Today my desk was driving me nuts, but I didn’t feel like tidying it. I thought, “Maybe I’ll take a Before picture, just to tempt myself with the prospect of showing off any results.” It worked.

Here’s the desk Before:

Items found while cleaning:

• ribbons and paint from a kids’ Christmas project
• Rob’s Halloween mask
• two containers of pennies from when I was last on a diet (September 2006) (no, I didn’t eat the pennies) (I was using them to keep track of WW points)
• two Lynda Barry calendars I treasure and therefore allow to gather dust
• two enormous empty Altoids tins, saved because they seem like they’d be useful for something
• an empty pot of lip balm, saved in case I ever need a small container like that
• cat, dripping his fur into the back of my nice warm monitor
• the Where’s George? supplies (stamp and stamp pad) I lost several years ago
• the sensor/transmitter and long trailing wire for an indoor/outdoor thermometer we no longer have
• two lamps I thought were pretty, and bought, and have never used because it turns out I don’t need more light at my desk

And here’s the After:

Lamps gone. Cat shooed. Pretty nesting lacquer boxes (they’re red, pink, and orange–the colors don’t look exactly right in the photo) unnested and on display, instead of hiding behind the photo frames. Thick layer of dust vacuumed up.

Next up: the bottom shelves of the desk.

BAD NIGHT. First I ate a bowl of ice cream and crushed Oreos too close to bedtime, a delicious, delicious mistake. Then we got an email from Paul’s dad. It was his usual crap: one-third asking for reassurance that it’s okay that he’s been out of touch for nearly two years, one-third blaming everyone else (including us) for him being out of touch, one-third weird paranoid stuff about how he doesn’t update us on his life because people twist his words and he doesn’t know who he can trust. I find these infrequent emails adrenalizing. Half of me votes for fight (“Listen, bonehead…”) and half of me votes for flight (click delete and move on). My nighttime brain always votes for fight, and composes long and detailed emails.

It was clear to me that Benadryl was called for, and I took some. It was shortly after I did this that the twins started acting up. First one would cry briefly and go back to sleep; then the other would do the same. I got out of bed and went to the living room: I’m happiest if I just stay up to deal with sleep issues, rather than getting repeatedly yanked out of sleep. I stayed up for 2 hours. I went in a few times with the usual results: I soothe Elizabeth, she screams when I leave, she finally drifts off, Edward starts crying, Elizabeth wakes up again. Finally, finally, there was quiet. I waited ten minutes to be sure. I went to bed. The Benadryl had kicked in, and I went out fast.

Ten minutes later, both babies were crying. I handled it badly. I flung the sleeping cat out of my way as I got out of bed. I stormed into their room. I asked them what they thought the problem was. I checked their diapers once again. I offered them a drink once again. I slammed the baby gate AND the door on my way out. You can imagine how soothing and comforting this was to the babies. I stewed in the living room while they screamed. I wrote in my journal about how impossible it is to handle sleep issues: it doesn’t matter how many children I have, all I learn is that the issues usually have no one key to solving them, and that they usually resolve themselves after awhile, and that until they do resolve, everything I do will feel like a mistake and everything will feel like my fault, and some of it will in fact be a mistake and my fault, such as the door-slamming. This isn’t helpful when it’s 1:30 in the morning and everyone’s exhausted. Fortunately, the twins went to sleep shortly afterwards, and so did I–right in the recliner. I woke up a couple of hours later and went back to bed.

The best/worst part of the night was that I dreamed that John C. McGinley was my total boyfriend, and I was getting to pet his hair as much as I wanted to, which was a lot, but I kept getting interrupted in and out of the dream. In the dream: Oh, no, Rob is late for the bus! A baby is crying! No one’s had breakfast yet! Someone is here to talk to John! The phone is ringing! Out of the dream: “Mommy, I had a bad dream.” Baby actually crying. Cat sounding like it might be about to throw up. Cat trying to pick a door open.

When it was time to get up, everything seemed tired and dreary, and I wondered if I was even going to be able to get Rob off to school. I did all the things that can help at times like this. I turned on lots of lights. I dunked my head under the bathtub faucet. I averted my eyes from the mountains of laundry. I drank a big cup of water.

Luckily for me, it’s looking like the kind of day that’s going to go well. The morning routine went smoothly, and there’s a load of laundry in. I think I’ll bake cookies later with William, and then the house will smell all yummy, and also there will be cookies. My hair smells yummy because I used some of my carefully-hoarded Bath & Body Works lavender-vanilla shampoo last night. I have a bunch of yummy-smelling Yankee Candle candles I found at 75% off at Hallmark yesterday. I think I can guarantee a medley of yummy smells throughout the day, possibly in lethally bad combinations.

My, what a healthy breakfast I just had! Semi-Desperate Housewife put me in the mood for Grape-Nuts with raisins, and so I had a bowl of that and a glass of orange juice. While I was chewing (eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts is a physical and mental commitment), I was thinking about a diet I was on before getting pregnant, which didn’t allow cereals that had more than 100 calories per cup. Nor did it allow raisins or other dried fruits. Nor did it allow juice.

I’ll tell you this: I’m done with that kind of diet. A diet that doesn’t allow GRAPE-NUTS or RAISINS? My goal is “try to eat fewer boxes of Dove ice cream bars per day,” so I’m not going along with anything that says dried fruit has too much sugar and is off-limits. I understand that the diet writers don’t want people sitting down and eating a whole canister of raisins and wondering why they’re not losing weight on this stupid useless diet when they’re eating nothing but fruit, but binging on dried fruit is not my problem. My problem is broader than that, and involves foods that do not technically belong to food groups. Going from “non-food-group food” to “food-group food” is a big step for me. Eating Grape-Nuts and raisins is a very good thing indeed, and I don’t want to hear boo from a goose about it. Or no, wait: we say boo to the goose. Well, I don’t want to hear anyone saying boo to the goose about it, either. This is none of the goose’s business.

It seems to me that any diet requires a certain level of customization. I’ve had diets that allowed certain foods that, as it turns out, I can’t handle: if I have a little, I have to have a lot. So even though the diet permits it, I modify it and don’t allow that food. More often it’s the other way: the diet forbids certain healthy foods that I don’t think should be forbidden. If I find I’m struggling with the impulse to eat an entire box of Grape-Nuts at one sitting, I’ll reconsider my modifications–but until then, Grape-Nuts are a good food, and I don’t feel the urge to eat more than a serving of them, and I don’t crave them irresponsibly between meals, and so Grape-Nuts are allowed. Besides, I’m not on a diet right now anyway. So boo to you, diet writers.

Paul is getting sick again. He told me about four times over the course of yesterday evening that he was feeling funny, and then he said in a pathetic voice that he sure hoped he wasn’t getting sick, and then he asked me to feel his forehead and see if he had a fever, and then he went to bed an hour and a half early, and then he called out in a small weak voice asking if I could bring him another blanket, and he shivered as I put the blanket over him. At 3:30 in the morning he woke up his pregnant wife (that’s me, but I’m disassociating to lessen the emotional impact of the experience) to ask for acetaminophen. This morning he chose not to go to work (all together now: “Must be nice”), and now he’s moping around, drinking Gatorade (to replace all the electrolytes he lost by sleeping, presumably), lying down on the bed and groaning, and seeing if he can possibly choke down two of the muffins William and I made this morning. Sometimes he manages to bravely drag himself to his computer.

He’s been sick more often than the kids this winter, and this is my fourth pregnancy in which he’s spent almost the whole 9 months expecting sympathy FROM me without giving any TO me, and keeping me awake with his snoring and his groaning. As I understand it, there’s an “in sickness and in health” clause in our marriage contract—but as I also understand it, there’s an “until death do us part” loophole.

I had my 30-week OB visit today, and now I’ll be going back every 2 weeks instead of every 4 weeks. The nurse is going to call me tomorrow with my c-section date. They’re scheduling the c-section. Scheduling the c-section! I’m not sure you heard me: they’re scheduling the c-section. That means we are getting seriously close now.

I had to get up and go to the kitchen to look at the calendar and make sure I was right that I’m 30 weeks tomorrow. At 30 weeks, things start going very quickly for me. I was chatting with another pregnant woman who said she has the opposite experience: in the beginning it feels like she’s flying along, but then the last couple of months are an eternity. For me, I think it’s a matter of how big a chunk “one week” is of the time remaining. When I go from 8 to 9 weeks pregnant, I’ve reduced my remaining time by about 1/30th. Whoop-dee-do. When I go from 33 to 34 weeks pregnant, I’ve reduced my remaining time by about 1/5th. That’s significantly more exciting.

Listen, don’t quibble with me about my math. It’s nearly 11:00 at night, and I’ve just spent twenty minutes trying to figure out if I was supposed to make the fraction out of the 33-week-mark “time remaining” or out of the 34-week-mark “time remaining,” and I have furrowed my brow in vain because I still don’t know. Furthermore, I no longer care. I am pregnant and I am crabby, and you do not want to correct my calculations while I am still holding this well-sharpened pencil. Let’s just agree that I’m right in spirit if not in actual mathematical fact.

When you must go to the grocery store with toddler twins and a kindergartner and a huge round tum, because you are out of milk and have been out of milk for two days and things are getting desperate now that the bananas are gone too, it helps to know that the Dove ice cream bars are on a really good sale. And so are the Dove ice cream miniatures, which they should not advertise as having “only 60 calories each!” because that seems like a lot for such a small yummy bite, and also it is too easy to multiply by, for example, ten.

My mom has a good rule of thumb for deciding whether to go back to fix a store error in your own favor: if you would have gone back for the same error in the store’s favor, you go back; otherwise, you figure it balances out in the end and it’s not worth the confusion and trouble.

I like this rule of thumb because it isn’t too tight-assed. I’m not in favor of mincing back to the customer service counter to give them back the extra nickel and wait for my parade, nor do I feel as if every mistaken penny is a black mark on my conscience. I routinely let errors in the store’s favor slip past because it isn’t worth it, and so I am glad to see errors in my favor making it all even-steven.

In this particular case, I think the amount of money involved is very close to being right on the line, and so other things have to be taken into consideration in order to make the decision. If W@lmart had made this mistake, I’d be rejoicing that I was finally getting some payback for all the times the shelf price said one thing and the item rang up much higher, because they are always screwing me over, not to mention putting huge pallets in every possible throughway, and, if they run out of pallets, having clerks stand in the way, since the clerks are never running enough registers and never know the answers to customer questions and so have nothing better to do than stand in my way looking sullen.

But I have two Targets I go to regularly and both of them are completely awesome: great clerks who all seem like they’re working there part-time for the love of the job while double-majoring in business and helpfulness, customer service people who take back anything in any condition with the attitude that they totally agree with your decision to return it and don’t even need to hear an explanation, and so few wrong ring-ups I hardly bother to check my receipt anymore. So I have this feeling of wanting to do good by them, and that makes my decision for me: I WANT to give them the money for the earrings.

I still feel like a suck-up going to the customer service counter with this problem. I’ve worked a few different retail jobs, and every so often you get someone who wants you to correct an error in their favor and then, presumably, issue them a halo and thank them tearfully for renewing your faith in humankind. I wish there was a way I could pay the $3.74 without coming across this way.

And so I came up with a genius idea. What if I snuck the earrings into the store and then put them with my other purchases when I was checking out? That way if they did ring up at $14.99 (and you guys have me a little freaked about that possibility now), I could just not buy them. The only downside is if somehow I was caught with those earrings in my purse or something, it would look like I was shoplifting them, and my truth would not sound even one bit like actual truth. But I usually get a cart while I’m still in the parking lot (hard to lug twins without wheels); I could put the earrings in the cart at that point, semi-concealed by the diaper bag or something.

This plan solves all the problems: It allows me to handle this the next time I go to the store, without having to make a special trip. It means I don’t have to explain the situation to someone who’s going to look at me funny. It lets me avoid the whole “I’m so awesome to be doing this, please give me my medal now” problem. It dodges the “Oops, the earrings are $14.99 now” possibility. And it wipes away the potential bad-memory taint from the earrings. Perfect? I think so.

Two minor domestic triumphs:

1) Located Source of Mysterious Bad Smell. First thing this morning, I started encountering little air pockets of Bad Smell, mostly in the kitchen but also everywhere else. The usual culprits proclaimed their innocence: twins’ diapers were clean, kitchen trash seemed fine; the diaper pail, while not exactly springtime fresh, was within normal limits. I kept smelling something, though. Then, as I went to wipe up the twins after their breakfast, I found the problem: a nasty washcloth. A washcloth can turn on you like that. I spritzed the hell out of it with Febreze: when a washcloth smells that terrible, I like to do prep before it goes through the wash.

2) Used a $10 Off Coupon at Target. The challenge was to spend the necessary $100, but on things we would buy anyway. A coupon for $10 off $100 is good, but if I buy a bunch of pretty-sparklies and dishes and baby clothes we don’t need, it’s only 10% off—that’s hardly even a sale. If I buy diapers and dish soap and cat food, it’s a free package of diapers. I came home with the world’s most boring Target haul (paper towels! light bulbs!), but I used that coupon.

Hey, ethical dilemma: The other day when I went to Target, I got a pair of earrings that were 75% off—$3.74. When I got home and was looking at the receipt to see if I needed to save it, I noticed that the earrings were not on there. They were in my bag, but unpaid for. On one hand, it’s only $3.74, and I’m going to feel like a major kiss-up dork if I go to customer service and insist on paying. On the other hand, it doesn’t sit well with me to just let it go. Usually I wear new earrings the very next day, but I find that when I look at them, I think uncomfortably of how I—totally inadvertently—“stole” them. What would you do? I’ll tell you later what I’ve decided.

I really liked the suggestion some of you made about getting a DVD player for the trip I’ll be going on, the one where I will be trying to contain a toddler for hours and hours and hours and hours. I’d had it in my head that the only way to have a DVD player in the car was to buy a car with a DVD player already installed. Then, when you guys mentioned purchasing the DVD player sans vehicle, I looked into it and found that hey! you can BUY these things! Furthermore, my dad thinks he might be able to rig his portable DVD player somehow, and he has made it his mission to make something work. So—thanks! I don’t mind telling you I’m a big fan of television, especially in its child-muzzling capacity.

Anyway, this got me thinking about children’s DVDs, and what I could stand to be trapped in a car with. There are certain children’s shows that would motivate me to fling myself out of the moving car, thanking the gods of momentum and gravity for the privilege. The first few notes of Barney, for example, make me run for the remote yelling “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” to keep any sound from entering my brain. I don’t care if he does have the best clean-up song ever, he’s horrible, and so are those child actors. Someone must be holding those children’s parents at knifepoint right in front of them to elicit such strained and vigorously cheerful performances.

And Caillou. I don’t think I have ever heard such irritating whining. And Maya and Miguel, with their whole “He thinks with his brain! She thinks with her heart and with her sparkly twirling ponytail! Because she’s a silly girl!” And the newly-formatted Sesame Street, with “Journey to Ernie” and “Elmo’s World” taking over all the good stuff.

Well. I enjoy anything that gives me an excuse to buy things I’ve been wanting to buy anyway, and I was thinking this trip would be a good excuse to buy those “old school” Sesame Street episodes that have started coming out on DVD. I might also buy some Blue’s Clues. Do I have to specify that they’d be the ones with Steve? Of course they’d be the ones with Steve. We have a bunch of Blue’s Clues episodes on videotapes that are totally legal, legitimately purchased, not at all taped off the TV—but we have nothing on DVD. I wish there were more than just a couple of episodes per DVD, though. If someone were to tape onto their own videotapes, for example, they might get more like 15 episodes per tape. I’m just saying IF.

Successful and non-irritating DVDs we already own are:

1) Baby Bach, Baby Mozart, and Baby Beethoven from the some-good-some-bad Baby Einstein series. These are good because the background sound is mostly just classical music, rather than hyper piping voices or “the FISH song! Fish-fish-fish! fish-fish-fish! fish-fish-fish-fish-fish!” And I can look away from the screen when Little Miss “I Think of Myself as a Hand Model” is on, or when they’re doing the not-exactly-Jim-Henson-quality puppetry.

2) Schoolhouse Rock! I never saw these as a child, but Paul did, and I’ve really been enjoying the 30th Anniversary Edition he insisted we buy. It has all the songs, and you can watch them by category (grammar, government, etc.) or you can put it on shuffle mode so it plays them in random order. I’ve never been so close to understanding how our government, circulatory, and banking systems work. It’s way too old for a 2-year-old, but our resident nearly-2-year-olds don’t seem bothered by that—they like the animation and the music.

3) They Might Be Giants have a kid DVD called Here Come the ABCs, and it is great. We bought the DVD/CD combo pack so we can listen to the music in the car and watch the DVD at home. The kids like it, we like it, everyone’s happy.

Okay, tell me the children’s shows you hate, and the ones you love. My credit card is itching for action, and I have such a good excuse for using it.

Hey! Hey, I just swayed as I walked down the hall. Houston, we have waddling.