I will write for one full hour." Ha! Instead I get up and say, "Uh-oh. Hurry up kids, get your clothes on. Come on, down to breakfast. We'll eat in the car again. Brush your teeth. Where are your shoes? Did you brush your teeth? Fill your water bottles and put your snack in your backpack. Get out of the bathroom and stop eating toiletpaper little one, argh, you're making me nuts. BRUSH YOUR %$#@! teeth!!!"

When I was little my mom wanted to be a painter. But we kids took up all her time. When she finally put oil to canvas again my brother walked up to it and stuck his finger right in the middle of a big wet but beautifully done field mom had just finished. Sigh. The balance is always so tenuous and sometimes I feel like I'm juggling lit torches. The little details of every day cannot be left undone or we'd all be buried alive in dirty dishes and mimographed memos from school.

So that hour I have to write? I must also floss my teeth, workout, read my magazines, write my friends, do my zine, catch up on the news and pursue any other of life's little entertainments during that 60 minutes as well. Nutty with a capital nuh.

cyberspace pity party (cuz no one feels sorry for me in real life)

my definition of chaos -- two weeks' worth...

car work:
my power steering went out on the van (another $500 oil change), i witnessed a hit and run accident, my battery died on the van (an unrelated repair two days later and a 3hr ordeal) and today! @$#!, they want $1300 to make the heat/air conditioning run correctly in that blasted vehicle. didn't we just fork out $2000 for a condensor six weeks ago? rapidly reaching the point where we're putting more money into the van than it's worth.

body work:
spent last tuesday night in the ER until 2am. hubby's arm was totally numb and as his dad had his first heart attack at 38, died at 54, he wanted to make sure he was ok -- he is -- has to see a neurologist for probable pinched nerve. came down with a nasty cold on wednesday night, probably someone sneezed their tuberculosis on me in the ER!

busy work:
had to rip up the carpet in the mother-in-law's condo because littlest pulled over the world's soggiest plant and made a mud bog. we've had three soccer practices, two games, three birthday parties and two family parties, plus dinner at my parents' all in the last 12 days. somehow, in around the usual nuttiness of dishes, diaper changes, laundry, school lunches, carpool, etc., i managed to do all of the above plus cut the grass, babysit my friend's son, mop the kitchen floor and take a 30 min. nap one fine sunday afternoon in the middle of all that.

ok, party's over. i'm LOVIN' how writing all of this down is making me feel. so many accomplishments. so it wasn't exactly how i would have chosen to spend my time, but it was something anyhow. truly amazing. you can't make this stuff up. i'm looking for a mellower finish to the month, please....

what does the AAP say about housework?

maybe you've heard that the american academy of pediatrics has recently recommended no TV for children under 2 and less than 2 hours of quality educational programming for kids 2 to 6? i doubt it will slow down the baby einstein craze too much. which is so funny because usually the AAP's word is god -- feed solid food at 4 months, give cow's milk on day 365, no sleeping with your babe, etc... but take away the boxed babysitter and ferget it. moms are NOT going to back down in this area.

despite my disdain for cable TV, somedays, i am very sad to admit, i'd be lost without my BB... i wish that were not the case, but when the boys get spooled up and i am about to throttle them, a little TV is a pretty easy way for us all to get a break and me to get dinner made a bit more calmly.

i kinda did a little self-assessment this long weeked and one of the things i decided was that i need to get a bit more cooperative spirit going around here as a way to spend more time together. i do all the housework, ok, sorry honey, JUST ABOUT all. if i can get the boys more involved, we can talk more, be together more, they'd watch less TV and I'd be putting them off less because we'd be together. pipe dream in a way b/c they HATE most cleaning, folding, etc (geesh, who doesn't?), but i want to try a little harder rather than letting them off the hook.


back in a few days to laugh my ass off at this one.

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.