I felt a little dizzy yesterday, but if you think I’m going to Google “pregnancy” and “dizzy” you should Google “crazy” and “you must be.” I am still jumpy from the time I looked up “pregnancy” and “headache.”

We have a minivan and a truck, and Paul normally drives the truck to work. The truck’s “check engine” light came on the week before last, and so he is driving the minivan and I am stuck with no vehicle. I was thinking it would only be for a few days, but now we are well into Week Two and I am trying to suppress hallucinations of caterpillars covering the walls. Last night I took the truck to the repair place (we are procrastinators even when desperate, and then we had to wait a bit for an appointment), and this morning they called. It was this kind of call: “Well, the ‘check engine’ light came on because of an exhaust leak, which we can fix for $370. And while we were in there…” and I tune out until the end of the sentence, which is, “…and all that would come to an additional $1100 or so.”

I hate this kind of thing, where people are telling me about things that will cost money, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to believe them or not. Maybe they’re sitting around on the other end of the line taking bets on whether the sucker is going to do the 100,000-mile replacements at 75,000 miles just because they used the “concerned” tone of voice. Or maybe the “belts” and “pumps” (or whatever it was I wasn’t listening to) really are going south, and I’ll be sorry when something snaps at 70 mph and Paul is killed in the resulting pile-up and inferno, all because I thought I was being so savvy.

Well, we’re fixing the exhaust leak. And then we’re going to do the 60,000-mile check/replace thingie we inadvertently blew off 15,000 miles ago because we can’t seem to keep track of these things. And maybe we can get them to fix the quirk where the “door ajar” light beeps at us alarmingly every 15 seconds even though the doors are firmly shut. But I’m not replacing the belts 25,000 miles earlier than the maintenance schedule says to. See what they’ve driven me to? I’m checking maintenance schedules. This is not how I want to live my life.

I am 21 weeks pregnant, and it seems like all of a sudden the tum is getting bigger. It surprises me every single time, how long it takes for the tum to be of Public Recognition size. It seems weird to spend half the pregnancy looking “kind of fat.” But now, finally, I am starting to look pregnant. I was crabby when I went to a social thing the other night and no one guessed I was pregnant, and everyone acted surprised when I announced it. Considering I was wearing a snug top, I had thought it would be instantly obvious to everyone. Instead, they evidently assumed I’m just normally this bulky shape. Paul tried to reassure me by saying that everyone probably did guess that I was pregnant, but no one wanted to be the one to say it and have me respond that I wasn’t. It’s true that I myself often don’t comment on an unknown tum unless it is covered with a t-shirt that says “Baby!” with a down-pointing arrow.

Speaking of t-shirts, I’m so glad I bought those four maternity shirts the other day. I spent about a week putting them in an online shopping cart and taking them out again, thinking, “Am I really going to spend nearly $50 on four shirts I’m only going to wear for four months?” But as soon as I started wearing them, I wondered why I hadn’t spent the money earlier to improve the amortization. Even so, I’ll wear each shirt about 30 times. I should be good and sick of them by May.

I’m feeling more tired, more inclined to sit or lie down, more inclined to nap in the afternoons, more inclined to go to bed a little early, more inclined to stay in bed until someone’s really crying. I’m eating all the time, or else thinking about what I am about to eat.

I get little rushes of energy, which a recent post about not-cleaning accidentally inspired me to start using for cleaning. The other day I moved the loveseat and removed four thousand toys and crayons and game pieces from underneath, then vacuumed up two dustbusters’ full of dust and dirt. Paul said, “Would you like me to take all those dustbunnies and help you build a nest with them?”

I get a frequent, unpleasant “can’t breathe” sensation. Sometimes it helps to walk around a little, if I’ve been sitting. Sometimes it helps to sit, if I’ve been moving around. I’ve had this with all my pregnancies, and nothing cures it except childbirth. One of the happiest feelings after the baby is born is “I can breathe!!” Oh, yes, and “The baby is born!,” of course.

There are lots of baby movements now. Some of them are general “moving around” feelings, and some are distinct little bappy kicks: bap! bap! bap! BAP! If you have not yet experienced pregnancy, these feelings are just as mesmerizing and gross and thrilling as you might imagine. I get this combined feeling of wonder and ick: “There’s a real live BABY in there! My baby!” and “Oh my god, something alive is INSIDE MY BODY.”

We are still stuck on boy names. Nothing emerges from the pack as a name for Our New Boy.

We will need to buy a car seat–we got rid of the ones we used for the twins, thinking we were Done. And now there’s that whole Consumer Reports thing, where their recent car seat test needs to be redone. Probably I’ll go ahead and buy a Graco, since that’s what we used for the twins, and since that’s a seat Consumer Reports has liked in previous tests. I usually spend about a third of the pregnancy agitating about which car seat to buy: different stores often carry the car seat in a different fabric, and the fabric choice seems like The Most Important Decision In The World while I am pregnant. (Afterwards, when the car seat cover is really only a difficult-to-wash cloth backdrop for the baby to yack milk and have astonishing blow-out diapers on, it seems less important.)

It seems as if this pregnancy is going very quickly. I’m already looking forward to the food at the hospital, which is truly excellent. Big huge chickeny caesar wraps, and still-warm brownies. Fresh-fruit cups, which you are allowed to order more than one of. Cinnamon french toast with butter and a little cup of warmed syrup. Turkey sandwiches piled so high with turkey you almost want to take a little of it out, with pickle wedges on the side. Most important: someone else making it, and bringing it to me after I pick up the phone by my bed and ask them to. It’s almost worth the entire pregnancy and recovery, just for that food. I always cry when I go home and the food part is over. See? I told you I was always either eating or thinking about eating. Right now I’m doing both, since I am also eating a bowl of ice cream with hot fudge sauce.

It is 1:10 in the morning, and I am still up because one or the other of the twins has been crying since my bedtime more than two hours ago. Sometimes both of them have been crying at the same time, and what I would like to know is, Why am I dealing with this by myself? How is it possible for Paul to be a good human being and still sleep through this? I don’t recall him sleeping through the creation of these children, and yet he is actually snoring as Elizabeth cries in her crib on the other side of the wall.

I’m not sure why they’re crying. It reminds me of how lucky we are that usually they don’t–usually we put them to bed and they sleep until morning. But what is their deal tonight? First Edward cried, and when I went in to soothe him it woke up Elizabeth, who hates having anyone in her room when she’s sleeping. So I settled Edward, but then Elizabeth was all riled. And then I got her back to sleep, right before Edward woke up again, which of course woke her back up. And up. And up. And up. And two hours later I have put her in her crib again, mostly because I am out of ideas. She thinks some good ideas would be to let her roam around and maybe do a little coloring, perhaps have a little snack. I think there is only one good idea, and that is for her to go to sleep. To this end I have tried: (1) having her cry it out; (2) having her come into our bed; (3) having her cry it out; (4) rocking her in the recliner out in the living room; (5) letting her sit on my lap in the recliner while I bitched to my journal; (6) having her cry it out. We are on that last one now.

To be honest, there is a hidden item between numbers 5 and 6: “giving her a dose of Benadryl.” I know it’s not a good idea to dose a kid up with medicine for my convenience. At 12:30 in the morning, I don’t know it as much.

…Suddenly I am picturing someone dosing up a child thrice daily and saying, “But Swistle does it!” I am picturing law suits, liability, my own personal feelings of guilt and responsibility. This is what happens in my mind at this time of night: everything turns into a court case. So let me rush to say that I do this hardly ever. And that you should definitely consult your child’s pediatrician before giving any medication for any reason.

And then I will say, just a teeny whisper into your ear and nothing that could be caught on hidden recording device, that Benadryl really does seem to do the trick in these situations. Well, for some kids: I’ve heard of unlucky mothers who finally resorted to it, only to find that their own personal children reacted to Benadryl as to a shot of espresso. That’s the sort of thing that could make a mother seriously consider ordering that single one-way plane ticket to another country. There are red-eye flights, and you’re up already anyway.

In case you have not yet had a chance to develop Hot Fudge Tasting rules for your household, I offer ours for your use:

1) You are allowed to dip a finger into the cooling hot fudge sauce, though you would be advised to check first to make sure it is not still molten.

2) You may dip that finger only one time.

3) Your finger must be clean to begin with.

4) If you are going back for another taste, you must use a new finger.

5) Be careful to leave at least one finger clean, for turning on the faucet afterward. A thumb is good for this purpose, since it is not very good for dipping anyway.

I don’t like to say that my house is disgusting and that I only clean it when I start seeing creepy faces in the patterns of mold on the shower curtain. What I like to say instead is that I live a life of the mind. Nice, huh? I worked pretty hard on that. I like how it communicates a certain superiority, as if the reason I don’t clean is that I am preoccupied with higher things, as opposed to that I don’t like to.

Floors are my biggest struggle. Vacuuming enrages me, the way I always have to be yanking the canister behind me, or finding another outlet because I’m out of cord. Then the nozzle thingie doesn’t fit under the furniture, or it does fit but I can’t put it under there because there are so many little toys and marbles and so on that will get sucked up into the vacuum cleaner, but now I have to move the furniture and clean up all the little toys first, and oh forget it. And mopping! You’re supposed to vacuum first, then mop. But by the time I’ve done any vacuuming at all, my face is red and I feel like I’m about to start throwing chairs across the room, so I’m not getting out the bucket and the mop and perhaps moving the heavy pine table and chairs because otherwise I’ll slop the mop all over them and surely that’s not good for the finish, and oh forget it.

The method I use for cleaning my house is this: Ignore it until I freak out. I go on cleaning binges that leave corpses in my wake, and then neglect everything for another year. The cleaning binges tend to coincide with visits from my mother-in-law, who still remembers a time 30 years ago when an acquaintance implied that her house was not kept as well as it could be. She gets red in the face and her voice gets loud as she tells me the story for the hundredth time since I met her.

Paul, I know, would prefer the house to be a little cleaner. But his mother did him a grave disservice when she taught him that sparkling cleanliness is the only right way to live but also that his personal efforts need never enter into it, and I don’t see it as part of my wifely duties to keep him in the style to which his mother foolishly accustomed him. I have had to remind him of this periodically over the twelve years we’ve been together: if he would like the kitchen floor washed, I see no reason in the world that he can’t wash it. The floor is not bothering me.

I have also tried to be sure to teach my own children in a way that will not make them a curse on their future partners: that certain levels of cleanliness are pleasant but not necessary to sustain life; that there are things I would rather do than clean and that that is a fine choice for a person to make; and that men and women are equally able to clean. I worry, though, that example is more important to a child’s learning than lecture. Paul is certainly capable of cleaning, but he learned from his parents that women clean and men never do, and a dozen years of me carefully explaining otherwise hasn’t changed him. If I teach the kids that cleaning duties are not assigned based on genitals, but they see me doing all the cleaning that gets done, it’s hard to see how we’re not just repeating the training that has given me some of the worst fights of my marriage.

Remember sniglets? I spent all yesterday trying to remember that word. The first book of them caused a sensation; I remember everyone leafing through it and saying, “YEAH! There SHOULD be a word for that!!” After that, when the dozens of sequels came out, I remember thinking, “Actually, we don’t really need a word for that, and that’s why we don’t have one.”

I can tell I’m feeling a little nervous about the financial implications of five children, because I have started using bread ends. I know it’s wasteful not to use them, but I don’t like to eat them, and I remember when I was a child I thought a sandwich made with a bread end was a sad sandwich indeed, and so I haven’t been giving them to the children either. We have a lot of birds in our yard, and so I would fling the bread ends out under the trees, thinking of how happy I was making the little birdies. That is, until I read an article saying, in essence, please don’t feed the birds because it’s bad for them and means they don’t go south when they should and then they’ll die and it’ll be totally your fault. But I still flung the bread ends out.

But now I have been toasting the bread ends and giving them to the twins for breakfast, and since they’re eating them without complaint I guess I should have been doing this all along. I still find the bread ends depressing to look at, but I admit they look better when they’re toasted and buttered. And think of all the millions and millions of dollars I’m saving!

Hi! Today I have two tips for you that, if you were struggling in these areas as I was, will have you falling down on your knees in gratitude! And, if you were not struggling in these areas, will have you thinking that I am the reason tech support always starts by asking you if your computer is plugged in.

First tip involves cans of frozen orange juice concentrate. They have little plastic strips around the end, and you pull off the strip and then you can pry off the metal lid. I always had to really pry, so that it would come off suddenly, flinging out slaps of orange juice concentrate onto me, the counter, the cupboards, etc. Or at least there would be that cringing feeling of waiting for that to happen as I had to pry harder and harder and harder. Well! It turns out that if you hold the can firmly on the counter and pull straight UP on the strip as you’re pulling it off, the lid comes off way, way, way more easily! I = genius!

Second tip involves making sandwiches in a family of so many children you don’t know what to do. I still make Rob’s lunch for him (perhaps my next tip, after I go mad from making so many sandwiches, will be “Have your second grader make his own goddamned lunch”), and every morning the sandwich-making part of it overwhelms me. I hate making sandwiches, and it has to be done every morning, and I don’t like the smell of peanut butter first thing, and it seems like it’s the hardest thing to find time for. By the time lunch comes around, I don’t mind it so much, and in fact I often thought to myself, “It’s too bad I can’t make Rob’s sandwich now, when I’m making the other kids’ sandwiches.” And this is where my genius idea comes in. What I do now is, every day at lunchtime I make three sandwiches: one for the twins to share, one for William, and one to put in a plastic sandwich box and put into the freezer. The next morning, I can pop the sandwich box into Rob’s lunch. It feels so much better to do it this way, especially on the busier mornings when I feel like I’m going to be very lucky not to be in my pajamas at the bus stop.

Furthermore, I have accumulated a little stash of freezer sandwiches, because if I make a sandwich unexpectedly (such as if Rob is still hungry and there is no more dinner, or if the twins eat their shared sandwich and want another), I make a second one at the same time. Not only does this give me another sandwich to put in the freezer, it lessens the “Oh, god, I thought I was done with sandwiches for the day, and now I have to make another sandwich” feeling. I never mind an activity as much if it feels efficient, which is probably why I have so many children, and probably why I didn’t feel that twins were that big of a deal: as long as I’m feeding one child, I might as well feed five; as long as I’m changing one diaper, I might as well change two; as long as I’m reading to one baby, I might as well read to two; etc.

If there is no milk in the house, and you are without a car for the day so you can’t go to the grocery store, and you are thinking, “Well, that’s no big deal: I will eat my own weight in vanilla ice cream, and that will fill my calcium requirement”–then let me be the voice of your own future self saying to you, “Nooooooooooooooooo!”

When I am not pregnant I like ice cream, but it doesn’t occur to me to buy it. When I am pregnant, however, I bring more home every time I go to the grocery store. The other day I was having a bowl of it with some Magic Shell ice cream topping left over from the end of the school year when we did a little sundae celebration with the kids, and I idly glanced at the nutrition information on the bottle of Magic Shell. Do you know what Magic Shell is made of? DEATH.

Still, I wanted chocolatey topping, so today I made some fudge sauce. My homemade version may not be a health food but at least I can make it with LESS DEATH. And it was so, so tasty, I had three bowls of ice cream with it. Okay, four. Four bowls. Four bowls in the afternoon, plus one more just now after dinner. And so I can personally testify, not only as your future self but as my own present self, that it is a poor idea indeed.

I am feeling pretty cute today in my new maternity t-shirt. I’m wearing the Blue Violet one, which is very little Blue but plenty of Violet, and the purpley wonder of it is like a promise of all the lighthearted goodness of spring: fluffy squirrels and tender flowers and flocks of storks. After months of pigment-dyed men’s shirts, one in dark blue, one in dark green, the girly purple color keeps surprising me in the mirror. I put on some blush this morning, because it seemed like perhaps I was female after all.

Something I approve of about this shirt is that it comes in a nice range of sizes. I have had the impression, sometimes, that a woman is allowed to be fat or pregnant, but not both. It is the same with height: you may be fat or you may be tall, but you may not be both. If you are fat and tall and pregnant, woe to you, you freak of nature, and how on earth did you manage to get yourself pregnant anyway?

See, now there I have gone from happy to crabby in maybe four seconds total. Clothes-shopping can do that to me, and in fact memories of clothes-shopping can do it. In this case there is also a piggyback memory of my mother-in-law saying that women in any of those predicaments should simply make their own clothes. She said it in a shrill voice, and it is one of the many areas of life in which she can’t understand why I don’t do things her way, and I don’t understand why she doesn’t shut up about it since clearly I’m not going to. And so you see, this is a labyrinth of crabbiness, and I think we should back away from the entrance, don’t you?

Let’s go instead into the labyrinth of cuteness:

Okay! Eight of you commented on my “$1-to-charity-per-comment” Delurking Week entry, and I thank you very much. (I’m sure St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital thanks you, too. I love them because they don’t require payments for medical treatments from families who don’t have insurance.) I rounded it up to a nice even $20, because of my pro-lurker stance and also because it is not St. Jude’s fault that this blog is relatively new and not yet very commentlicious.

Here is a question I always have when mailing an envelope to a charity that puts “No postage necessary” in the stamp location: If I stamp it anyway, does it mean they don’t have to pay postage, or does it mean I’m wasting my stamp? What about the envelopes that say things like “Your stamp increases your support”–does that mean I have to pay the stamp, or just that it helps them out if I do?

Awhile back I mentioned that I have been making some very good purchasing decisions recently, and I am ready to reveal another of them to you. I bought an atomic clock, and it is atomitastic. It self-sets! It doesn’t gradually get less and less accurate! It only occasionally mis-sets and tells me it’s the year 2028! I do love it so so much. I bought a second one, and it is freaky-cool to see them ticking off the seconds in absolute unison. And when we had the time change awhile back, they automatically adjusted for that. Of course, in an apocolyptic scenario where the National Institute of Standards and Technology no longer broadcasted the time, my clocks and I would be screwed. This is why I still have some regular battery-operated clocks for back-up.

My new maternity t-shirts have arrived, and they are pretty nice. They look way better than my old ones, and the colors are prettier than I’d thought they’d be. Here are the ones I bought, in case you’re pregnant and want to be twins with me: JCP Duo Maternity Solid Scoopneck Tee. I bought it in Blue Violet, Brilliant Green, Firebrick, and Provencial Blue, but it also comes in Black and in White.