As of yesterday, we’re officially in my sister-in-law’s “due month” (38-42 weeks)—which is the term my first OB used in a futile attempt to keep her patients from focusing on the due date. All it does for me is give me up to TWENTY-EIGHT days to think “BABY? BABY? BABY? BABY? BABY? BABY?”

On one hand I don’t want to try your patience by having a contest so soon after all the giveaways. We are not some sort of daily sweepstakes blog. On the other hand, I’m jittery and I’m looking for distractions and I’m thinking a lot about the BABY? BABY? BABY? and it’s fun to make care packages, so here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to play a game I love, which is called “Guess the Birth Date.” (You may think you can also Guess the Rules, and you would be right.)

Guess the day my very first NIECE! will be born. If more than one person guesses correctly, I’ll pool the correct guesses and choose one randomly. The prize will be a Happy Niece Day Celebratory Swistle Care Package, contents as yet undetermined. A little spruce tree kit? An owl notebook? Lip balm? A monkey apron? Mint brownies? Goodness knows! But for sure it will include a small toy chicken for The Chicken Game, because Dr. Maureen introduced me to it (the game and also the chicken, whose name is Mr. Pickles), and you may want to play too. I also might send you the 2009 dishtowel calendar I just bought two of, because I love mine far more than I ever expected to love a dishtowel calendar, and perhaps you will feel the same way.

Here are some details you may find useful in coming up with your guess, now that you’re all hot to win that dishtowel:

1) The due date is February 24th.

2) This is my sister-in-law’s first baby.

3) Her OB has already warned her that she (the OB) doesn’t like to induce until 1 or even 2 weeks past the due date.

Okay, now guess! One guess per person. The deadline is the birthdate.

I had a surprisingly enjoyable trip yesterday morning to one of those places that sells bird feeders and small trees and potting soil and flower pots and big bags of powdered manure. It’s not one of my usual haunts, but you remember my little spruce sprouts (scroll way down on that one to see their baby picture) that were getting so big I was going to need to buy them their own pots soon? Well, the day had arrived. They’d ceased to thrive in their cramped little shared starter pot, and it was time for a transfer. So that’s what I was doing at the seed-soil-manure store: looking for spruce real estate.

One reason the errand was so enjoyable is that I was there without anyone else: my mom took the three littles for the morning, and the two bigs were at school. I just kind of BROWSED AROUND, without having to tell anyone not to eat the manure. I spent a long time considering various flower pot possibilities, and the only one making alarming ceramic-clinking sounds was ME.

I bought four cute little pots with attached saucers. It was difficult to choose the colors. There were three pink ones, one yellow, one blue, two light green, and three speckled yellow. I tried various combinations. I wanted BOTH yellows, but they clashed, and not in an ugly-chic way but in a way that made both colors look bad. There wasn’t four of anything, nor did “one each of four different colors” look good in ANY combination. Finally I got two speckled yellow and two light green and felt well-satisfied. —Ha ha! I’m totally lying. I’m second- and third- and FOURTH-guessing the decision, fretting about maybe making another trip to the store to reconsider options. I LOVE the two speckled ones: they look just like pear skin. But the light green ones, I’m not sure about, and I’m not sure how well they go with the pear-colored ones. I wish there’d been two blue ones, or four speckled ones.

You can see their old cramped apartment in crayon green on the left, and their new swanky digs on the right. Also, I hate to embarrass the plants, but look at the length of those ROOTS. I have a feeling the new homes will only be temporary. I wonder when baby spruce trees can be transplanted outside? Probably not when they’re still small enough for the lawnmower to run over them.

Oh hai! Remember the one last giveaway, for the Rachael Rossman painting? Me, too, suddenly! The winner is Erin of Mama Said No!. Yay, Erin! I’ll email this evening to put you in touch with Rachael!

A few people emailed me to find out how much the name paintings cost if you DON’T win a contest, and I emailed Rachael and she says they’re $5.00 per letter. You can email her at RachaelRossman at earthlink dot net for more info or to arrange an order.

OH HEY!! GUESS WHAT I AM DOING?? THAT’S RIGHT I AM DRINKING COFFEE!!

I am trying to learn to like it black, which—character-building, or exercise in futility? It’s not so much a NUTRITION thing, although my “coffees” were getting to be more and more like heated, melted, coffee-flavored ice cream, as it is a CONVENIENCE thing. It is a fair amount of fuss to mess around with….okay, fine, so it’s not all that much fuss to spoon in some flavored coffee creamer. But I was also adding about 1/3rd mug of milk, and I heated that separately in the microwave first, nice and hot but not so hot that it boiled and got an icky skin on it, and then I added the coffee, and then the flavored coffee creamer, repeat for each cup, TRUST ME IT WAS A LITTLE FUSSY.

Seems like we should make some small talk to catch up. Did you, uh, have a good weekend? I DID NOT. I was in a crappy mood for some reason NO NOT PMS, JUST BECAUSE I AM “EXPECTING A VISITOR” DOESN’T MEAN I “HAVE PMS,” and in fact finally I decided that if I was going to feel so foul anyway, I might as well get some HOUSEWORK done. So I…well, I MOPPED. The FLOORS. And I CLEANED THE TOILET.

And of course everything is already dirty again, which just proves my usual contention that cleaning only leads to more cleaning, and that not-cleaning makes more logical sense. But, fine, the top of the toilet tank is still clean, and that does look pretty and shiny I’ll admit. And the floors do FEEL a little nicer under the sock feet. And it was awesome that RIGHT AFTER the floors were dry, the cheese slid off an english muffin pizza onto the floor, and I just picked it up and put it back on the pizza. For about one full minute there, YOU COULD EAT OFF MY FLOORS. And one of us DID! (Not me, though. I gave it to one of the kids.)

Beth writes:

I’m particularly interested in your ongoing contemplation about family size/spacing. I have one perfect (I think) little girl and I think my husband and I feel DONE! I’ve never particularly wanted a big family, and now that she’s here. . . we just don’t feel like we’d like another. We feel complete and well balanced and happy.

Of course this solicits many negative comments from friends and strangers alike, and I wonder if you might ask your readers sometime how they feel if they either are only children or if they have only children. . .

I’d like to hear some positive stories about “only-ies”. . .we feel fine about our choice, but it’s tough sometimes to hear about her “need” for a sibling!

This is such a great idea. I, too, would love to hear Happy Only stories. I hear a lot of negative feedback on my end of the family size spectrum, and I know the only-child peeps get a lot of negative feedback on their end of the spectrum, too. Socially acceptable family size seems to be “No fewer than 2 children, no more than 3 children.”

So let’s hear some GOOD STUFF about having just one child, or about being the only child. And I’m hoping we can do it without it turning into a bashing of OTHER size families.

As promised yesterday, we’re having one more giveaway even though the CPSIA scare has been postponed. I was really glad that the donor was willing to still give this prize, because it’s such a fun one: the artist Rachael Rossman has offered one of her Name Paintings! If you read Dooce, you’ve seen Rachael’s work there.

I think this is a PRETTY SQUEEISH prize, and I don’t know WHY I even DO these giveaways when all they do is make me ENVIOUS of the winners. But your happiness is my happiness, etc., etc., so let’s do this thing!

The prize is one Name Painting, with, obv, your choice of name. (Tease: the real name of one of my kids is one of the samples.) She’ll paint it to match room decor and interests, too, so, like, you can do a kid’s name in pinks and princesses or in greens and sports or in pinks and sports, or whatever. You could also do it with a surname—it seems like that would make a good gift for parents or grandparents who are hard to buy for. Maybe not in the princess theme, then.

To enter, leave a comment on this post before Sunday, February 8th, at 4:00 p.m. U.S. Pacific time. (Need something to say? You could guess which name is the one that’s the name of one of my kids, but I’m not saying if you’re right or not so that’s kind of an over-tease and maybe you just want to say your favorite color instead.) I’ll choose one random winner to envy.

Oh, whoops, I forgot to draw winners for the second CPSIA giveaway! Part of the reason is that we got a Wii Fit, and I have been VERY BUSY voluntarily allowing a cyber-character to ask me passive-aggressively, “Doesn’t it feel good to use muscles you don’t usually use?” And I’ve been busy feeling crabby every time I look at the little Mii person representing me, which the game has kindly fattened up to my “real” proportions, as opposed to the proportions I gave it when I designed it, making as it did so a little sound effect like in old comedies when two fat men bounce tummies. Thanks, Wii Fit, for keeping me honest! Also: see you in hell!

And I’ve been a little distracted because of THIS: the whole CPSIA thing has been kicked a year into the future! And perhaps by then it will, you know, WORK RIGHT. Or else I’ll meet you back here and we’ll do some more indignantly supportive giveaways, how about that?

And now the third CPSIA giveaway has ALSO ended, so we have tons of winners to pick! Random number generator, TO MY SIDE!

The winner of the Amy Quarry giveaway is Cheryl! Cheryl, I’m emailing you and Amy to put you guys in touch.

Now we need THREE winners for the Charming Maeve contest. The three winners are:

1. Shannon of Living in the Grey!
2. Chez Bacon, of the January 29, 11:09 p.m. comment!
3. Becky, of Totally Serial!

Shannon and Becky, I yoinked your email addresses off your blogs already. Chez Bacon, email me (swistle at gmail dot com) and I’ll put you in touch with Charming Maeve.

Soon I will be posting one more contest for a giveaway I can’t resist doing even though the CPSIA crisis is temporarily averted, because I love the prize so much and the donor has agreed to give it away ANYWAY which is really nice of her. But this means doing more typing, and the kids will be up in MINUTES demanding cereal and clothes and combing and so forth, so that will have to wait for now.

In the meantime, Carrie at Barely Controlled Chaos is doing her own CPSIA giveaway for her Crafty Tuesday feature, and you should totally check it out because I saw her stuff and it is KEY-YOOT. She makes reusable shopping bags and kidlets (kid-sized reusable bags) that make you feel like getting all environmental so you can be cute too.

Every morning I get out the kids’ vitamins. All five kids take a daily multivitamin, and Rob also takes a calcium supplement because he doesn’t drink milk. I’d already streamlined the process somewhat by using the same bottle for anyone who takes the same dose: for example, Elizabeth and Edward both use Elizabeth’s prescription until it runs out, and then they both use Edward’s. Rob and William do the same. Henry is the only one who doesn’t share.

So that’s…four little bottles every morning, which is not exactly the sort of chore that RUINS MY LIFE, but it’s a minor hassle and I have found a pleasing improvement to the situation: I use one of those weekly pill reminder boxes. Last night I put in each compartment two square vitamins (E and E’s), two round vitamins (R and W’s), and a calcium supplement (R’s). This morning I opened the M compartment, tipped the pile into my hand, and went around the table handing them out. Henry’s doesn’t fit into this system yet because his is a liquid, but soon he’ll take a chewable and fit right in with the rest of the crowd.

Not only is this a little quicker, it solves the fuss over who gets which color vitamin: they get whatever is in the box, and I made everyone’s the same color for each day: four orange vitamins for today, four pink ones for tomorrow, etc.

That reminds me, though, of something we started doing early on to reduce the color-choice fuss. When Rob was a toddler, he wanted to CHOOSE, but that led to problems with (1) running out of one color before the other colors, and (2) long agonizing decisions while I stood there holding out my hand with the vitamins in it. So what I started doing was dumping out a little pile of vitamins into my hand, and giving him the one there was the most of. If I had 4 purples, 2 oranges, and 1 pink, he got a purple. If I had the same number of two different colors, I’d dump out a couple more vitamins, or put back a few. This method encourages the colors to come out even, too, which is pleasing to those of us who are firstborn and mathy.

The first giveaway has ended! The winner of the first giveaway for a Whimsical Walney shirt is Chaya, who left the January 27, 2:13 a.m. comment. Chaya, email me at swistle at gmail dot com and I’ll connect you to Whimsical Walney.

Dr. Maureen is showing her pay-it-forward loot and starting a new contest, and because I am SO DIM, I forgot to post about this until the DAY the contest ends, but Maureen is merciful and says she’ll accept comments even after the deadline. Well, not FOREVER. But within reason. And I REALLY suggest you enter, because one of the things in the prize package is going to be a Small Secret that we will be using soon to play a game! And that’s all I’ll say for now.

This is one of those “All the coffee in the world couldn’t…” mornings. But I’m an optimist, so I’m trying the coffee anyway.

I’ve started getting up BEFORE Paul so that I can have some hot water. Upside: hot water! And not having to rush through my shower because Paul used 35 minutes of our shared 40 minutes of getting-ready time! Downside: getting up at five o’clock in the morning, and having my early rising wake the children Every Single Time, so that by eight o’clock I have already logged THREE HOURS of Cherishing Every Moment. Well, 2 hours and 45 minutes, since Paul is technically in charge of the children while I’m getting ready.

It’s unpleasant, and I haven’t adjusted yet to losing the 45 minutes of sleep, but I know, I know, some of you would consider five o’clock SLEEPING IN, and also it’s worth it to avoid starting every day trying to figure out whether my husband doesn’t love me or if he’s just an inconsiderate jerk.

I’m still eating baked oatmeal nearly every morning, and this has led to a canned pineapple kick at our house: the recipe only calls for a little bit, so I was having the kids help me finish off the can before it went bad, and now they’re eating canned pineapple as part of their food rotation. And by the way, not to embarrass anyone, but a Certain Baby has had Certain Issues very much assisted by the addition of pineapple to his diet.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the pineapple. Canned pineapple is packed in unsweetened pineapple juice, and do you know I was POURING IT DOWN THE SINK? I just wasn’t THINKING about it. I’m used to canned fruit being packed in syrup, I guess, and I’m used to draining cans of tuna, legumes, etc. But pineapple juice is YUMMY and made of JUICE! And I have a Certain Baby who is supposed to drink more juice! And also I will note that SOME people enjoy the taste of pineapple juice mixed with vodka after a long day. And stores SELL pineapple juice! For money! But you get about 6 ounces of it FREE in a can of pineapple! This has been a very exciting discovery.