Stacie over at The Twinkies had a clever idea: First write a nauseatingly perky paragraph about your life, the type of paragraph you see in alumni newsletters. Then write a franker, funnier one. Here are her paragraphs. And here are mine:

Swistle and Paul welcomed their fifth bundle of joy this May: baby Henry joins older siblings Robert, 8; William, 6; and twins Elizabeth and Edward, 2. Swistle is a stay-at-home mom and loving every precious minute of it! What a privilege to see the miracle of childhood close up, and in so many versions, and for so many hours a day! Paul can barely stand to leave for work in the morning, knowing that his happy family is farther behind him with every mile he drives.

If you people hold our old college friendships in any regard at all, you will get your asses on a plane and come HELP US. For the love of god, we are dying here. There are children on every surface, like those news stories you see about old ladies who have so many cats the entire house is disgusting. The squalor, it is unthinkable! The diapers alone will bury us! Bring food! Bring cleaning supplies! And bring a car, so you can drive away with one or more of our excess children! Toddler twins AND a newborn, do you understand what I am saying here??

Stacie is making this a new meme–and with new memes, the way to get them going is to threaten everyone with bad luck and/or ancient curses if they don’t participate ask everyone to consider themselves tagged.

To The Boys:

We totally notice it when you haul out “I love you” and “You’re beautiful” only when you are also panting and groping. We totally notice. Furthermore, we hate it. Get a clue, morons.

Love, The Girls

Huge Fisher-Price / Mattel recall due to lead paint:

http://www.service.mattel.com/us/recall/39054_IVR.asp?prod=

It took me a few tries to get to the site because it’s so busy right now.

I did this week’s second day of running yesterday, and what I would like to know is, where is my parade? There is nothing–NOTHING–quite like the smug and self-congratulatory feeling you can get from doing some truly revolting exercise. It feels GREAT! Today I am strutting around thinking, “I exercised yesterday! Yes indeed! That was me, out there exercising!” Even through this fog of righteousness, one thing remains painfully clear: it still feels better NOT to exercise. The after-exercise is great, but so is the after-going-to-the-dentist: if it feels so good to be DONE, we are not talking about an enjoyable experience.

The second day was worse than the first. My shins hurt from the first time, which tells me I’m probably doing something wrong, and they did not feel better when I ran on them. The weather was miserable. The boys were less enthusiastic. And in the back of my mind I was hearing all the people who said they ENJOYED it! And that it got EASY! But we did it, and I’m glad.

While I was counting out how many more minutes of hell remained to me, I had a thought. In the comments section, there was a discussion of how FAST you need to be running/walking. And what I think is that your speed doesn’t matter. I think all that matters is how trampled you’re getting. If you’re running along at 15 miles an hour but you feel all free and breezy (test: are you using words such as “enjoy” and “easy”?), you need to pick up your pace. If molasses is gliding past you but you’re seeing a tunnel of light and hearing beloved ancestors calling your name, you need to slow down. We will not be passing out medals for speed, only for misery.

Time for a diaper report! We went through 184 diapers this month, if I include what I estimate we’ll use for the rest of today. Henry wears size 1 diapers now, which are sold 56 diapers in a package for $5.75 (we use the Target brand). That’s 10.27 cents per diaper, and we went through 184, so that’s $18.90 to put him in disposable diapers for a month between the ages of 1 month and 2 months old.

It’s less expensive than last month, because last month he wore the newborn size, and the newborn diapers are more expensive per diaper.

Is he TWO MONTHS OLD? Yikes.

Will no one return this child’s stolen eyebrows?

Day One of the Couch to 5K running program, and I am off to a good start. It’s three days a week, so you wouldn’t HAVE to start this very day, but I did and I’m glad because it’s nicer to have six days to do two more days of exercise than having six days to do three more. Um, duh. So, here is my report:

Good: I did it, rather than finking out before even doing it one single time, which is what I’d feared might happen.

Bad: The whole “doing it” part.

Good: It was a good idea to bring Rob and William, because it was more like doing a difficult game: “Okay, now we run for 60 seconds! Okay, now walk for 90!” I think if I’d gone out by myself, I would have turned around after a few minutes and said forget this crap.

Bad: Not only did I have to keep my own motivation up, I had to keep THEIRS up. “Come on, you can do it! Come on, keep running!”

Bad: Also, they kept wanting to TALK when I was working on DYING. “How many more seconds?” they’d ask again and again during the minute-long runnings, while I was wondering if I should be trying to draw another breath or just lying down and skipping the whole breathing thing entirely. And then Rob would want to start complicated conversations: “How many calories do we eat in a day? And how many calories does this burn? So how many more do I have to eat when I run like this? And what percentage of…” Me: “Let’s … *gasp* … talk … *gag* … later … *pant pant*”

Good: The way Rob and William struggled and complained tells me they could really use the exercise too.

Bad: Aesthetic considerations aside, can it really be good for me to JIGGLE that much?

Bad: I mean seriously, my FAT hurts more than my muscles do.

Good: Doing it even ONE TIME makes me feel like I’m starting on the road to better health.

Bad: The road to health sucks, and is full of alligators and mud and burrs and taxes and dog poop.

Good: After running, I no longer felt like eating the Hershey bar that was waiting for me.

Bad: Nor did I feel like continuing to live. And when the will to live returned, so did the will to eat the Hershey bar.

Good: I shower in the evenings usually anyway, so I showered early (while Paul had to take care of the kids) instead of at my usual time (when it cuts into my kid-free evening).

Bad: Even after the cool refreshing shower, I still felt–and looked–as if something had stepped on me.

Good: With just one session of running, I have learned things about myself and about my body.

Bad: Those things are that I hate exercise, that I hate the WHOLE EXERCISE THING—the changing in and out of clothes, the sweating, the need to shower afterward, the stretching, the warming up and cooling down, ALL of it. Hate! it!

So, how about you? Did anyone do it today? It seems as if we ought to keep a tally or something: people who have done one session, people who have done two sessions—I won’t bother to continue that sentence until we know if we even need to go on.

I filled my prescription for the mini-pill, so the experiment starts tomorrow. You’ll have to let me know if I seem crazier or crabbier than usual.

Perhaps you are wondering, “Why the rush to fill it? Why the very first Sunday after seeing the OB?” Well, when Paul was headed for the grocery store, I asked him to bring me a pint of Dove “Give in to Mint” ice cream if it was still on sale–and he came home with four pints.

So. Hey. Do you realize that tomorrow is the first day of the first week of the running program we’re supposedly doing? I feel partly excited (something new! maybe slimming and energizing!), and partly heavy with dread (maybe unpleasant and exhausting! maybe yet another failure in the quest for health and fitness!).

The shopping part is fun, though. I have some nearly new all-purpose exercise shoes from the last time I kidded myself that I was going to exercise and I’m going to start off with those–but then if I do this for “awhile” (two weeks? three? a month?) I’ll buy some running shoes. But Rob and William had only slip-on shoes, so they needed something they could run in, and they need that for the new school year anyway. Today we went to Target (*choir of angels sound effect*) and I found a pair for Rob at 50% off and a pair for William at 75% off. “Woo,” and also: “hoo.”

Also, we bought a pedometer. We don’t NEED one, but….well, it’s a fun toy. And Rob learned that “10,000 Steps A Day” thing at school, so he is wildly enthusiastic about it and asked if he could have his own pedometer as a Christmas present, and then William asked if he could have one for Christmas too. That is a pitiful request. If this one seems good (it was $6-something, and maybe it’ll be craptastic and we’ll need one that costs a little more than that), I’m going to buy one for each of them.

I can already tell that this particular pedometer is not going to work for finding out how many steps I walk in a typical day back and forth between the recliner and the brownies: at around 200 steps I sat down for awhile, and when I got up it was over 300. I thought it was an anomaly, but then I went down to cycle the laundry, and when I looked again afterward it was over 500. Hmm.

I’ve been thinking about Devan, whose husband is in trouble right now for seeing dishes in the sink and asking her, “What did you DO all day?” Devan has a toddler and a newborn. Devan’s husband still has all his parts attached, but it may be just a matter of time.

What I’VE been doing all day is thinking about that question. I think of it as living on the list of questions and comments that are never under any circumstances okay to use. It doesn’t seem as if we would have to come out and say that these were Forbidden; it seems like at this point it would be understood by everyone in the entire human race that these are the things you say right before rotten produce starts flying through the air toward your face. And yet no.

So for the sake of those who are still struggling with this, claiming angrily not to be mind-readers, I think we should compose a cheat sheet: a list of all the things no one should ever, ever say. I’ve made a start on it:

1. What did you DO all day?
2. I work all day.
3. Is that on your diet?
4. Have you been putting on weight?
5. Sure, you could stand to lose a few pounds.
6. Is that what you’re wearing?
7. This isn’t rocket science.
8. I hope we can still be friends.
9. I love you, I’m just not “in love” with you.
10. I have a new co-worker—younger than us, but she’s already had a highly successful career as a porn star! Smart, too! We talked for hours today about [insert boring work problem here] and she was so interested and had such great ideas!

This morning had a moment so madhouse, I wasn’t sure I could pull through it without crying or screaming. The twins were in the tub, and Henry started crying and I realized it was time to nurse him, so I started taking the twins out. It’s a little tricky to wrangle them both out by myself, but it’s possible. Henry was really working himself up, so I worked fast getting the twins dressed. Then I picked up Henry—and my hand sent me an urgent message that I was not holding a dry, clean baby. He had blown completely through his diaper and outfit, and was sitting in a puddle in his new bouncy seat. And he was screaming so hard, and the bathroom still had pjs and wet towels and bath toys all over it, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to clean that up or stain-treat Henry’s clothes before he needed to nurse, and I was worried the twins were going to get into the mess on the bouncy seat while I was cleaning up a screaming Henry, and I was still unshowered and wearing my baggy sloppy pajamas which had (1) milk, (2) bath water, and now (3) diaper on them. Not a good moment, is what I’m saying.

Part of my crisis this morning was that the house seemed to have crossed a subtle line between its usual Friendly Squalor and a new state of Unacceptable Horror. In fact, after I decided to see what I could do to improve things, I wandered hopelessly from room to room, near tears, thinking it wasn’t even possible to get started. And my mother-in-law is supposedly visiting in October (this is Day 26 of her not telling us she’s coming).

But! I got a grip. And I started with the kitchen table, which I have cleaned before on this blog. It doesn’t stay clean because we don’t eat at it and it’s such a handy place to put things. This must change. For one thing, we need to start eating at it. For another thing, I can’t stand it the way it is.

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after:

Hi, table! Long time no etc.!

The tablecloth was ripped in several places, so I threw it out.