The Twinkies

It only took 20 months - well, a week less - but both babies slept through the night last night. That’s right. BOTH BABIES! All night. Sleeping. Not crying. Not demanding to sleep with me, then in the crib, then with me, then kicking me in the kidney. All night. In their own room. Asleep. Sleeping. All night. For 11 hours. In a row. Both of them.

Take heart, parents of newborn twins. It only took 20 months. That’s not bad, right?

I am assuming tonight will be dreadful.

So week 3 of school has come and gone without a hitch except for the nap disruption. (Yes, it is nap time right now and, yes, J is not happy about that.) F doesn’t even make a pretense of saying goodbye to me in the morning, she just plunges into the classroom. J still wants me to say goodbye but then he trots off happily and starts his day.

They have started with the potty training. When J and F get there in the morning the Directress and her assistants sit them down and help them take off their outside shoes, socks and pants. I send them to school in cotton underwear with cloth diaper covers over them so next they remove the diaper covers. Then each child pulls down the underwear, goes to the bathroom which has a toddler sized flush toilet and sits on the toilet. The bag of “clothes to wash and return” at the end of each day has several wet pairs of underwear per child so they are on their way. The school puts them in pull-ups for the trip home and then I keep them in cloth diapers during the afternoon.

I have a pounding headache. This in itself is not unusual as I get headaches of some severity at least 3 days a week and have all of my adult life. If I am dehydrated I get a headache. If I miss a meal I get a headache. If I am stressed I get a headache. If I am tired I get a headache. That this happens with some frequency doesn’t make it any less unpleasant, however.

I spent all morning driving around. I drove the kids to Montessori (25 minutes), drove from there to a portfolio building photo shoot (45 minutes) drove all the way back and then some to go to the consignment shop because the kids need more t-shirts for school (55 minutes), drove back to school (10 minutes) and then home (25 minutes). Tonight I have to go out and get pull-ups for school. More driving. Whee..

At the photo shoot I somehow lost my lens cap. Goodbye $20 for a replacement that I can only HOPE fits as Canon does not list a single replacement lens cap they make that fits my lens. I am hoping that the 50mm 1.4 lens and the 50mm 1.8 lens take the same size lens cap. If they don’t I guess I get to buy another lens. Goodbye $90. I make $12/hour in my part-time job at which I log MAYBE 5 hours/week. You do the math to figure out how many weeks that shoot cost me.

J has been protesting nap for an hour now. One hour of intermittent screaming. It goes well with the headache.

Last night they slept well but the previous two nights involved at least an hour of soothing J to get him to go back down when he woke up in the middle of the night so I’m tired. I was going to nap when the kids napped but since he is still protesting nap I am guessing that is not going to happen.

I have a list of things to do that just makes me want to crawl into bed and cry. I still haven’t written thank you notes from CHRISTMAS. I haven’t written thank you notes from my birthday. I haven’t written AMS a formal note of condolence. I have unanswered email from over 6 months ago. I need to baby proof the kitchen which means I need to go to Target and get more of those giant plastic storage bins to put more things in the garage because we don’t have space to just move things into high cupboards. The house is full. I have to do laundry. I have to figure out dinner.

The house is full except, it has no furniture. I did a photo shoot in a house on Tuesday and this woman’s house was beautiful. It was gorgeously, simply decorated. It was clean. It had, you know, furniture. The high chair wasn’t coated in oatmeal no one has had the time or energy to clean up. We need to repaint pretty much the entire downstairs, replace all the windows which are 68 years old and thus are both drafty and likely have at least one layer of lead paint on them ($10,000 at least because they aren’t standard sizes and thus we can’t just do plain old replacement windows. We’ve checked. It doesn’t matter anyway because to keep whatever minimal amount of character the house has we have to do true divided light and cheap replacement windows don’t offer that option.). We need to demolish the poorly built addition off the dining room which leaks, has water damage and had carpenter ants. I’m pretty sure that whoever put that up just did it themselves without permits, contractors or any real skill. We need to gut the kitchen and redo it before we can hope to sell this house. The vinyl flooring is peeling up. The ceiling is caving in. When we redid the bathroom they just ran the pipes in such a way that will need to be redone when we redo the kitchen plumbing. (This was actually a good idea and we did it that way because we knew we would have to redo the kitchen before we moved but in the meanwhile there are these pipes in strange places in our kitchen.) And, of course, it’s dark, small, cramped, has no counter space, the cupboard shelves are falling apart and held together by gorilla glue and it is in general an unpleasant room to be in. The dining room chairs are folding chairs and they have scratched up the hardwood floors. Every time I look at those cheap chairs I get irritated that they are ugly and have damaged the floors. And, of course, the are a hazard to the kids. F climbs on them, the start to collapse, and her leg gets caught inside the folding seat part. I HATE HATE HATE these chairs. And, no, we can’t afford to replace them so I have to fold them up and put them in the closet or the tiny, cluttered kitchen when we aren’t using them and then bring them out again when we eat and then put them away again. All of this will get fixed in time but it is frustrating and depressing to deal with the ugly inside of my house every day, especially in winter when we can’t get out and especially after seeing other people’s nice houses. Other people manage to have kids and still live like adults but our house is such a dump it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

And. Yes. J is STILL screaming. When I bent over to return his lovely to him, which he had thrown out of the crib, the headache intensified so I felt like I was going to vomit. Once I straightened up it returned to being merely painful. Going up to see him only seems to make him more upset. I’m never sure whether I should go in and pat him or not. It just seems to make him more angry. I really can’t take his refusal to sleep much longer. My patience is utterly UTTERLY at an end which is why he is screaming in his crib and I am downstairs hiding rather than trying to soothe him. F is sound asleep despite his caterwauling.

So that’s why there hasn’t been a blog post or cute pictures of the kids in a few days. I am stressed, tired, busy, wracked with CIO guilt and, at least right now, in a not insignificant amount of pain. And, yes, I’ve taken pain killers.