Henry is four! Here he is with a sword he made out of Tinker Toys, and the giant forehead mosquito bite that prompted me to reschedule his portraits:

Good call.

I don’t generally do much Kid Birthday Talk here (oh, Kid Birthday FRETTING, sure, but I mean I save the developmental lists and sentimentality for my own journal, where even _I_ generally find them boring), but I’m a little different about Henry because he seems like a Blog Baby: he was BORN here. And today, when he turns 4 while the twins are still 5, it seems a little crazy to look back at when he was born: those little toddler twins, and then bringing a baby home before their 2nd birthday. But there he was. Henry. If there’d been two of him, I’ll bet we would have made the local paper: “Two Sets of Twins Under Two!”

Here we are, right before he arrived:

Tired much?

This is a picture I didn’t want to keep because I thought I looked so dreadful. Now I’m so glad I made myself keep it, because I care about “having a picture of me pregnant and holding my toddler twins” more than I care about “my neck wrinkles and double chin and pinkish pregnancy skin and pulled-weird neckline and tensely-clenched hand.” Those neck wrinkles aren’t going to get any SHALLOWER over the years, anyway.

And then a few days later I was back in my chair:

With a slight change.

And then less than two weeks later, the twins’ 2nd birthday, which I must have BAKED CAKES for while recovering from a c-section:

Yeah, I don’t really remember it. Good thing I have photos.

Henry’s birthday also feels different to me because he’s the caboose child: every birthday he has, the train pulls further away from the station. And sometimes that seems like a very happy, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of thing, and other times it seems like a very sad, midlife-crisis-inducing kind of thing. Because this is great:

But it means no more this:

I am finally reading The Year of Magical Thinking. Paul is wondering why I keep clinging to him tearily when he is just walking past me in the kitchen.

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Speaking of books, if you have not yet purchased LIFE The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, I advise you NOT to. I pre-ordered it before there was even a description of it, still caught up in the unexpected happiness of re-watching the wedding three times when I’d thought I’d only be half-interested in seeing it ONCE. I figured that if it was by LIFE it would be pretty much guaranteed to be good. I imagined page after page of gorgeous photos, like other LIFE books I’ve read.

Or maybe I’m misremembering that the other books were by LIFE? Because in fact the book is almost worthless. It’s something like 125 pages, and about a dozen of them are about the wedding. All the rest is regurgitated photos of Diana, and of Will and Catherine as children, and of Kate in the sheer dress AGAIN FTLOG. And you know, that kind of thing is interesting TOO, but in a book ABOUT THE WEDDING, I want it ALL and ONLY about the WEDDING, and I want photos of EVERY MOMENT.

Furthermore, the writing quality is…iffy. Iffy AT BEST—as in, I kept TRYING to read it, and kept thinking, “No, never mind; I will just look at the photos.” Really, VERY disappointing. I put it in the library donation pile so at least maybe someone ELSE won’t have to pay money for it.

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I did not think that a CHRIS ROCK documentary about black women’s hair was going to make me burst into tears not once, not twice, but MANY TIMES—-but there it is. And this was BEFORE I started reading The Year of Magical Thinking. (Though, now that I think of it, AFTER the wine.)

I’m having soup for breakfast. It is a perfectly cromulent breakfast, but now I am onion-scented and it does seem too early for that.

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This is the time of year when I start panicking if I’ve made the wrong decision and should quick buy a ticket for BlogHer ’11 before they sell out.

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Listen, do you kind of want to get in on the whole “bloggers who run!” thing, but you are pretty sure you are genetically incapable of EVER getting in on the whole “I was feeling lazy, so I just did a short 10 mile run today!” thing? Reading and Chickens is doing a Nerd 5K for the socially-awkward, can-I-just-wear-my-jeans?, wanting-to-die-after-1-minute-of-running among us. Here’s the FAQ. The 5k will be run, or walked, or pretended-to-run-it-while-actually-sitting-at-home at the same time on the same day wherever you are, so we don’t have to make eye contact with anyone or worry that anyone is looking at us. I don’t know if I’m doing it or not: I’m in the stage of fretting and considering and making lists of pros and cons—which, if I know me, will last until it is too late to join in. But at this point I am favorably INCLINED toward the idea, and will consider it as I’m dying during my 1.5-mile walk.

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Henry calls Venus fly-traps “Fleenus Try-Traps.” If you tell him the actual pronunciation, I will cutchoo.

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Please help me boss Sara into naming her baby girl Penelope Rosalie. There is a poll, so you can boss her there if you don’t want to leave a comment.

On the review blog: review of a custom-decorated (with stickers) toothbrush and toothpaste for kids, with a $100 Visa gift card giveaway. Through June 9th.

The other morning I was driving over to my mom’s house, and there was a bird standing in the road, right in the middle of my lane. And I thought, “It’s funny how these birds always LOOK like they’re going to get hit in exchange for their nonchalance, and then they fly away at the last minute”—and within a few seconds later I was driving over the part of the road with the bird on it, yet without having seen a bird take flight at the last second, and there was a thunk, and when I looked behind me there was a dead bird in the road. It must have flown up JUST as I got to it, and then gotten hit by the front of the car before it got high enough. And the dim thing is that if it had just NOT FLOWN, it wouldn’t have gotten hit. This is like the worst fable ever.

This came on the heels of discovering YET ANOTHER bird in our house, killed by our cats. They are killing one pretty much every day now, despite me stringing MULTIPLE JINGLE BELLS on their collars. And on one hand I am settled with the idea of this being the natural order of things, and even with the idea that the thinning out of the slower/dumber birds makes the bird species stronger—but neither of these concepts leaves me settled with the part where that same morning there was a bird foot, JUST a bird foot, on my carpet. And a wing, JUST a wing, in the hallway. It makes me hate our cats, and of course I’ve long since stopped putting out food for the birds.

Anyway, that same day, when I hit and killed a bird with my car after spending part of my morning hating our cats as I cleaned up their recent kill, I drove past the same spot just a few minutes later on my way home, and the bird was gone. So, I mean, one possibility is that it got nipped up by some other animal, or got hit by another car in a way that flung it off the road (though the car would have had to be way out of its lane to manage that). But you know what I think is most likely? I’ll bet what actually happened, rather than my theory of it flying right in front of my car at the exact wrong time, is that it flew up AFTER my car was already ABOVE it, and it bonked its head really hard and got stunned, like birds sometimes do when they fly into a window but not hard enough to kill themselves. And then it lay there in the road for awhile, recovering itself. And then it sprang up and flew off. (Hey, now you could TOTALLY use this in a fable!)

Every year we receive two perky messages from the school about what the children are wearing. One comes in December, when we are reminded that “Gone are the days of heat waves and sandals!!” and the other comes in May, when we are similarly prompted to look out our windows and observe changes in the weather. I am annoyed EVERY TIME, even though I KNOW there is a need for such notices. No, I KNOW. Do not tell me I would be surprised: I would NOT be surprised, because I ALREADY KNOW.

But my own children are NOT wearing flip-flops in the snow, or bikini tops and short shorts as soon as it hits 70 degrees, and so I don’t like to have someone CHIRPING at me about it as if “we” forgot to take “our” “meds” this morning. I wish there were a practical way to send these notices only to those who need them. NO, I GET IT, THERE IS NO PRACTICAL WAY. But are we also in general agreement that the people who NEED to be told that their children should not wear flip-flops in the snow are NOT going to be affected by a school-wide chirpy little notice? “Oh! The school is right: flip-flops and snow DON’T go together! Silly old me, I’d forgotten the days were getting shorter and Old Man Winter was on his way!”

This is Rob’s first year of middle school, and HA HA HA HA HA! Oh, I do feel SO SORRY for the middle school staff. I can picture their weary postures, and the way they go home to their spouses and say “You would not BELIEVE how much RIGHTEOUS ANGER an 8th-grade girl can manufacture over the definition of the word ‘crop top.’ No, you would not believe it. No, don’t even try, just…bring me a bottle of wine and a funnel.”

I can HEAR in the newsletter that the middle school staff does not WANT to make a dress code. They want to say, “Wear REASONABLE clothing, please, and let’s get on with the day.” But no: the children push and Push and PUSH, until the staff is FORCED to say things such as “Shoulders of tops must be at least three (3) inches wide.” I’m sure that in the beginning they were thinking, as I am, “What’s wrong with a tank top?” And many VERY HEADACHEY days later, it’s “three inches” and then needing to spell out that “three” = 3.

This one seems to me to come from the calm that only psychiatric medication can provide: “Necklines of shirts should provide thorough coverage of the chest area.” THOROUGH! When the writer of that line was in college headed for a career in academia, did he or she think they would be spending time forming that sentence? And would he or she consider changing “chest area” to “chestal region,” because that would be way funnier. And then, in the part about the shoulders of tops, I think we should say “shoulderage.”

“Undergarments cannot be visible at any time.” I’ll bet the first draft included “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PEOPLE” and a long scream.

“Pajama/lounge pants are not permitted” seems like it is just ASKING for trouble. Does this mean yoga pants? But those are perfectly reasonable pantsage! Is it NO soft pants at all? “All pants must have a snap and a zipper and belt loops, and be made of a sturdy fabric such as canvas or denim; more than 2% spandex is not permitted”? Mark my words, there will be such changes in the next memo!

This is why schools end up thinking to themselves, “You know what? We are done. UNIFORMS.” Which only leads to MORE rules. “Waistbands of skirts must not be folded over.” “Uniform elements must be the appropriate size, neither slouchy nor skin-tight.” “Knee socks must be within one (1) inch of the knee.” “Hooker-style thigh-high lace-up boots may not be worn.” “Lip balm may not be worn, because we are not talking to ONE MORE middle-school girl about the difference between ‘balm’ and ‘gloss’.” “Parents should be advised that their children are a huge pain in the ass. Thank you for your consideration.”

I dreamed last night that a VERY CUTE boy was interested in me. Unfortunately, when my dream mind discovered that the boy was 18, it did not do what _I_ would have done in ITS shoes, which would have been to assume _I_ was also 18. No. Instead my dream mind said to me: “Hey. Hey, wait. *counting on fingers* Aren’t you nearly TWENTY YEARS older than that? I don’t think this is AT ALL appropriate. Not at ALL. Seriously. Ick. And…wait. Aren’t you also MARRIED? We need to stop this right here.” Then my dream mind went and fetched Paul and had him take away my glass of champagne and make a pointed remark about my “boyfriend“—with heavy quotes, just like that, and not a very pleasant tone of voice, either.

Thanks a lot, dream mind. This reminds me of once when I was on a diet and I dreamed that I was very tempted by a bunch of candy but didn’t eat it. Come on, now, that is TOO STRICT.

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I recently gave up on a book after 220 pages, which I think may be unprecedented for me. Despite being very familiar with the concept of sunk costs (that is, that the amount of time I’ve spent reading the book is irrelevant to the decision about whether to KEEP reading it, since I can’t get that time back either way), I have trouble putting it into practice. And besides, with a book, it MIGHT pay off to continue reading it. Though, admittedly, probably this is more true at 50 pages than at 220.

It was bugging me because there was a ton of foreshadowing to keep the suspense going, but then the foreshadowed events were never as big a deal as they’d seemed like they’d be. Plus, most of it was made up. Which is to be expected of fiction, of course, but in this case the narrator was also making up a story: imagining what things were like for his parents before he was born, when he hadn’t been told those stories. So then I felt like I was reading fiction about fiction: the story wasn’t even true within the covers of the book.

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But then I read a book I liked very much: You Know When the Men are Gone, by Siobhan Fallon (photo from Amazon.com).

It is a TEENSY bit “you civilian wives have no idea how good you’ve got it,” and I’m not sure anyone can make that kind of statement about anything (parenting, working, location, relationships, lifestyle choices/non-choices of any sort) without it being kind of annoying. And since NO ONE experiences ALL life circumstances, it’s also kind of a duh thing to bring up: we ALL live a way that only other people who live the same way would understand, and ALL those ways include some things that would be considered disadvantages—and other things that would be considered advantages. If the book had instead JUST told the stories, without adding the little preachies about how much better things are for civilians, I would have received the message ANYWAY, but without feeling prickly about it.

Another problem is that it’s short stories, which I hadn’t realized when I checked it out of the library. And while I partly love short stories, I also partly hate them: they leave me stranded just when I’ve gotten fully invested in the situation. But these particular stories overlap each other a little, which I LOVE, so. Still, there are a couple where I thought, “No. You can’t just leave it without any sort of ending and and call it done.”

Boy, it sounds like I DIDN’T like this book, doesn’t it? But I DID. I liked it in an “I NEED TO SEE WHAT ELSE THIS AUTHOR HAS WRITTEN” way. (Nothing, sadly.) It is just, when I like a book, I don’t want to talk it up too much because then you’re BOUND to be disappointed, and also I want to make sure I mention the things I DIDN’T like so that when you read it you don’t say “She liked THIS?”

This morning I went to wake Elizabeth up and she wasn’t in her bed. She was fine: she’d just gotten up quietly and gone to the living room—which is atypical for her, obvs, or I would have cottoned to what was going on a little sooner. But those seconds of first thinking “That’s funny: she’s so buried under her covers I don’t even see her,” and then “Actually…she’s so burrowed in, it doesn’t even look like there’s room for her under there, nervous ha ha,” and then “Okay, okay, she’s NOT under there, she might have just gone in to our bed after I got up,” and then “SHE PROBABLY JUST GOT UP QUIETLY, THAT’S ALL, THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC ABOUT THIS”—well, it was a little draining, and I found my hands were a little shaky by the time I saw the back of her head in the living room.

NOTHING CAN HAPPEN TO THEM, is the problem with having children.

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Rob, eating a taco: “Mmmmmmm, BEEF!” Paul: “…It’s turkey.” Another meat education fail. (It would be a more understandable fail if we didn’t, every taco night, send either Rob or William to the downstairs freezer with instructions to bring up a package of ground turkey.)

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Rachel AKA Doing My Best AKA Crappy Day Present Sender has started a blog, and one of her entries is the Crappy Day Present backstory, plus instructions!

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Elsewhere:

On the baby name blog, one of the hardest naming issues I’ve ever attempted to answer: what to do when you’re marrying someone who has a hyphenated surname.

On Milk and Cookies: our favorite cheap but good brand-name stuff. Like, not generic, but not La Mer either. I’m taking notes from the comments section.

On the review blog: review of a custom-decorated (with stickers) toothbrush and toothpaste for kids, with a $100 Visa gift card giveaway. Through June 9th.

I have recently been plagued–PLAGUED–by spamments. There IS a spam filter on Blogger, and I KNOW spam filters are not an exact science and require delicate tweaking and will nevertheless make the occasional mistake—but I don’t see how ANY spam filter would let people BLATANTLY named “generic [drug for men’s Personal Regions created by scientists who could be using that time to create non-stupid birth control]” comment freely. The upside is that when I have to click over to delete the comment, I revisit old posts I forgot I even wrote. I’m thinking of it as a little Swistle Archives Tour.

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Henry, amazed: “I was born ON my BIRTHDAY??”

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I finished the fifth and final book of the Y: The Last Man series, and I was a little disappointed. I really really really liked the series, and I’m still glad I read it, but it feels like it was supposed to be a couple of books longer but then the budget ran out and they were instructed to wrap it up fast.

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I have been frustrated ever since we bought our minivan six years ago, because if there is enough weight on the front passenger seat, a “passenger seatbelt” warning light will flash throughout the entire trip. Sometimes even my purse will set it off. It only JUST occurred to me that I could just…buckle the seat belt. It sits flat against the seat, so it doesn’t keep me from putting stuff there.

My lip has an ouchie split place, and I think the blame can be placed entirely on opening my mouth wide enough for huge floofy bites of the kielbasa-and-greens salad, which I’ve been eating day after day as if the fields will run out of greens.

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I’m reading a book in which a new character was described right away as African-American. We’d met many characters already, and none of them had been described in corresponding terms. That is, we had not met “Liz, a short Caucasian girl of mixed European descent” and “Anne, a plump Japanese-American girl.” Just this one character, who was “Marissa, a tall and beautiful African-American girl.”

I am not usually particularly sensitive to these things, I don’t think: when someone else points them out I am immediately on-board, but often they go right past me without catching my attention. Well, unless they are blatant like in the 1960s Shocking Interracial Romance book my mother-in-law once lent me because it was her FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME (ick alert: she gave her children the same names as the two hot-romance main characters), where the author couldn’t mention the guy without using adjectives to describe his skin color.

But here’s a riddle I couldn’t solve, as an example of my usual lack of noticing: What is wrong with the sentence “He was in love with his neighbor’s wife”? Take yer time. (The answer is that unless his neighbor’s wife lives elsewhere, SHE IS ALSO HIS NEIGHBOR. He is in love WITH HIS NEIGHBOR. The sentence as written implies that the man of the couple is the only real neighbor.) [Edited to add: After all the comments about commandments/adultery connotations, I should add that the original puzzle was “He murdered his neighbor’s wife.” I changed it to be less gruesome, but perhaps I should have changed it to “He respected his neighbor’s wife” or something.]

But anyway, this one caught my attention and bothered me, but maybe it is because I felt like I needed to pee at the time. And also, I started this section with “I’m reading a book…” but actually I’m not reading it anymore, because it was making me feel hopeless and weary with all its cutting social critique that didn’t suggest any alternatives/solutions to what it was cuttingly criticizing.

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I dreamed last night that my mother-in-law was alive (although I would say it like this: “ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVVVVE!!!”) and visiting us and making arch remarks about things she thought I should take action on. I woke up feeling tired and headachy and full of suppressed impotent rage—but then relieved and grateful all over again. I really am very, very, very lucky to have been spared the path where she lived into her late 90s like her mother did, and I think of it often. And I’m using it as a reminder to try VERY HARD not to be a person whose death makes other people feel relieved and grateful and lucky, but if I keep being so irritable WE’LL SEE.

I am a little DISCOURAGED today. I have another UTI (and if you want to ask me why I always, ALWAYS feel the need to share this particular diagnosis with you, I have NO ANSWER to that question), and having a UTI is like being nauseated or like having a backache: it is really hard to focus on ANYTHING ELSE. And furthermore, when I feel like I badly need to pee, I also feel IRRITABLE, and I have been feeling that way since yesterday afternoon, so I have a lot of irritable stocked up.

I’m also discouraged because I thought THIS TIME the doctor would do something about this, because LAST TIME she said that NEXT TIME we’d do something about this, and I was hoping “do something” would mean “give you a fill-as-needed prescription”—but instead she did NOT do something about this and said NEXT TIME we would.

Furthermore, our insurance doesn’t want to pay for the entire cost of the lab work, and I don’t even blame them: according to the doctor, the lab work is to find out if the strain is resistant to the antibiotic they prescribed. I can see how that would be important in some situations, but in MY case, I think it’s one of the many markers of What Is Wrong With Health Care. It’s $450 for that lab work. I pay $150; my insurance pays $300—money it collected from us and from everyone else paying in. TO FIND OUT IF IT’S THE RIGHT ANTIBIOTIC. Which we could also find out for free, by waiting.

And it’s just ROUTINE, it’s just AUTOMATIC that this amount of money is spent, EVERY TIME I go in for one of these. I’m picturing that money as little dots on a map, little $300 symbols pinging pointlessly out of insurance accounts across the nation as each person with a UTI pees in a cup. And on a personal level, I am seeing those little $150 symbols pinging out of my bank account every time it’s my personal cup.

And perhaps you are wondering why I don’t just decline to have this test done, to which I reply with a blank look, because I am wondering what it might be like to live that way. I even totally worked up my courage once and resisted the lab work for several back-and-forth dialog exchanges with the doctor, explaining (1) that I thought the test was unnecessary and (2) that I was willing to take the risk of not having that test done and (3) that it was not an amount of money I considered unimportant, and the end result was that she continued to argue back at me and so the lab work was done, so I don’t really want to talk anymore about it and you are just going to have to chalk this up to a temperament component that looks unlikely to change. Maybe the day will come when I can handle more than three volleys of the ball while arguing with a medical professional about her medical opinions vs. my “this is what SEEMS like it would be the case” opinions, but that day was not today. Oh, I can do it in my head, sure! But whenever I imagine applying that script to an actual conversation with an actual doctor who will then respond to what I said rather than blushing and stammering and agreeing with my finely-put point, it does not work out.