Crabby

Because I am nothing if not hospitable, here is a list of things to be grumpy about today.  Join me, won’t you?

1.  Sleep.  I need more of it.

2.  Those stupid plastic things they use to attach tags to new clothes.  Note to the makers of children’s clothes, especially: if the information you want to give me about my daughter’s new shirt will not fit on one tag, please consider the possibility that the shirt is too complicated and ought to be dumbed down for the masses.

3.  In a similar vein, the packaging for toys.  Look, I know you don’t want to make it easy for someone to shoplift a toy by removing the package and sneaking out of the store.  However, please know that every time I have to unwind those industrial twisty-ties of yours, I curse you and the horse you rode in on.  So for the horse’s sake, if not for mine, LAY OFF THE DAMN TWISTY-TIES.

4.  PMS.  I feel confident that even any male readers among you will appreciate this one.

5.  Exercise, which for me seems to mostly be a way to injure myself in exceptionally stupid ways, as opposed to my usual method of bumping into things.  Example: yesterday I hit myself in the head with a two-pound weight because I didn’t notice that I had gotten too close to the place in my basement where the ceiling is lower.

I think that about covers it.  Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.

I’m the Kind of Mom…

…who sometimes hides in the bathroom

…who forgets and snaps at you, when it’s really not you I’m angry at

…who realizes that she has become a grown-up, in the most unflattering Peter Pan/Antoine de Saint-Exupery sense, and is duly appalled with herself

…who tries to compensate for her disgusting adultness by planning (oops!) fun kid activities

…who thinks there might be hope for herself, since she can lose herself in playing Indoor Sandbox, wheeling Matchbox cars around in a baby tub of rice for an hour

…who second-guesses every decision she makes that impacts you

…who knows you should never know that until you’re older, because you need her to be in charge

…who loves you, so dearly, but often checks the clock and calculates the hours until bedtime (but feels guilty about it!)

…who melts and forgets to check the clock on those magic days when we all can play together in between the boring mom stuff I have to do and the naps and eating and diaper changes and potty breaks you insist upon.

…who is prouder of you than of anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life, bar none.

One Year

Dear Apple and Orange,

Monday was your First Birthday, which deserves capitalization because it is Very Important.

Obviously, your birthday is mostly about you — how you are so big now that you fit into the “right” size — the clothes intended for your age group are actually the ones that fit, instead of the ones intended for babies 3 months younger than you.  Or how you can pull up and stand just about anywhere, and cruise around the house.  Or how Orange has forgotten a few times and stood on her own, and Apple is so quick with his army crawl that sometimes I look up and have no idea where he’s gone.  And you’re so anxious to talk, both of you — you babble so seriously that I honestly feel dumb sometimes that I don’t know what you’re saying.  It’s like you’re speaking French, and I really should get it, since I minored in French, but I’ve forgotten everything I knew, and honestly, Mother, I could not be clearer, are you listening!?

It’s also about how you learn something new every day: my favorites so far are clapping (which Apple does on cue every time someone says “yay”) and shaking your heads “no.”

But your birthday, especially this first one, is also a little teeny bit about me and your dad.  Because we did it.  You are alive and healthy after this first, most difficult (physically, anyway, please no one with teenagers comment on this entry) year.  We kept you fed and pretty much clean, and the house didn’t burn down even when we were so, so tired that we might’ve forgotten to turn off the stove, and Raisin survived too, and I am pretty darn proud of all of us.

(And I’ve given up completely on grammar for this entry – call it a stream of consciousness in the spirit of James Joyce or something, because the run-ons and inappropriate conjunction placements are here to stay today.)

So, happy birthday, little ones!  You are beautiful and lovely and smart and adorable, and we all love you with our whole hearts!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jog

The Jellyman arrived last night.  I was very, very happy to see him.  Very.

Tipsheet – Updated

1.  Feed your young children shredded cheese instead of cubes or slices.  That way, you won’t have to cut it up yourself.  “But, Julie,” you might say, “Shredded cheese will end up all over the floor!”  Yes, yes it will, but so will anything they eat.  And the shredded cheese dries out faster — by the time you wrestle them all to the sink to wash their faces, you’ll be able to sweep it right up.

2.  A room last cleaned a month ago looks just as clean after you dust and vacuum as a room cleaned last week.  As an addendum to this tip, a room your guests will never see should be presumed, by those guests, to be clean.  Example: my houseguests this weekend will have no reason to see the shower in the downstairs bathroom, so the spiders who live there can die quiet deaths of old age (preferably comfortably well-fed on the numerous other bugs who might be lurking nearby).

3.  Byerly’s gives free cakes for kids’ first birthdays.  Have twins; they’ll give you two.  Then you won’t have to figure out whether you can serve all your guests with 1/4 sheet cake.  If you don’t live in Minnesota, though, this might be a problem, since it’s a local company.

4.  Do not buy your children a doctor set with a “real” cell phone and pager, even if it seems cute at the time.  Because on some day when you really need to leave the house on time, say your daughter’s first day of preschool, one of your kids will find a way to get the cell phone stuck on this ridiculously annoying, high-pitched beep, and you will not be able to turn it off.  And of course the battery cover will be attached with a teeny-tiny screw, so you will need to find a teeny-tiny screwdriver in order to take it off, remove the batteries, and stop the ever-loving racket.

You’re welcome.