Today I did half-assed work at my mothering job. I let the twins watch television while I lay down on the bed and read a book. I should have given them a bath this morning, but instead I milled around on the internet. For lunch I gave them cheese cubes and graham crackers. I let William watch a boiling rice steamer with no rice in it for an hour, because I knew that if I let him do so, he would stop asking me to play with him. When Rob came home from school, I sent him and William outside to play, not for the healthy physical benefits but because I didn’t want to talk to them right now.

I completed the bare minimum of tasks required to avoid getting fired. Everyone got something to eat at breakfast time and at lunch time. Everyone wore clothes. I got Rob off to school on time. I did a load of laundry because Paul was on his last pair of pants. I talked to William about not scalding himself with steam. I set the television to PBS Kids. But I did nothing that would put me up for a promotion, or that would lead others to consider me for an award. I would not be able to describe myself in an interview as a self-starter. I would not want social services or our pediatrician sitting behind one-way glass, observing my work.

I don’t recommend this as a regular way of life, whatever job you’re in, but I will say that occasional half-assedry is underrated as a coping mechanism. In my pre-motherhood working life, I would periodically have a day when I felt I should get extra credit for showing up to work at all, and would spend much of the day writing letters to friends, going to the bathroom and just sitting there thinking, making lists of motivating reasons to lose weight, chatting with co-workers, offering to go on coffee runs, etc. Work done: minimal. Guilt felt: minimal. I try to bring this philosophy to my new career as mother: the occasional day of uselessness is no big deal.

This morning I’d planned to give the twins a bath, but I’m too tired. I remember this pregnancy tiredness: it’s like wearing a shawl of “sit down! sit down!” It feels so much better to be sitting and resting. I remember one of the books I read when I was pregnant with twins said something like, “Don’t stand if you can sit, don’t sit if you can lie down.” Mmmmm, lying dowwwwwwwwn.

I was surprised that the post on our baby name candidates didn’t generate more comments. One reason we’ve always kept the candidates a secret with previous pregnancies is that we’ve assumed everyone would have a strong opinion and want to share it with us. We’ve worried about hearing bad things we can’t forget. For example, during my last pregnancy we were considering the name Genevieve for the female twin, and I confided the name to an acquaintance, and she said, “Oh, that’s such a great name! Like in a romance novel! I can just picture her with long flowing red hair and green eyes!” And the name was ruined. I had been picturing the brave, pleasant dog in the Madeline books, but now whenever I thought of the name I thought of trashy paperbacks. (Perhaps at first glance the dog association does not seem to you like an improvement, but in that case you will have to trust me.) Anyway, my guess is that the name post didn’t generate many comments because the names are kind of boring. It isn’t like our list is Maverick, Benito, Ajax, Apollo, Cosmo, and Oleander. Or maybe it’s that you guys are really polite and I should have you as friends instead of those romance-novel-reading losers.

The “check engine” light came on in the truck Paul drives to work, so he took the minivan. I hate being stranded like this. I don’t have anywhere I planned to go today, but as soon as I can’t go anywhere I have a million ideas. Plus I’m stuck with all these unpleasant thoughts about how would we get to the emergency room, how would we escape the zombies, etc.

I have been shopping. I had forgotten how exciting it is to shop during a pregnancy. Each item I considered or purchased, I was thinking, “This! This for the new baby!” Each item I buy makes the baby more real to me. One reason I like knowing before the birth if the baby is a girl or a boy is that I can shop like this, and then at home I can gaze at the little unfamiliar items, picturing them on an unfamiliar baby.

I bought two Carter’s sleep-‘n’-plays, blue with puppies, one in size 0-3 months and one SMALLER than that, if you can imagine something so wee: size “newborn” is what babies wear for about a week after they’re born, but YOU try to resist the weensy little things. I also bought two six-packs of teeny-tiny socky-wockies. Two four-packs of onesies, one pack all white and one pack decorated with puppies. PUPPIES. Two fish-shaped teething rings, because he will not have any TEETH.

For myself I ordered four maternity t-shirts. I had a clothing crisis a few nights ago, when I had a social event to go to and nothing good to wear. I’ve been wearing jeans and a men’s t-shirt, but that’s so casual it looked like I was coming to the event straight from scrubbing the toilet. I put on my maternity clothes, and it became clear to me that those items are seriously too big. If I hadn’t saved them I’d be wailing for their loss, but since I did save them I can see they’re not going to work. I should have known, since at the end of my pregnancy with twins those shirts were still roomy. I finally wore the maternity jeans with a non-maternity-but-good-‘n’-stretchy semi-nice shirt, and all evening I was hiking the jeans up and the shirt down. Stylish! So I ordered the new shirts.

Part of me is fretting a little about spending money, but most of me is thinking that shopping is one of the most fun things about being pregnant. And whatever part of me is left is thinking of making a pan of fudge.

For home-scenting purposes, I like incense–the tame, pretty scents like lavender and jasmine, not the serious ones like patchouli and sandalwood. The other day I was noticing that incense is, you know, SMOKE, and I wondered idly if it might be bad for the lungs. I Googled it, expecting to be told to not be so silly. Instead I found that I might as well have been scenting my home with a busy traffic intersection, or by lighting up a pack of Marlboros: cancer-causing chemicals, asthma-causing particles, AND pregnant women have a greater risk of having a child with leukemia. EXCELLENT. I have like $40 worth of incense, and it’s all in the trash. I have a favorite lavender kind that I’ve been deliberately breathing in when I felt tense or anxious, because it’s supposed to be calming. I’M NOT SO CALM NOW.

To distract me from thinking about the leukemia thing, I’m looking for other, preferably NON-LIFE-THREATENING ways to make my house smell nicer. We have a cat litter box and a diaper pail, and so we need a nice, regular de-smellifying routine. I like scented candles, but I worry about the flames: not only are there cats and children running around, but I’m a little absent-minded these days and can picture myself forgetting about the candle altogether until I smell something smoky and notice that the room where I left the candle is now a pleasantly-scented pile of ash.

I think my little crisis has (mostly) passed. Thanks to those of you who reminded me that some people say stupid things for no good reason, and that it’s better to remember one’s own personal life philosophies than to automatically absorb everyone else’s. I am just a little too pregnant to see things in a balanced light right now.

One thing that helped was remembering when I was pregnant with the twins and reading a lot of twin-rearing books. All of them were like, “Um, you are totally going to need to hire round-the-clock help because twins are so, so hard.” Then they added, “And by the way, most twins are born early and have tons of problems, and also you could end up on bed rest for months.” Thanks, twin books! I had a totally uncomplicated pregnancy that went full-term, and the twins were born as big as singleton babies, and we’ve managed to take care of them without outside help, but thanks to the twin books I did it all with a hefty dose of anticipatory worry that came to nothing! Yay me for believing everything everyone else says as long as it’s bad news!

Anyway. I think if four children including a set of twins feels like no big deal, then probably five children including a set of twins isn’t going to be a whole lot worse. And if they’re a real problem when they’re older, I’ll send them to boarding school. There! *brushing hands briskly* Problem solved.

Twins are being extra cute, which helps. If I carry one twin out of the room, they wave good-bye to each other. Also, this morning they were sitting side by side looking at a book together and pointing to things and looking at each other for reactions: “Whoa! I wasn’t expecting that ending, were you?” And Edward likes to hold his blankie and lean his head on Elizabeth, and even though she hates it and makes loud protesting noises, it still looks really cute, especially because he’s so oblivious to her objections. Even though she doesn’t like him snuggling on her, she’ll alert me if he cries: she looks at me with wide eyes and raised eyebrows, pointing to him and saying her sound for his name.

By the way, last chance to post a comment on Delurking Week to make me send a dollar to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

I went to a gathering of former co-workers last night, and one of them freaked me the hell out. He and his wife have six children, ranging in age from 8 to 22, and he was saying, “Five children, huh? Let me give you some advice: don’t have a sixth.” He was telling me stories of how difficult it is to have so many children, so many issues, so many expenses. They lock the pantry because otherwise the boys eat a week’s worth of groceries in an afternoon. Someone always needs something expensive: braces, new glasses, lessons. There is nothing worse than a 13-year-old girl.

This conversation caused it to occur to me that perhaps having lots of children is easier when it’s lots of babies than when it’s lots of teenagers. I’ve been humming along thinking, “What’s the difference, really, between three children and four, or five, or even six? It’s just more of the same thing.” I’ve even pushed this philosophy with Paul, who, if you remember, had a crisis over the discovery of this most recent pregnancy and had to be talked down. I wasn’t just saying I thought five would be fine and not much different than four, I really did think so.

Now it seems as if our family of four children, with its convenient twins at the end to prevent one youngest child being left alone with the parents at the end, was the ideal family, and that we’ve screwed it up. In fact, it seems like we should have stopped at two like most people. Two children would have been a happier life. We’ll never be able to afford the expenses of five. We’ll never be able to rear them right, because we’ll never have enough time and energy to teach everybody everything they need to know. We’ll be one of those families social services keeps an eye on because we’re so disheveled and disorganized and our kids don’t even know simple things like not to drip pee all over the toilet seat.

Time to talk myself down. The first thing that comes to mind is that it’s common for parents to be the doom police to other parents. I remember when I was pregnant for the first time and very excited about it, there were a lot of people who said things to me such as, “Yeah, it’s really exciting when you’re pregnant,” and “Just wait until he’s born: you’ll never sleep again, you’ll never go out again.” Then he was born, and it was okay. There were some difficulties and adjustments and midnight crises and so forth, but nothing as bad as I’d been led to believe. When I said so, those parents changed track: “Sure, it’s easy now, wait until he’s a toddler.” He became a toddler, and it still wasn’t as bad as predicted. So the other parents changed again: “Sure, one is easy; wait until you have two.” I had a second, and it wasn’t as bad. And so on, and so on, and so on: every time I say something’s not as bad as I’d feared, there’s someone to tell me that that’s because I’m a naive fool who hasn’t yet experienced real parenthood. So my first possibly reassuring thought is that it could be the same in this situation: older children do come with their own set of difficult parenting situations, but it won’t be as bad as the other parents are making it sound.

I’m remembering, too, that when Rob was a baby, Paul and I would freak ourselves out by wondering what it would be like when he was five years old. We would get upset about the whole idea to have children, because what were we going to do with a five-year-old? We didn’t like five-year-olds. We liked newborns. Now we were totally screwed, because he wasn’t going to stay a newborn and then we’d be stuck with a five-year-old. But by the time Rob was five, of course, it was fine: he’d gotten there one hour at a time, and we liked him just as much as when he’d been a newborn–more, in fact. My guess is that freaking myself out about the kids being teenagers is just as silly.

My last thought, and the most important one to me, is that it’s not as if there’s anything to be done about it now. Short of selling some of the children on the black market, I’m stuck with them. I’m a mother of five, and it’s not as if I can go back in time and try it again with two. So there is no sense getting all upset about making bad decisions, especially since I don’t even know if they were in fact bad. Maybe I will always be glad I had lots of children; maybe it’s what I want, even though it isn’t what someone else wanted.

My apologies to those of you who are thinking, “Oh my dear god, enough with the baby names,” but I have another name-related thing to discuss. Semi-Desperate Housewife‘s comment on the post “Boy Names” brings up an interesting topic: names that someone you know has already used for their baby.

I have been wondering what the etiquette is for this, and I have not yet found anything standard. There are some people who would say it is never okay to use a name that anyone you know has used, not even if you’re not related and you live in different states and you’re not really in touch. There are people on the other end of the spectrum who think it’s okay for cousins to have the same name.

I’m in the latter group: if a sibling of Paul’s or mine named a baby the same thing we’d named one of our babies, I’d think that was fun. But I’m aware that not everyone is at this end of the spectrum with me, and so I like to be careful–and I get tense if someone I know is considering a name we’d consider, because I’m worried they’ll use it and then I’ll wonder if we’re “allowed” to use it or not.

What do you think, and what have you heard are the rules? Ask first? No one owns a name? First come, first served? Does it depend on the popularity of the name; i.e., no one can say “Hey, Emily is our name!” but it would be out of line to use the name Apollonia right after your friend did? Does it depend on your connection to the other person; i.e., the closer the relationship, the more off-limits the name? If a friend or relative uses a name you wanted to use, how could you broach the topic to find out if they’d be okay with you using it too? Is there ever such a thing as having “dibs” on a name you haven’t yet used but would want to use some day?

I hope Shelly won’t mind that I’m totally pilfering her excellent comment (from the post “Boy Names”) for this new post. She wrote:

I like nearly all of the names you have listed, with Henry my favorite (as if my opinion matters). Why is it so hard? & what do you do if you have namers remorse?? We sort of do b/c we didn’t want to name our 4-month with an ultra popular name, but I fear we did, though we spelled it differently. It’s such a fine line between wanting to have a unique name but not wanting to look like you just randomly threw syllables together just to be different.

I’ve been thinking of this all afternoon, ever since I read the comment. It brings up so many interesting issues.

Issue the first: Avoiding an overly popular name. One reason I love The Baby Name Wizard is that she gives the heads-up on which names are getting too hot to handle. But her book also gave me some of the most reassuring baby-name-choosing advice I’ve ever had, which is that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to choose a popular name: it’s popular because lots of people like it, and that means lots of people will like your baby’s name. You wouldn’t necessarily want to go with Hortense or Herbert just to avoid popularity. I also like to keep in touch with The Social Security Administration’s list of baby names, since that’s a great way to see which names are rapidly shooting up in popularity even though you hardly ever hear them: you can type in a name and it’ll tell you the popularity rank of that name every year since 1991. Sometimes I use it to avoid popularity, and sometimes I use it because I actually want a more common name.

Issue the second: And that brings me to namer’s remorse. We didn’t name our second son William, as you know from my post on pseudonyms, but it would have been a better choice than what we DID name him, since there were three children with his same name in his preschool class. There are two with that name in his kindergarten class. Holy crap, we had no idea. We thought we were choosing a boy name that was common, yes, but in a one-per-classroom way, not in an everywhere-you-turn way. We can’t totally regret the choice, because now the name is HIM; he IS that name. But on the other hand, I’ve winced many times over the years since he was born, wondering if we should have chosen something different. You can legally change the baby’s name if the remorse sets in right away, but pretty soon it’s too late and you just have to give a shrug and a wry look and say “We had no idea!”

Issue the third: The point Laura Wattenberg (The Baby Name Wizard’s author) makes about how you don’t necessarily want to choose an unpopular name brings me to the issue of whether or not I would want the opinions of other people on the names we’re considering. The answer is YES. For example, I’m pleasantly surprised to see that two people already have voted for Henry, because it’s a name I worry about using in case it gives too many people the feeling of “old man name.” Other people’s opinions are an important part of which name we choose, and so I’m glad to have input.

Issue the fourth: Why is choosing a baby name so HARD? Shelly, my empathy buckets RUNNETH OVER. I think the reason it’s so difficult is that it’s so important, and because there are so many choices. Sometimes I wish I were part of a group that had specific naming rules, such as that the baby had to be named for a relative or a saint, because it would narrow things down a little. You have to choose how popular a name you want (three in her class with the same name? or mocked because her name is so crazy?), and what style of name you want (flowery? androgynous? classic?), and whether you want to name her after a family member. And of course, most people have to make all these decisions with another person–sometimes a person with whom you can’t even agree on a thermostat setting. It only gets harder with subsequent babies, since then the names you choose can’t be too similar to what you’ve chosen (if you choose Owen, you probably won’t want to choose Ewan) or too different (if you choose Matthew, you probably won’t want to choose Jett).

If anyone else would like to chip in here on choosing names, please do. Tell how you chose, or what factors were most important in your decision, and whether you regret any of your choices. Tell about your own name, how your parents chose it, whether you liked it or didn’t.

I was getting out all the tiny boy handmedowns from the basement. Usually this is a task that fills me with a disbelieving, fascinated happiness: “There will be a real baby, and it will be in this house, wearing these clothes!” Instead I got a jolt of nauseated doubt: “I don’t even think I want another baby. I don’t think I even like babies. Why would I want to start all over again with another baby, getting up in the night, nursing, changing those numerous blowout diapers, dealing with an infant who cries or looks neutral but never smiles? And I’ll be sore and puffy, and I’ll be so tired, and I’ll know that when all I want is some quiet and some time with nobody touching me, Paul will be thinking about when can we have sex again. And all this will be happening with not only a new baby in the house, but two toddlers, plus two older children home from school all summer. Oh my god.”

It was an unpleasant few minutes. The only way through this kind of feeling, I think, is a combination of (1) waiting it out, and (2) remembering that I’ve had this feeling about previous babies and now wouldn’t want to exchange even one of them for store credit. Right now, this new baby is unknown to me, a theoretical baby. Soon his existence and safety will be just as essential to my continued happiness as all the other children’s. It is hard to comprehend this now–but then, the whole mother love thing is hard to comprehend. How can it be that people who didn’t even exist a few years ago are now so important to me that if they died I would want to die too? That’s ridiculous. Nine years ago I was living just fine without a single one of them.

One of the things that appeals to me so strongly about pregnancy is the way it so radically alters the world. An entire person appears as if from nowhere. And your life as the mother of this person will be completely different than if you had gone down the path where that baby never was. But this appealing magnitude and importance is also what freaks me the hell out, as well it should. Creating a new person is no small thing, and it shouldn’t feel like it is. It feels better to focus on the thrill of it, but it seems natural that the thrill of it is paired with the near horror of it.

When I find myself focusing on the “What have I done?” side of things, I find it useful to pull the camera back. What I am really doing here is continuing the species. Reproducing. This is a totally ordinary–even banal–activity. Eat, sleep, bear young. No big deal.

Or it helps to fast-forward. In twenty years I’ll be well into my 50s. I’ll be fretting about what to wear to my son’s wedding, and I’ll be trying not to tell women with tiny screaming children that these are the best years of their lives. I’m not going to care anymore about the morning sickness or the worries about spacing or the worries about who has to share which toys, and my guess is that one child more or less isn’t going to seem like a big difference at that point. My guess is that I’ll be struggling to remember that we’d only planned to have four. My guess is that it will seem unthinkable that we wouldn’t have had this boy, too.

Okay, let’s get to work naming this boy. Now that I know I need boy names and not girl names, I feel fresh enthusiasm for the task. This despite our boy name list, which is PITIFUL. I asked Paul, “Do we have ANY boy name candidates?,” and he said, “No.”

We actually do, but it is a far from stellar list. Most of them, we’ve rejected repeatedly with previous boys, and so the names have a worn, tired feeling to us. Others have serious flaws. Here’s the list, with their problems:

Alan: We’re afraid this is too old and not old enough: 1950s names are not a great choice right now. Also, might be geeky. I like it partly because of the character known as The Brain on the TV show Arthur (his actual name is Alan). I also like it because of Alan Alda, but he doesn’t help with the geek factor. (Nor does The Brain, I suppose, but I find him so appealing I can’t see it that way.)

Charlie: Both of us dislike the name Charles, but don’t want to use Charlie as the given name. And I don’t think the name Charles would grow on us.

Henry: We’re worried that this one was a late-’90s mini-hit that is now Over–without being Over enough to have regained its classic status. Also, until the late ’90s, I thought this name was the epitome of geeky and old, and I’m not sure I’m past that. My mother was horrified when I mentioned the name (during my first pregnancy), and with each pregnancy since has worried that I will use it. I think she’d get used to it, but I hate to torture her on purpose.

Leo: This is the frontrunner as far as I’m concerned, but Paul is still thinking of it as a blatant reference to Leonardo DiCaprio. I’m more worried about all the references I’ve seen lately to how great it is with the name Max, since I’m heartily sick of the name Max and other names of that sort, such as Sam and Jack. (All three of those names–Max, Sam, and Jack–were on my list in 1998 when I was pregnant for the first time. I think the reason I’m so sick of them now is that I thought of them as such Awesome Fresh New Ideas when I thought of them, and then experienced the crashing disillusionment of discovering that we all think of great names at the same time. Were Emma, Isabelle, Ava, and Abigail also on that list? Why, yes they were.)

Oliver: We have a cat named Oliver. We’ve had him our entire married life. I think that’s too much to get past. Plus, we often call the cat Olive, and I think that’s a bad sign for the boy’s name.

Elliot: We don’t like the way it can be Eliot, Elliot, Eliott, or Elliott. Also, we’re both sort of so-so on the name to begin with.

Riley: Really, really, really like it. And it is a vile clash with our surname.

Miles: I don’t know. It’s a noun. It sounds plural.

Oh, man, is there any hope? I’m looking through The Baby Name Wizard hoping to add to the list, but I just don’t like anything. Boy names are so b-o-r-i-n-g.