There are few things as maddening as a confusing problem in the middle of the night. Periodically, maybe every four to six months, our thermostat does this: “Click click. *pause* Click click click. *pause* Click click click click click click click click click click click click. *pause* Click click click click click click click click click click click. *pause* Click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click”–where each click is, individually, the sound the thermostat normally makes when it cues the furnace to come on or shut off. Meanwhile, the poor furnace is attempting to comply with the thermostat by swoofing on and then almost immediately turning off, and then swoofing on again, and then turning off.

Why is the thermostat doing this to us? Our loose working theory is that it happens when the batteries get low. We have to believe this or we will go mad, because clearly the actual explanation is that the thermostat is messing with us. This clicking thing only happens in the middle of the night, never in the day. Also, the thermostat has a “low battery” warning message, and we have seen that before, but it is not on before or during this clicking problem. Nevertheless, when it is 2:00 in the morning and the clicking and the swoofing are happening, I always change the batteries. Then I lie wide awake in the darkness, waiting for the clicking and the swoofing to continue or to stop.

Here is what that wily thermostat does then: it continues to click and it continues to make the furnace swoof, but it does it much less often. So then I think, “Well, I did just get those batteries out of the unheated basement. Don’t batteries work less well if they’re cold? Maybe they just need to warm up. It’s not clicking as much. I’ll just wait and see.” I think this way not because I am a woman of extraordinary patience who can take a “wait and see” attitude even at 2:00 in the morning, but because I am out of ideas. Changing the batteries is all I’ve got.

These are the times when I could seriously kick Paul out into the dark, monster-ridden night. Why is he sleeping through it? When I change the batteries, I have to go creaking down the stairs, and creaking back up. I have to turn on the hall lights. I don’t technically have to open our bedroom door wide to let the light wash over him while I do it, but I do–just to include him in my life. He snores on. I suspect that if a serial killer came into our house and made one single giveaway clicking sound, Paul would not awaken, leap from bed in fighting stance, and save the day. No, it would be me, leaping out of bed with fresh batteries already in hand.

John C. McGinley wove through my dreams last night, lucky girl that I am. Unfortunately he was there mostly as a background presence in various stressful situations (brought wrong child to pediatrician, discovered most of my teeth had cavities, late to class and can’t remember where the classroom is), rather than in the sort of situation where I could, for example, grab one of his biceps and give it a little squeeze.

I was looking in my old journals to see what pregnancy was like at this stage in other pregnancies, and I found that always at this stage I am doing very little reading. Too distracted, I think. I do continue to read People magazine, because, you know, I need to keep up with important current events. And this time around, I’m reading a ton of blogs. I think this is comparable to my last pregnancy, when I spent zillions of hours reading and posting to message boards in a group of women all due the same month as me: it’s not really reading, even though reading is involved–it’s more cruising for social interaction.

One thing I have noticed, as I cruise the bloggerhood, is that more blogs need a section like *ahem* mine. See up at the top righthand side, where it says my name and my husband’s name and the names and birth years of our kids? That would be a very handy thing to have in most blogs. Often I find a blog, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, but who are all these people? I’ve come into a room filled with strangers, and I don’t know who is the husband, who is the baby, who is the cat, who is the blogger. I need a list of the cast members. Once I read nearly an entire post before realizing that the code-named individual was a dog and not a child.

This morning has been our usual weekend routine: I try to set things up so that Paul realizes his help is required, and he cruises obliviously past. Today I was in my pajamas feeding the twins their breakfast, and he said that he and William were going down to the workshop to do a project. I said oh, that’s a great idea, but was he going to want the twins left in their high chairs, or put down in their playpen? because first I was going to take a shower (here I glanced so rapidly it was almost subliminal at his clean, dressed person) and have breakfast (another rapid glance at the crumby plate he was bringing to the sink).

Edited to add: Thanks to Coffee Stained for letting me know that comments were disabled–I thought nobody loved me anymore.

Kara of Baa Baa Black Sheep is clearly my comment-box muse these days. She left another comment that made me feel all chatty, so I thought I’d make a new post about it so we can all be chatty:

So, hey, you guys. This got me wondering–do any of you use cloth diapers? If so, can you talk about your experiences with them? We’re not planning on trying to start a family for 6 months to a year, but it’s nice to know about these things.

We used cloth diapers with our first baby. I had a great experience with it. For one thing, a cloth diaper service went out of business while I was pregnant, so we were able to buy heaps and heaps of diaper-service diapers for very cheap, plus we bought some of the pails they gave to customers to use for diaper collection.

Then, I bought a bunch of different kinds of plastic pants at a consignment shop for pennies (not a popular resale product, it turns out), and so I got to try all the kinds and see what I liked best. Hands down, my favorite were the Dappi pants. They used to sell them at Target; I don’t believe they do anymore. They were…nylon? I think. So they could be laundered (I think I hung them up to dry, though), and they didn’t rip anywhere near as quickly or as easily as the kind made of plastic. They were less crinkly, too. They were more expensive than the regular plastic, but I got a whole bunch on clearance, and also I thought they were worth it even at full price.

For wipes, I cut up cloth diapers that were getting tattered. The diaper service started us out with some of these as “hey, take these as freebies,” which really helped; if I hadn’t had those, I probably would have used washcloths. I do not sew in any skillful sense of the word, but I can thread a needle, so I used pretty colors of embroidery thread and did some crude round-and-round stitching to keep the edges from falling apart. I kept a bottle (it was one they gave us in the hospital) on the changing table filled with a baby-shampoo-and-water solution, for wetting the wipes. Then the wipes went into the laundry with the diapers.

I had a mental hurdle at first, with cloth. Rinsing the first few diapers in the toilet (I wore rubber gloves) was…unpleasant. After that, it was nothing. It felt totally normal. I got completely used to it, and felt satisfied with my system. We had a particularly excellent set-up: the washing machine was between the nursery and the bathroom, so I could take the diaper to the bathroom to rinse it, then drop it in the washer on my way back to the nursery with the bucket. I enjoyed taking all those clean fluffy diapers out of the dryer. And I liked it that when the baby peed in a fresh diaper, I didn’t hear the ching-ching of coins dropping into the trash can, the way I do with disposables.

Why did we stop using cloth? We moved to a new place, and it had coin-operated laundry. Also, one of the big parts of my cloth-diaper system was filling the washer and dropping each diaper into it to soak until I did a load of diapers. I couldn’t do that in the shared laundry facilities. I switched to disposable. Why am I not using cloth again, now that we are in our own home with our own washer? Part of it is that I was so, so stupid, and I gave away all our cloth diapers and Dappi pants when we went so long without our own washer, and I thought we wouldn’t be able to get a house before we were done having children. Then the thought of buying all those things again was…disheartening. And part of it is that stores like W@lmart and Target made their own brands of disposables that cost about half of the ones I’d had to buy before, which made it easier to stomach the cost element of the disposable disadvantage.

So! Weigh in, cloth diaper users! Your experiences! Your favorite products!

Obviously you guys need to check out Jonniker’s post about menstrual cups, because I found myself posting a lengthy response (which I then deleted and turned into this post) in my own comment section in response to Kara, who has also read Jonniker’s post. So that’s at least two of us here who feel like talking about it, and if the rest of you want to join in you’re going to have to visit Jonniker first so you know what we’re talking about. Read her comment section, too, because it’s pretty great and also gives more information on the topic.

Now. On to the discussion. I want to know who here has experience with these things, and, if you own one or you’ve ordered one, which of the dumb-named items did you choose? If you’ve read Jonniker’s comment section, you’ll have seen my comment, which was this:

I’m not grossed out by the CONCEPT of the cup, but I agree it needs an image makeover. First of all, the names, which are stoooopid. “Diva Cup”? I am not using ANY product that requires me to favor the diva concept, as if I am a 12-year-old with a rhinestone t-shirt. And “The Keeper” is both creepy (because of all the horror novels called The Keep) and also creepy (because of the implication that the point is to SAVE the contents, perhaps forever).

Secondly, the color. I agree that brown is gross, and that clear would also be gross, and so would white be gross. I think it needs to be available in a selection of patterns: a swirling paisley, a jungle floral, a pink camo, etc. I want CHOICES, and I want them NON-GROSS.

I agree with what Kara of Baa Baa Black Sheep said (in Jonniker’s comments) about doing your own small part for the environment, and in fact I have a partially-written post on this very topic (not in re menstrual products per se, but overall) that I keep not posting because it wavers between preachy/pious and uncaring/flippant, which in case you are wondering is not a pleasant combination and leaves me looking like a self-satisfied jackass, and so the post just sits there unfinished and unpostable.

Where was I? Oh yes! I agree with the concept of each of us doing the environmental pleasantries that we don’t mind doing, and this is one I don’t think I’d mind doing. I think there would initially be a mental hurdle involved in using such a product, but I had the same hurdle for using tampons, and in fact for my whole period in general. If this is not too much information, and I think maybe it is too much information, I personally would like tampons best but am too scared to use them because of TSS. I know, it’s rare, but I would feel so dumb if I died of it. And so I use pads, which are way worse for the environment, not that I would let that stop me from using them (and in fact, I do use them, so there you are) if I were truly grossed out by the menstrual cups. But speaking of grossness–and now this really is too much information but at least it isn’t about me personally–isn’t it just as gross to see it on a pad as to see it in a little cup? I think it might be, but that I’m just not used to the cup and I am used to the pad, and that gets us back to the mental hurdle thing from the beginning of the paragraph. See how beautifully that all ties together?

So! Please do tell. What with all the pregnancy and breastfeeding, I’ve only had my period four times in the last two and a half years, so I need information from people who are on the front lines of this issue, as it were.

I’m not saying that without naptime I would go insane, but I WILL say that I appreciate naptime. Look forward to naptime. Anticipate naptime all morning. Consider drugging my children in order to get them to take a longer naptime.

So why is Elizabeth setting out to destroy me? Here is what happens nearly every single day now. I feed the twins their lunch. Then I take William to kindergarten. Then I put the twins down for their nap, and I settle in at my computer, or in a comfy chair with a book, or in front of the freezer to eat ice cream directly out of it, or whatever.

Elizabeth starts crying. Has she perhaps taken advantage of her nice clean dry pre-nap diaper? Why, yes she has. So I change her, and after I do that she clings to me in a way that is both loving and manipulative. Edward is already sound asleep, so I am whispering to her: “You are going to have to go back into your crib. It is naptime. I got you out to change your diaper, but now you need to go back in.” She has not given up hope, and she pushes her face into my neck, making a little “mmmmm” sound. She knows this is difficult to resist.

Easier to resist is her angry astonished crying when I put her back into her crib anyway. Edward is a good sleeper, and he is used to this; he continues to sleep. I leave the room. She continues to cry. Finally she wakes up Edward. Now they are both awake, less than an hour after the beginning of naptime.

Alternate ending: Elizabeth finally does go to sleep, just as she succeeds in waking Edward. I wait as long as I can to go get him: he is making gentle little talking sounds, not crying, and the sound of not-crying is good to me and I want to take advantage of it. Then he begins crying. Elizabeth is a light sleeper, and so when I go in to get Edward, she wakes up, crabby and tired and definitely not going back to sleep. Now they are both awake, less than an hour after the beginning of naptime.

I’m starting to notice Tum Interference occurring. I’m walking funny. My tum gets sore. I feel tired from walking around. It’s difficult to carry things that I would normally carry in front of me. It’s difficult to lean forward. It’s difficult to get up from the floor, or out of bed. It’s the beginning of the third trimester, all right.

I was thinking about my most recent pregnancy, the twin pregnancy. I looked it up in my journal to make sure I was remembering correctly, and I was: It sucked. I had to lie down for awhile, queasy and shaky, after taking a shower. I almost couldn’t face the idea of a short errand. I couldn’t get comfortable in any position. My legs retained water all the way up to my hips–enough water to give me stretch marks. My feet went up two sizes. I could barely walk, and when I did walk it was slow and painful. At around 32 weeks, I couldn’t lie down anymore without excruciating pain in my pelvis and hips, so I had to sleep sitting up in a recliner for the rest of the pregnancy. I felt lousy and sick all the time. I felt like I was dying of a painful terminal illness.

Hard to complain about it, though, when there are women who would have given up one of their limbs just to have carried their twins another week, or to have felt bad but have no actual complications, or to not have been on bedrest for months. But just because I was very, very lucky in comparison doesn’t mean it didn’t still utterly suck. It did. It utterly sucked. I acknowledge my luckiness, without giving up my claim to the suckiness.

I was partially hoping that this pregnancy would be twins again, because I have so loved almost everything about having twins (I have to use that qualifier because of the times when they both had blow-out diapers and then both spit up over their clean outfits and freshly-washed hair), and because it would be so comical and unusual to have two sets of twins less than two years apart. But when I found out I was having just a single baby this time, I felt like I could look forward to the pregnancy. Definitely it is not buttercups and Christmas morning, but there’s woe and then there’s WOE, and I am better able to handle woe.

I came home from shopping today, and the jar of honey was in the kitchen sink. I said to Paul, “Why is the honey in the kitchen sink?” and he said, “Because I was pretty sure it didn’t belong in the SHOWER.”

That logic doesn’t really follow, does it? Besides, if the honey is in the shower, it’s not the same as if it’s in the refrigerator and maybe someone just got a little absentminded. If it’s in the shower, someone must have put it there on purpose. And yes, it was me.

You all have honey in your showers too, right? Or, okay, fine, on your bathroom sinks if you prefer. Because we’re all doing Sundry’s honey challenge, aren’t we? This is exactly the sort of thing I loved to do in high school, and while some women might mourn the hips of their youth or the boyfriends of their youth, what I mourn is the beauty product experiments of my youth: I used to cruise the beauty aisle, babysitting money climbing out of my purse looking for what would be coming home with us today. The facial scrub, with real bits of apricot pit? The peel-away masks, as thrilling as peeling off dried Elmer’s glue? The mud masks, so very very ugly and full of minerals? Did I want to tighten? glow? exfoliate? peel?

I tried the honey this morning in the shower, and Sundry is right that it isn’t sticky and yucky as you’d expect: it went on smooth and nice, and of course it smelled delicious. I rinsed it off a few minutes later, and my face felt just as nice as with any of the other facials I’ve tried over the years. I don’t know yet if this says something about the honey, or if it says something about the other facials.

One of the commenters on Sundry’s honey post says you can mix honey with your hair conditioner, too. Well, count me in! High time we had some fun beauty product experiments around here!

That “vote on a name” comments section was THE MOST FUN EVER. I loved reading all your comments. LOVED. IT. Well, except for the Milo and Otis comments, because I found out that I am very, very elderly. I didn’t even know what you were talking about until I looked it up, because I was too old in 1989 for movies such as that one to make an impact on my consciousness. Dead Poets Society, yes. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, yes. Uncle Buck, yes. Story about a kitty and a doggy who are friends? NO. So now I feel old, thanks so much. (I’m waving a cane irritably in your direction.)

One commenter wanted to know what we thought of three girl name candidates: Evelyn, Eve, or Gwen. I’m a big fan of the name Eve. If we were having a girl this time, I’d be pushing for Millicent around here, and Paul would be pushing for Penelope; we both like Ivy and Eve even better than the names we’d be championing, but can’t use either of them for other reasons.

I should have re-mentioned before posting that vote thing that I use pseudonyms for my kids’ names. So although Milo would be a bad, bad match and Henry would be like the perfectest fit ever, in actual life either name is about the same, match-wise. They’re both equally good with our surname, too. Well, okay, Henry is a shade better on both points. But only a shade.

Well. Yesterday’s appointments. Elizabeth has a massive ear infection, and the usually very understanding pediatrician made me feel bad about it. When he looked in her ear, he said, “Whoof.” “HOW long has she had the cough?,” he added. And when I said to her, “Oh, no! An ear infection? Has your ear been owie?,” he said, “She would have HAD to have felt that.” Me: *sinking into hole in earth, while simultaneously declaring my total innocence since the child never seemed bothered by her ears at all, I swear*

And Elizabeth was totally working it, looking at the doctor with the large pitiful eyes and limp posture of a Truly Sick Child, communicating with every fiber of her being that she had tried and tried to tell me but I wouldn’t listen.

The thing is, I brought Edward in less than 2 weeks ago for this same cough, and I felt like a total overreacting idiot because he was absolutely fine and I’d dragged three children and a double stroller into a tiny exam room for nothing. So with Elizabeth I waited a little longer. Edward had had a low fever and no appetite and he looked cruddy, but Elizabeth seemed happy and healthy except that she had this cough: no fever, no loss of appetite, no batting at her ears, nothing. In this whole parenting thing, one of my biggest struggles is the “When to call the doctor” struggle. I feel like I always go the wrong way.

I had my ultrasound, and got the all-clear on the placenta previa situation. I’m very glad. Then I had my usual OB appointment, and confirmed that I’m now in the third trimester. I’d been confused on that point, because my week-by-week book says it starts week 27, but Baby Center says it starts week 28. The OB says week 27. I’m going with that, because I like that answer better.

The screens for gestational diabetes and anemia both came back fine. Blood pressure was kind of high for me, but only the top number, and I personally think it was because their ultrasound tech is an irritable sadist who nearly leaves bruises every time I see her, plus is always sighing as if I am ruining her day. For my mid-pregnancy ultrasound I asked to go to the hospital instead, because they don’t try to KILL me there.

So, here we go! About 12 weeks left until the c-section, which will probably be scheduled when I go back to the OB in 3 weeks. And they didn’t say word one about my weight, which was good because I was still a little fired up from earlier this week, but it would have been difficult to defend myself considering I had Cadbury Fruit & Nut Bar breath.

Choose one baby name: Milo or Henry. Say why, unless it is mean and would make me cry.

My blog is mostly secret. I told Paul and my parents about it after a few months because I kept slipping and almost telling them, and plus I wanted to be able to tell them happy or funny blog-connected things. All three have promised not to go cruising around the blog on their own, and they read only the posts I send to them. Nobody else in my life knows about the blog, because I don’t think I can trust anyone else to be so good. I think I have mentioned before that my mother was the kind of mother who could be trusted to walk past an open diary. I don’t think that’s common in the general population, do you?

This blog is anonymous, so I say things that I might not even say to my best friends. Or I say things that I might say to one best friend but not to the other. Or I say things that otherwise I might not have said except in my own head. This blog is technically public, but because it’s anonymous, it feels private.

Well. Today. I left a comment on a friend’s blog. While I was logged in as Swistle. I deleted the comment, but it still says “Swistle said…” with a link to the Swistle blog. Also, then I tried to re-leave my comment, and I accidentally used the Swistle name A SECOND TIME. I’ve emailed my friend, begging her to delete the link and then forget she ever saw it, but I haven’t heard back from her yet. She has three children including a very young baby, and so who knows when she’ll get back to her computer? I am DYING here. Her family is friends with my family. Her family is very dear to me. Her family can NOT read some of the things I’ve written.

I am so mortified. At any moment, one of those dear people could be thinking, “Huh. I wonder who this is, who wrote a comment and then changed their mind TWICE? I’ll just click and see.” And then they will be here. And THEN what?

It was bound to happen, I suppose. I’m so very, very careful, but even “very, very careful” isn’t one hundred percent reliable. Exhibit A: fifth child. Exhibit B: leaving comment while logged in.