Okay! *brisk clap* New exercise goal! The new plan is to continue to exercise three times a week for about half an hour–but to gather a selection of choices so I will be less bored/discouraged. I’ve got jogging/walking as one possibility (not “to 5K” anymore, but just jogging and walking for half an hour), and then I added a Tae Bo DVD, and this morning I tried a new DVD: Crunch Super SlimDown Pilates Yoga Blend With Ellen Barrett. Sounds like a cereal, doesn’t it? Or a trail mix, maybe.

I’d never tried pilates, and in fact I was saying it “pie-LAY-tees,” so saying “pih-LAH-tees” feels like saying vahz instead of vase. I’d tried yoga only once, and quit after about 5 minutes of irritating music and irritating spacey white chick who was clearly under the mistaken impression that getting in touch with her ancient spiritual side made her less of an irritating spacey white chick. Um, no offense, irritating spacey white chicks!

This DVD was way better. The instructor is nice, and she didn’t irritate me, and her instructions were clear and had to do with the exercises rather than anything I was supposed to be doing with my mind or anything I was supposed to be “becoming one” with. You know how some instructors seem as if what they’re saying and doing represents the entire contents of their brains? Ellen Barrett seems more like this is her job and even her life’s work, but that she could probably participate in other activities or say other words.

The difficulty level was perfect: I couldn’t do all of the exercises, but I felt reasonable hope that I’d be able to if I kept working on it–and I could do enough of them that I didn’t feel like I’d wasted 30 minutes squinting at the screen trying to figure things out without getting any actual exercise.

I would like to point out that I am awesome for persevering with this, especially since my weight! it continues to climb! This is so wrong! I am clinging to what Black Sheep said in the comments section of the post on weight–that exercise is still good, and that it is still making my heart and lungs happy, even if it is making me spit death at the scale. Fie on you, scale! Pistols at dawn, you bastard!

Have you seen any of this Signing Time with Alex and Leah stuff? It is a huge gigantic hit at my house. I’d never heard of it, but when I went on a trip back in June, I needed something for Edward to watch on the hotel TV in the morning while I was getting ready, and I turned it to old reliable PBS, and this show was on–and pretty soon I wasn’t getting ready anymore, I was watching the TV with Edward.

I don’t know what it is about this show, but it’s so mesmerizing, and its characters so likable, that our entire family is now learning sign language signs. Elizabeth has a speech/articulation delay, and the signs have saved us from several difficult situations already. She doesn’t say the “ck” sound in words (she can say it separately), nor does she say the “r” sound correctly, so a word like crackers comes out more like “ah-ahs.” She was working up to a blue fit over it until she learned to knock on her elbow while saying “ah-ahs”: now we understand her immediately.

But that’s not really the main reason we’re learning it. The main reason we’re learning it is that it’s fun. Paul and I once tried to learn sign language (long ago, before we had kids), but we got so bored, and we didn’t retain the signs very well. This show is different, and we find we remember most of what we learn. Well, especially because the kids want to watch the DVDs a billion times.

The show isn’t on all the PBS channels yet, but the Signing Time site has a link you can click to see if it’s in your area. You can also order the DVDs, either on the Signing Time site or on Amazon.com. BE AWARE: the first three DVDs have been re-released to match the later DVDs, so make sure you get the “revised edition.”

My mom has a set of the flash cards and she says they’re GREAT: glossy and wonderful and easy to use. Our library has three of the board books and they’re great too: large for board books. I like the DVDs best, though, because I think the show is magic (um, not to oversell it or anything). The books and flash cards are good for reviewing what you’ve learned on the show.

Edited to add: the show/cards/books all use ASL (American Sign Language). Many “baby sign” programs use made-up signs and aren’t intended for use after the child is talking competently; the Signing Time stuff teaches real ASL, the kind a deaf person would actually use. Children can talk baby talk in sign language just as they do in spoken language, but the show teaches the real signs and then shows a bunch of kids and adults doing the sign various ways, from a babyish version to a kid version to a grown-up/master version.

Also, the show teaches mostly individual words, not sentences.

This is a fun test to take: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/. It tests whether you can tell a fake smile from a real one. I got 14 out of 20 correct.

Listen, just because the Millicent debate was a long time ago doesn’t mean you can’t still vote. But right now we have another name to consider. I realize I am not pregnant and so have no reason to be thinking of baby names, but it’s a hobby, okay?

All right, get ready to speak your mind on my new Baby Girl Name of Great Interest. I’ve been saying it again and again for two days now, and I think I love it. As with Millicent, this makes me feel a little shy about presenting it to you, since maybe you will say “BLEH! YECK! GROSS! Oh, I HATE it!” But bravely I tell it to you anyway: Beatrix.

Discuss.

You would think that, as a mother of five, I would be immensely relieved to have two of the five off to school all day. But I am not.

Part of it is nothing but practical: Rob and William can be given tasks as if they were little remote-controlled cleaning machines–albeit extraordinarily inefficient ones I’d return to the store if I’d bought them for this purpose. All summer I could say, “Get the dustbuster and vacuum under the high chairs” or “Put all those toys back into the playpen” or “Put this dishtowel in the laundry,” and they would do it. I must have been giving out orders casually all day long without even noticing: with Rob and William back in school, the floor is littered with toys and towels, cereal and socks. It’s oppressive and depressing.

Also, they voluntarily played with the twins, and they did it more than I’d realized, because now I’m scraping bored twins off every surface. Rob could even lift a twin out of a crib–so if Henry was nursing when Edward and Elizabeth woke up from their naps, Rob could go get the twins up and give them cups of juice. Now it’s a choice: do I listen to Henry cry, or do I listen to the twins crying? Choose your own soundtrack!

And Rob and William could be trusted to watch the twins for short periods of time, like when I needed to pee or when the laundry needed to be cycled. A few days ago, while I was changing Henry’s diaper, Edward somehow magicked out of the ether a brown permanent Sharpie marker and used it to color on my yellow recliner. Yesterday he did the same with a black Sharpie, and also crayoned a clipboard. He must be squirrelling away any unattended weapons of destruction, then waiting for his opportunity to strike.

But it isn’t just the convenience of having minions to do my bidding. Another part of it is something I haven’t experienced since William was a new baby and Rob was a toddler: the unpleasant feeling of being trapped in a house where no one speaks your language. Without me knowing it, Rob and William were fulfilling some of my need for sentient companionship, for people to talk to–even if all they were saying was “HE HIT ME!” “NO I DID NOT!” and all I was saying was “Settle down now, I mean it” and “You are TOO WILD, go to your rooms for fifteen minutes.” Now I’m here all day with people who can’t even tell me what they want, or understand when I tell them what I want. I feel like the only intelligent life on this planet, handmaiden to the apes.

my planet

Semi-Desperate had her cute cute cute baby boy! Go say congratulations!

I have been exercising for one month. I have done it three times a week, faithfully. I have died at least ten times. My posture is improving, and I feel new muscle-type feelings here and there. And I am UP TEN POUNDS from where I was a month ago. OMG NO PONIES.

Sure, I’ve eaten the occasional post-jogging pan of brownies. But before I started exercising, it was a post-pan-of-brownies pan of brownies, so it’s not like I’m eating MORE now. Brownies + exercise is better than just the brownies, RIGHT?

I’m not going to weigh myself for awhile. Is this because “health is what really matters, not numbers”? NO. It’s because if I know my weight is going THE HELL UP, I am going to stop exercising. It’s the NUMBERS I care about, not some theoretical “health” (huge air quotes). And while muscle may weigh more than fat, it doesn’t weigh TEN POUNDS more after ONE MONTH.

Also, who am I kidding? Clearly I am going to be weighing myself, like, TWICE A DAY. Because, holy crap! This situation must be closely monitored! A watched pot does not boil, and a watched scale had better not go up–unless it wants to go down, very quickly, in the direction of the pavement below the window.

Here is another issue: the day I started exercising was the day I started the mini-Pill. Shall we blame the mini-Pill? But then what if I go off it and the weight stays?

Whenever I am getting overwhelmed, and my voice is getting increasingly shrill as I tell Paul all the things that are overwhelming me, he quotes one of our favorite lines from The Simpsons:

Kent Brockman (news anchor): So, professor, would you say it’s time for everyone to panic?
Professor: Yes I would, Kent.

Paul condenses it down to “Would you say it’s time to panic?,” asked in a soothing, affectionate, backing-away-to-get-the-tranquilizer-darts tone of voice. Today I am leaning towards YES I WOULD, KENT.

Suddenly I am overwhelmed. Everything was fine, and now everything is not. I am so far behind on photos, I don’t want to think about it or talk about it, and let’s not think or talk about laundry, either. My friends are wondering if we’re still friends. My mother-in-law is coming in two months, give or take a month, and I don’t see any way to get the house cleaned for that visit. Books, movies, and magazines are piling up. My toenails need painting, a present needs wrapping, my hair needs cutting and coloring, brownies need to be made and eaten. I need to tell you about the dream I had about David Boreanaz. And now Henry wants to nurse again. YARRRRRGGG!

See? The toenail polish situation is dire. DIRE. Also, will someone please replace hideous plaid loveseat kthanx.

First, you must go congratulate Becky Fay, who had a BABY, a cute little NEWBORN baby who makes MY baby look like a huge hulking TODDLER, practically. Oh, newborns. You are like crack to me.

Today must be Try Something Different Day, because I have been MIXING IT UP all morning. First, I was bored by the idea of jogging (heck, I’ve done it TWELVE WHOLE TIMES, no wonder I’m suffused with ennui), so Rob and William and I did Tae Bo instead. That is to say, we flailed around with a Tae Bo DVD playing in the background–it’s difficult to get the hang of it at first. I used to do Tae Bo a number of years ago, but then during my pregnancy I switched to Denise Austin (“Come on, I KNOW you can do it! You’re doing GREAT! Can’t you just FEEL your muscles WAKING UP to a GREAT NEW DAY?”), who offers a milder, less sweaty workout. After William was born, I thought I should start Tae Bo again, but I couldn’t face watching that same one (“We did it in one unrehearsed take, so you can wincingly anticipate our mistakes every! single! time!”) so I ordered a different workout. And then never did it, not even once. Until today!

Then, during my shower, I tried something NEW with my shampoo and conditioning procedure! Check it: I used the L’Oreal Vive Pro Nutri Gloss shampoo (which I bought because the bottle is gorgeous pink and because Erica promised it would give me shampoo-commercial hair), but–wait for it–didn’t use the conditioner. Then, after I towel-dried my hair, I put in a small quantity of the conditioner as if it were a leave-in conditioner. I am waiting on the edge of my seat to see how this turns out. It could go either way!

THEN, I parted my hair on the other side! Yes! Normally I part it on the high left, and today I parted it medium right! I KNOW! But I said to myself, “Self, if you’re not living Xtreme, you’re not living.”

Several of you commented yesterday on our big-ass clock. It is indeed enormous. In fact, it is so enormous, we lived for months mentally changing the time by an hour, because we couldn’t get ourselves to take the thing down to change it for “fall back.” Fortunately, “spring ahead” came along and now the clock is right again! Problem solved! I said, PROBLEM SOLVED.

I read a lot of your blogs, and what I’ve noticed is that most of you have better decorating sense than I do. Furthermore, some of you are like, “I whipped up some new curtains this weekend!,” which is, to me, like saying, “I popped over to the moon for a minute!” And so it is to you I turn for advice, hoping that on your path to the moon you discovered other, simpler decorating ideas.

We live in a raised ranch. The picture below shows the inside of our unused front door, which is between the top floor of the house (the “where we live” part) and the bottom floor of the house (the “where we do laundry and store boxes of crap” part).

There is a shelf of videos and DVDs there right now, but that’s just to keep them out of the grasping paws of my fourthborn. They won’t live there permanently.

The trouble I’m having is with the little windows. I like the little windows, but we get strong, STRONG sunlight at the front of the house, and it heats that entryway to, like, a billion degrees. Plus, I just put some of the kids’ portraits on the wall (these are from before the twins were born, and I only just now got around to it), and the sun shines brightly upon them, and lo it worries me.

Some of you are probably thinking, “Duh, put up curtains.” But so far in my (admittedly lethargic) searches, I haven’t found narrow little curtains like that. They’re all regular-window-width. I didn’t see any short little curtain rods, either. (Oh, fine: I only looked at Target and Wa1mart. That’s still “searches,” plural.)

Maybe some of you are thinking, “Well, why don’t you sew some?” Ah ha ha ha. I can sew a button, but that is IT–as long as you don’t count the elastic-waisted four-tiered skirts I made in seventh grade home ec and would never be able to remember how to make now, even if anyone had a need for such a garment, which, surely not. And I don’t have a sewing machine, and if you ask if my mom has one I can borrow I will lie to you and say she most certainly does not. I don’t know how to use it anyway. And if you say I have to, well, I’ll just never get around to doing it, and the portraits will be sun-bleached and it will be your fault.

Is there a clever decorating trick I don’t know about for little door-flanking windows like these? Is there perhaps something clever I could do with the heaps and heaps of unused twin-sized flat sheets I’ve squirreled away for no other reason than not wanting to throw away large pieces of perfectly good hemmed fabric? Or do you know of a source for doorside curtains and cute little shortened curtain rods?

Keep in mind when making suggestions that I am an inherently lazy person. If the suggestion is, “I think there’s some sort of thing that you can put on windows to keep the heat out but still get the light in, but I don’t know what it’s called or where to find it,” my eyes will read “hard work” and skip on past. You would need to say it more like, “There’s this stuff called X and I found it at Y.com, and I’ve figured out the measurements you’d need and put it in your online cart for you and all you need to do is enter your credit card information and click the ‘buy now’ button.”