The timeline:

Roughly 2:30 in the afternoon: after digging around in the lint and crumbs for a paintbrush and finding also (among many, many, many other things) a video game cartridge, a DVD out of its case, two non-matching socks, and a sippee cup with very very old traces of milk in it, Swistle uses Twitter to complain:

8:45 p.m. Swistle checks Twitter and finds many empathetic replies to this complaint. It turns out Miss Zoot DOES HAVE a couch with no under. This does not surprise Swistle, who theorizes that Miss Zoot is probably magic and can also probably bend spoons with her mind and probably also has a computer keyboard that doesn’t collect brownie crumbs in the cracks. But then Arwen said SHE had a couch with no under TOO, and what are the odds of TWO people being magic right in a row like that?

8:50 p.m. Swistle tells this whole story to Paul. She says, “If I’d known such a thing as a couch with no under EXISTED, that would have been, like, the FIRST thing I would have looked for when we were couch-shopping.” Paul says, “You know, I wonder if the feet of our couch would just, like, come off.” Swistle is silent and dumbstruck.

8:55 p.m. Paul and Swistle go out to the living room. Paul tips the couch back, but has to HOLD it like that, at a tipped angle, because all the STUFF under it actually prevents it from tipping backwards all the way. This is when Paul realizes he is going to need tools, so Swistle has to go fetch them. Paul spends nearly a full minute explaining the appearance of a Special Crazy Tool he needs Swistle to find, until Swistle interrupts with “Do you mean an Allen wrench?” and Paul says “…Yes.” Marriage is neither a game nor a competition, but Swistle nevertheless makes an imaginary mark on her side.

Using the Allen wrench. Can this possibly work?

Yeah baby.

9:00 p.m. Paul says he can either put the foot back on and we can do this later, or we can clean out under the whole couch and then remove the other three feet right now.

9:01 p.m. Paul and Swistle are cleaning out under the whole couch, loading “Things that need to be put back in their homes” into one bin and trash in another, while Swistle uses the dustbuster for everything else and who cares if it wakes the children. When everything is cleaned, the couch can be put on its back.

Two feet off; two feet remaining.

The feet, on our coffee table.

9:20 p.m. A couch with no under, and the first day of the rest of our lives.

I am suddenly inspired to do some organizing/decluttering in the Gift Closet, which is not only a Gift Closet but a catch-all for a lot of things. It’s hard for me to tackle it because getting rid of stuff from there often means getting rid of NEW stuff, stuff I bought on GOOD DEALS! It’s disappointing to have something that seems like such A Find turn out NOT to be A Find after all.

I already did a few boxes-of-clutter giveaways, and I also donated spare toys (bought for birthday parties they never seemed right for) to a charity toy drive this past December. But now I feel ready to tackle the rest. The closet is in the same room as the computer, so I can document each thing as I toss it out, recycle it, or put it in the Freecycle pile.

1. five years backissues of Consumer Reports magazine, which I never reference because I look online, and the magazine holders that held them

2. two unopened packages of booklets that accompanied the handheld organizers we bought eight years ago, including two sealed-in-plastic booklets labeled “READ ME FIRST!”

3. set of very pretty satin padded hangers I thought I would want for myself but it turns out padded hangers take up a lot of space, so then I thought I’d save them for a guest room, but we don’t have a guest room, nor will we have one for a very long time if ever, and if we DO ever have one I will buy more hangers if I still want them

4. a pretty Pfaltzgraff holiday serving dish, bought as a teacher gift before I decided to only give gift cards, then saved for a couple of years in case another use occurred to me

5. seven board games we never, ever play

6. paperwork/boxes for the cellphones we bought in 2000 and no longer have

7. ten reusable bags, bought for a planned Earth Day giveaway that has failed to happen two years in a row because I keep not noticing it’s Earth Day until other people blog about it

8. bag of holiday clearance items for planned holiday giveaway that didn’t happen

9. several broken picture frames from when photos got knocked off the wall and I thought I’d glue the frames back together and get new glass for them AHA HA HA HA HA

10. the packet of scrapbooking stickers and papers that came with my 2009 Victoriana calendar and thought I might find a use for

11. two partially-used classroom packs of jackolantern/pilgrim-making kits, the kind where you assemble a bunch of flat foam pieces; someone gave them to us as a gift, and although I do have a lot of children, I don’t have 32 of them, and no one made more than three or four of each thing

12. package of OVER THE HILL candles purchased for a family member’s milestone birthday I then forgot to use the candles for

13. pile of paper-pad mousepads that seemed like such an awesome idea but I only ever use mine to start my pen so now they seem less awesome for giving as gifts

14. some gifts set aside for the mother-in-law

Things I dealt with:

1. put a bunch of “I’ll put these in the box later” packets of studio pictures into the studio pictures box, which used to have too much stuff on top of it to get into

2. hung up a small pretty plate my mom gave me for a reason I no longer remember

3. released into the household a number of craft kits and activities I’d bought “for a rainy day” and then never thought to give out when it was “raining”

4. put up on the wall some jungle wall stickers I wasn’t sure if I wanted to save for myself or give as a gift

5. released into the household a huge inventory of stickers I used to send to Make a Child Smile or my parents’ World Vision child

6. filled a box with Valentine’s Day stuff for a giveaway

7. took a Mother-In-Law Dishes mug intended for a giveaway and put it with the rest of the Mother-In-Law Dishes, which should probably be renamed now that there is no mother-in-law

Things that still need to be dealt with:

1. a 5-opening picture frame: I need to choose a photo of each of the kids, get the photos printed, put them in the frame, and hang the frame up

2. a cute print of a lamb and a ladybug I forgot I bought for William in his lamb-obsessed toddler years: I need to decide if I’m going to keep it, and if so get a frame around it

While I was working on this project, Henry:

1. used a (fortunately washable) stamp on the wall

2. shook a paintbrush loaded with (fortunately washable) paint

3. unwound a significant percentage of a skein of yarn

4. got painty (still the fortunately-washable kind) hands all over the kitchen counter and dishes

5. shook salt and pepper all over the counter and the dishes and the sink and the floor

6. dumped out the container of jackolantern-making kits, spreading the flat foam pieces far and wide

Okay! Time to improve ourselves for the sole reason that it was time to buy a new calendar!

Let’s pause and notice that I spelled calendar correctly without the spell-checker correcting me. It seems like it would be a 50-50 thing, but it’s not just that I can’t remember how to spell it, it’s that I remember how to spell it WRONG.

Here are my resolutions:

1. I am going to use my reusable bags more often. I am already doing pretty well at this, in that Paul does the grocery shopping and he always remembers to use them, so I am using them by proxy. And I just bought (him) a set of 5 reusable produce bags after I saw them on StyleLush. Also, I carry a single reusable bag in my purse, and sometimes I remember to use it, and the number of “sometimes” has been increasing. I’d like to continue to increase.

2. I liked Miss Grace‘s friend Molly’s idea about resolving to pass along good things we hear. As Miss Grace puts it: “The logic is that you ALWAYS hear about it when someone says something nasty about you, so why not make a special effort to make sure people hear about it when someone says something nice about them.” So, for example, if someone mentions in an email how awesome they think Jonniker is, I would not just say, “Oh, dude, seriously, I KNOW!,” I would also tell Jonniker about it, even if privacy prevented me from telling her who said it. My resolution is to think about this idea and its implications, and maybe try it out.

3. I’m going to try to think longer before buying something. I enjoy bargain shopping, and although this results in happy things like $2 shirts to clothe my many, many children, it sometimes results in twice as many $2 shirts as we need. It’s not like this is tearing our finances apart, but it does seem like it might be nice to leave some $2 shirts for other people to find. I’m going to try to AT LEAST think it over before buying it, rather than thinking that “excellent price” plus “we have a use for it” equals “duh, buy it.”

4. I’m going to drink champagne more often. That stuff is delicious.

5. I will at least OPEN my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Workbook for Dummies to the page where I left off. I don’t know why I stopped reading it when I was finding it so useful (“I can PREFER that X is the case, but I can’t DEMAND it”), but I can’t seem to get back to it and it’s been MONTHS.

6. I’m going to memorize and think about a quote I just read at Kate‘s place: “Don’t be afraid of failing; be afraid of succeeding at the wrong thing.” There are things I sometimes feel pressured to succeed at, but this reminds me that success in and of itself is nothing to strive for or be praised for: it has to be something that was GOOD TO DO.

7. I’m going to throw out the lotion I don’t like and replace it with the kind I do like. We are talking about one of those huge bottles that cost $5, so the investment is not worth holding onto year after year.

8. I am going to copy The New Girl‘s decision to avoid avoidable jackassery.

What did you resolve? I might steal one of yours and add it to my list.

So! *clap clap!* What have we learned from the events of the last few days? We’ve learned that if you’re thinking of triumphing over your anxieties about how others view your body and letting people know what you look like, DON’T! May I suggest you instead talk about baking or children or knitting or really ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL?

Today is New Year’s Eve, and I GREATLY ENJOY New Year’s resolutions. It is a great sadness to me that good ones are so hard to think of. I mention this every year, I think, but one of my favorite resolutions ever was when my friend Firegirl and her husband resolved to choose a scent for their household (they chose vanilla). My favorite of my own resolutions was when I resolved to spend the year mock-playing the stock market to see if at the end of the year I wanted to invest real money.

Last year I resolved to learn how to spell calender calendar and lavendar lavender, and as you can see there was a bit of unsuccess on that front. (Wiseass fifth grader: “Well, maybe you should have TRIED to learn them.”)

I also resolved not to press down so hard with my pen, and I DID try, but I think the way I hold my pen thwarts me.

I resolved to USE (rather than HOARD) the pretty, Swistle-colored, CRANE stationary my brother and sister-in-law gave me for Christmas, and I did! I didn’t use it for every single care package, but I used it for most of them.

I resolved to consider buying myself the Bath & Body Works lavendar lavender-vanilla condition that no one was buying me as a gift despite MANY HINTS, and that now was available only via eBay, which is such a pain to deal with. I went one step farther: I not only considered it, I bought it.

What did you resolve last year, and how did it turn out? If you post on the topic, leave a link!

Tomorrow: 2010 resolutions, assuming I can think of any.

We are probably not in the mood anymore to talk about Christmas card scoring, but I wanted to show you this card I got from one of my friends:

I think it’s the best Mary/baby card I have EVER SEEN. I find it so TOUCHING, and it seems so REAL. It makes me think of Mary as an ACTUAL PERSON who had an ACTUAL BABY and SNIFFED HIS NECK FOLDS.

I think I accidentally gave the impression on my Christmas card scoring posts that I was opposed to RELIGIOUS cards, but HEAVENS NO. It’s PREACHY cards that get huge deductions, and preachy letters, and an overuse of the word “blessings,” but RELIGIOUSNESS? No. Many people celebrate one of the holidays PRIMARILY AS a religious holiday, so receiving religious cards seems absolutely appropriate. (Preachy, though, there’s no excuse.)

I have a lot of fun card-shopping with my mom each year. She’s Christian, so she’s always on the lookout for good religious cards of the Christian variety, and she’s much pickier than I am about it. Very occasionally, I’ll weed out one she likes (this year there was one I thought was too pointed in its wish that the recipient have an “open heart”), but generally it’s more likely that she’s rejecting the ones I find as being too preachy or lofty or trite or theologically shaky. It’s a fun quest. There is laughing, and there is reading aloud.

ANYWAY, we’ve seen and rejected MANY a Mary-and-child card. This year we rejected one on which the poor baby Jesus was buck naked and chilly-looking, with nary a swaddling cloth in sight. Others make the scene look as if it took place within the shining golden gates instead of in a small grubby barn. Others show what my friend calls a “Mary with attitude,” where she appears to be SO OVER this whole thing.

This one looks as if it were pre-electrical lighting, and the baby is snuggled up in sufficient swaddling clothes. It’s great. It’s by Christian Inspirations, and I was going to link to their site (file under “Links You Did Not Expect to See on Swistle’s Blog), but their url leads to one of those “placeholder” sites that tries to sell you things it guesses are related to the site you were trying to find, when the site you were trying to find no longer exists. So, sorry, you’re stuck with Attitude Mary or Nakers Jesus.

The Hershey sweepstakes [blog deleted, so link deleted] ends on New Year’s Eve and I’ll be picking a winner for the $100 Visa giftcard. Cookies = yummy. Money in time for holiday bills = nice.

Sahara asked why I chose to come out at all, and although right at this minute my response is “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA I DON’T KNOW, IT WAS THE STUPIDEST THING I’VE EVER DECIDED TO DOOOOOOOOO!!!!!,” my real response is that I was finding myself reluctant to post photos of myself or to meet any of you in person because I was worried the plus-size thing would come as an unpleasant surprise to you. When I realized this was causing me anxiety and preventing me from doing things I wanted to do, I decided OUT WITH IT.

For example, here’s the photo I wanted to use to illustrate the post about Rob teaching me to knit. I think it’s a super-cute picture but I couldn’t use it because then you’d knowwwwwwww:

Plus, then you’d see my unwise choice of hair dye. Sometimes trying to change nature doesn’t work out very well.

Now I have a question for you: how late should a child be allowed to sleep in on a day when there’s no particular reason to get up? How late did your parents let you sleep in? My eldest, who now qualifies as a “tween” I think, is still in bed at almost lunchtime. This is somehow more painful when the other children have been up since 5:30.

Last night was the kind of night where I lay awake making myself feel sad about how awful it would be if for some reason we lost all the photos we had of the children. Productive! Then I fell into a headcold kind of sleep and dreamed that I was arrested and put in jail because I saw a man in his underwear.

One of the best presents I got for Christmas was the gift of anticipation: my brother and sister-in-law gave me a gift certificate for airplane travel. A trip to see Niestle! …And my brother and sister-in-law and other sister-in-law.

Speaking of which: what relation is my sister-in-law’s sister to me? I think the official answer is “She’s your sister-in-law’s sister,” but I think that’s kind of BULKY. I suppose I could call her by her NAME. But I’d like to also call her my sister-in-law, as I did in the paragraph above. I don’t have any sisters, and it would please me greatly to have some lawfully-contracted sisters. I think “sister” is a very pretty word.

Elizabeth, age 4 and not privy to discussions about family planning, said to me out of the blue the other day, “If you want another girl, you should have one.” Me: “…!”

Rob, age 10, after seeing Niestle for the first time this Christmas, said, “I think we should have another baby. I forgot how cute they are.”

I think, though, that I have finally come to terms with the idea of not having more babies, to the point that I am looking forward to some aspects of it. It helps that Henry is such a stinker. He is the stinkeriest of all my children. With sparkling eyes and merry mouth he will fling a box of toys at the Christmas tree, climb on the counter and plug in the coffee pot so that it makes a terrible singed smell, step in the cat water, step on an open book so that the pages crinkle and rip out, color on the walls, stuff a handful of someone else’s candy into his mouth and run away, sneak into the bathroom and repeatedly flush the toilet, climb into his brother’s upper bunk and then fall out.

Sadly for his future character, we all think he’s hilarious and adorable.

Coming out as a plus-size person is a challenging and upsetting thing to do, with many unpleasant repercussions.

The main problem is that body size and shape are not yet widely considered to be something we’re born with. People who are born thin are given credit for it and take credit for it—even if what they consider to be their body-maintaining efforts wouldn’t have the same effect on others. People who eat enough to maintain their non-thin weights are considered to be overeating, and the overeating is considered to be why they’re non-thin. And because a small percentage of people who were born non-thin have managed with disproportionate and unceasing effort to make limited changes to limited aspects of their shapes, it’s widely thought that all people can be born thin if only they cared about their “health.” Next, perhaps, doctors will recommend that people who are too tall should have height-loss surgery. People who are too short will be advised to use heel supplementation devices to help them achieve a healthy height. Charts showing healthy height ranges will be posted prominently on doctor’s walls. Really we are just concerned about the non-ideally-heighted person’s HEALTH.

Another problem is that once a person is known to be plus-sized, his or her opinions about weight, diets, exercise, eating, appearance, etc., are forever and completely dismissed. Does a plus-sized person object to a friend’s self-loathing comments? The plus-size person is obviously jealous, and has Body Issues they’re projecting onto the friend. Does a plus-sized person think there are goals and achievements in life more worthwhile and laudable than being thin? The plus-sized person is just trying to feel better about herself and her failures to achieve thinness. Does a plus-sized person object to what she considers an offensive and disgusting cultural attitude toward body size? Well, of COURSE she does! Does a plus-sized person consider herself to have healthy eating/exercise habits? She is wrong. Does a plus-sized person feel sick when she sees articles praising people who are responding to social pressures by eating 1100 calories a day and exercising 2 hours a day? Body issues. Jealousy. FATNESS!

So I am painfully aware that by allowing you to know more information about the size and shape I am, I have potentially dramatically changed your feelings about me and the things I have to say. Now when I talk about baking, the baking is why I’m so PLUS-SIZED—even though if I were thin and liked to bake, no one would link the baking with my body size. Now if I complain about cultural problems, I’m jealous/fat/issued. Now if I worry about a friend’s exercise and eating habits, I’m jealous/fat/issued. My opinions on such subjects, which would be listened to if my body were a different shape and size, will be used to attack me, my “health,” and my mental condition. Only thin people are mentally healthy.

I’m tall. I’m Dutch. I’m light-skinned. I’m straight. I’m female. I’m narrow-shouldered and long-torsoed. I’m plus-sized. These are all characteristics on my DNA. It’s upsetting and disturbing that certain characteristics on the DNA, such as sex, sexual orientation, and skin color, have, over time, been used for discriminatory purposes—and that there’s very little reason to hope that anything will ever change about weight attitudes.

The upside of coming out as a plus-sized person is that a person’s nearest and dearest are not surprised or affected by the news.

[Clarification: I put this in the comment section, too, but it’s not likely to be seen there. I’m DEFINITELY NOT saying EITHER that change is not possible OR that lifestyle doesn’t contribute to body size—I thought both those things were clear, but clearly not. However, I do think that DNA affects what you start with, what it is possible to end up with, and how much effort it takes to get there. The amount of time and effort it takes me to be non-plus-sized costs me more than it’s worth. For another person, the price might be lower, or worth it; this is a way in which we are different.]