My husband smells like hair oil. Stale salsa. Meat. Even the smell of his toothpastey breath is nauseating, and if it’s not toothpastey? Oh my dear Til-death-do-us-part, I can’t sleep unless you turn the other direction. The kids smell like dried sweaty hair, like sheets that need to be changed, like too-strong fabric softener. What on earth possessed me to buy such an intense fabric softener? When I wasn’t pregnant, it smelled so nice, a faint lingering smell of freshness long after the clothes were washed. Now that I’m pregnant, those air molecules are too big to fit in my nose. I can’t breath that in, it’s so strong and chemical.

It’s the same with my shampoo, and the leave-in stuff I usually put in my hair afterwards, and our hand soap: it’s so strong, it slaps me across the face. I’ve switched to my usual pregnancy shampoo: Suave clarifying, a cheapie that for some reason doesn’t bother me with its smell, and which also helps with the hormonal oily hair problem.

In the few days after learning I was pregnant, I was super-charged with adrenaline. Remembering earlier pregnancies, I took advantage of that energy. I concentrated especially on the bathroom, particularly the toilet, over which I knew I would be leaning in no time. (The only thing worse than barfing is barfing and then breathing in the smell of old pee drips.) A week later, the smell of the bleachy cleaner I’d used, which should have been long dissipated, started bothering me. Now the shower curtain and the edges fastening the pieces of shower wall have come down with one of their cases of Sudden Mold, and I can’t deal with it: the only way to banish it is bleachy cleaner, and I can’t stand the smell; but leaving it there makes me feel like throwing up every time I see it.

I understand that this crazy affliction is helping to keep the baby safe. I’m avoiding strong cleaning supply chemicals, and there is no way I’d eat meat that’s even slightly off, I can guarantee you that. The problem is, it’s taking things too far: sometimes there’s no way I’ll eat any meat at all, because of that “meat warming to cooking temperature” smell. Sometimes I can’t drink milk, because of that strong…milk flavor. The stench of cooked eggs lingers for days. Vegetables? Oh god, the smell of the steam while they’re cooking, it is going to send me running for that nice clean toilet.

This morning I feel like hiding from the children. I ducked into the computer room to get away from all the noise and all the questions. There are days where it’s just too much stimulation, you know? It’s like a barrage of teeny pellets. The babies are saying “Dah DAH!!?,” and Robert is saying, “Mommy, can I bring my Rubik’s cube to school? Why does WILLIAM get to cut up paper?,” and William is saying, “Mommy, I ate all my breakfast! Can I have a dessert?”

(And here they are already, joining me. Robert is flopped in a chair, playing Tetris on a Gameboy and keeping up a running monologue about Tetris. William is wondering, repeatedly, when it will be time for lunch. It’s 7:55 a.m.)

I’m regretting subtitling this blog “Blogging With Twins.” I’d thought I would be writing mostly about twins and twin care, a sort of reference blog. But it turns out I have to almost force myself to write on that topic; it seems boring to me. Also, there are so many twin-themed blogs already, perhaps we don’t need more. I’m thinking of changing the subtitle to reflect the largeness of our family—but as large families go, we’re small. We’re only large for a small family, if you follow me.

My plan was to have a blog that was good-natured and funny, like Sundry’s. Instead, I find I mostly feel like whining and complaining and taking strong stands on minor, unimportant issues, and bitching about how queasy I feel. I have always wanted to be one of those even-keel, non-complaining, go with the flow people, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to work out. Instead, I’m going to be one of those people always getting into a huge cheese fit over nothing.

Isn’t that discouraging, when you realize you aren’t going to be a way you were hoping you’d be? I’ve had that disillusionment set in several times with parenting. When my first baby was still an infant, I bought a set of alphabet cookie cutters. We’ve never even taken them out of the package, and it’s been almost 8 years. It turns out I don’t like “helpers” when I’m cooking.

At least I didn’t have any delusions about my patience levels (= low), or about how much I like playing children’s games (= not at all).

It occurs to me that I have left some information out of the prior post about breastfeeding twins.

For one thing, you may be wondering how you manage “sides” with twins. With a single baby, you’re supposed to nurse the baby on both sides each feeding, alternating which side you start with. Twins are different. Each baby nurses on just one side per feeding. Some women assign each twin a side of its own, and always nurse the babies that way; other women switch the babies at each feeding; other women switch the babies every 12 or every 24 hours. The nurse at the hospital advised me to switch every 12 hours because it would be easier, but I found it easier to remember to switch at each feeding. I was keeping a log anyway, of what times they nursed and when their diapers were changed (more on this in a minute), and so I just added a notation about whether the baby nursed on the left or the right, and I switched it the next time.

The log was essential to me for a long time. I took a large pad of paper, drew a line down the middle, wrote “Edward” at the top of one column and “Elizabeth” at the top of the other, and every time any substance went in or out of a baby, I made a note of it. I can’t believe how many times I had to check to see if it had been one hour or three since the babies last nursed. Same with diapers: I would feel as if I had just changed a baby’s diaper a second ago, but look, it had been hours. And the pediatrician’s office was calling me every day for the first week or two, “just checking in” but also asking me very specific questions about how many wet diapers each baby had had. Without my log, there is no way I would have had any idea how to answer that question.

There was one period when I assigned each twin a “side,” and that was when I got a breast infection. It was so painful, and one baby was doing that thing where they latch on and off repeatedly just for fun, so I put that baby on the non-hurty side, and put the all-business baby on the hurty side. Even after the infection subsided, I kept doing it this way because it was so much easier to keep track of. But then after a few weeks, I noticed that one baby always seemed hungrier, and always nursed longer. I wondered if it was possible that one side was producing more milk than the other side, so I immediately went back to switching sides at each feeding, and the hungrier baby got less hungry.

You also might be wondering when I stopped breastfeeding the twins together. When the twins were 7 or 8 months old, they were nursing fewer times per day, and for less time at each feeding. They were more able to wait for a feeding, and more able to be distracted by toys while they waited. They were getting a little big for the tandem nursing pillow, and I was running into a problem with one twin being done long before the other twin was done, so that one twin was restless and squirmy and wanting to play and poke at the other twin, but I couldn’t put that twin down because I was stuck under the nursing pillow. That’s when I started nursing them consecutively instead of together. I would occasionally run into problems in the middle of the night, if both twins were screaming to be fed—but then Paul would just cuddle one baby while I nursed whichever baby was currently the faster eater, and before long everything would be back to sleep.

There. Is that everything?

I remember when the twins were teeny babies and I would take them out, the first questions people would ask were “Are they boys or girls?” and “How much did they weigh?” After that, the women would ask in hushed tones, “You’re not…nursing them, are you?” Why, yes! Yes I was. And so I had to say so, and accept my new reputation as some sort of Hard-Core Breastfeed-or-Die type.

I was fully prepared to bottle-feed, and in fact I had pre-purchased a small supply of bottles and formula in case it was an emergency and I couldn’t nurse them even one more single second. But as it turned out, neither twin ever took a bottle. It happened this way not because I am so philosophically firm on the issue of breastfeeding, but because I am lazy and breastfeeding was genuinely easier for me.

It wouldn’t have been easier, though, without two things. The first thing was the training the nurses gave me at the hospital. They let me get all the way to 4:30 in the morning the first night without intervening: I’d said I wanted to feed the twins separately at first, and learn to feed them together later, so they let me go to it. All night long, I was feeding one baby while the other baby cried, back and forth between them.

I was actually more incredulous than miserable: still high from the birth, and from the feeling of not being pregnant anymore, my feeling was more, “Um, this isn’t going to work!” than “Open that window so I can leap out.” At 4:30, the nurse came in. “So,” she said. “Would you like me to show you how to tandem-nurse now?” I did not fall to the floor and cover her white sensible shoes with kisses, whatever you may have heard. But I did say, “Um, yes. Please.” So she showed me how to stack pillows and how to arrange two babies and how to sit properly so I wasn’t dying from discomfort, and that was the first thing that made everything easier. From then on, I breastfed both babies at the same time, so I was never jittering one leg nervously as a baby screamed and I mentally begged the other baby to hurry up and finish already. Also, it takes half the time of feeding babies one after the other.

The second thing that made everything easier was a gift from my cousin Lee: a tandem nursing pillow. It was inflatable, which turned out to be one of its best features: I could make it a little firmer or a little softer depending on the babies’ sizes and positions. It came with an inflatable back pillow, which made me much more comfortable. And it propped both babies to exactly the right height, so that I could even take my hands off them and read a book while I nursed them. I could theoretically nurse both babies at the same time using piles of pillows like they did in the hospital, but that was much more difficult to arrange.

I got so comfortable using that pillow and scooping up babies and having peace and quiet while they nursed, it never seemed like the right time to start fussing with bottles. The one time I really, really wanted bottles, though, was when we were out. How do you breastfeed twins discreetly in public? The answer is that you do not. What you do is you nurse one baby discreetly while the other one wails, drawing attention to you sitting there with a huge squirming lump under your shirt. It confuses people: there’s the crying baby who clearly wants to eat, so what are you doing? They come in for a closer look. The baby unlatches to see who that is coming over, revealing half a boob. Jesus.

Oh, did I mention that breastfeeding twins burns about 1000 calories per day? Yes. It is glorious.

I’m reading a book called The Girls, which is about a set of conjoined twins. One of the twins becomes pregnant. Two things she says about pregnancy resonate with me:

– “Having been born, as Ruby and I were intended to be born, joined at the skull, we are normal to ourselves. It’s normal for me and Ruby to be who we are and to live as we do. But being pregnant did not feel normal. For the first time in my life, I felt fully freakish and monstrously, hideously, deformed.”

– “…my delight and my horror, and my misery and my bliss, at the occupation of my body.”

Okay, so I don’t truly feel freakish, or monstrously hideously deformed, nor would I say I’ve experienced “horror.” But it does feel peculiar, this possession by baby.

Considering how much of my mental activity is taken up with being pregnant, it is a surprise to me that no one knows about it unless I tell them. They might think I look tired, or ill, or that my skin sure doesn’t look as good as usual, or that my hair seems to need washing, but they don’t know I’m pregnant. My own husband wouldn’t know, if I hadn’t told him.

That is one of the satisfactions of early pregnancy, and also one of the things that makes the information difficult to incorporate. It is pleasing, walking around with that “I’ve got a secret” feeling. I know I’m pregnant, but the clerk at the grocery store doesn’t. I know I’m pregnant, but the old woman who just said, “FOUR children? I can’t imagine!” doesn’t. I can still sleep on my tum if I want to, or I can lie on my back. I can sit normally in a chair. I’m wearing my “fat pants,” but other than that I’m in regular clothes.

But it is hard to accept the realness of the situation, when everything seems the same. I don’t look pregnant. I don’t feel pregnant. I feel like I have stomach flu. I can leaf through The Baby Name Wizard a million times, but I’m looking at names for a theoretical baby, not one who will actually be here next year.

Yesterday I had some painful cramping, and it crossed my mind that having a miscarriage would not be 100% bad. Today when I have felt even queasier than usual all day, and the twins have seemed especially baby-like and difficult to manage emotionally and logistically, and the pregnancy stretches long before me with all its impending discomforts (“Oh, that ‘can’t breathe’ feeling–I forgot that’s coming up soon”), it crosses my mind again. Then I feel worse, imagining how I’ll feel later, when the dear, dear baby is born and irreplaceable, and I’m looking down at it thinking, “I thought a miscarriage might in some ways be welcome.”

It’s such a neverending feeling of “doing it wrong,” this parenting thing. I remember back when I was pregnant with my first, thinking things like, “Maybe this whole thing was a bad idea. Maybe we should have gone with the other plan, the one where we have cats and tulips and money and we spend weekends at Barnes & Noble.” When I was pregnant with my second, I was thinking, “The spacing is all wrong. We should have gone with the other plan, the one where we waited until Robert was in kindergarten, or until he was 3-1/2, or until NEVER.” When I was pregnant with the twins, I was thinking, “We should have stopped at two. Something will go wrong, and everyone will say, ‘You just HAD to keep going, you just COULDN’T be happy with the national average.’ Also, now we can’t have a sedan, we’re going to have to get a minivan.”

Now I’m pregnant for a fourth time, and I didn’t mean to be, and that raises even more of these feelings and thoughts. Thoughts like, “This baby wasn’t supposed to happen.” Thoughts like, “Maybe we’ve wrecked our Exactly Right family, and we’ll always think so, and always wish we hadn’t.”

Fortunately these thoughts are balanced by other thoughts, thoughts from the part of me that isn’t under siege by hormones that attack with barfing and emotions. Thoughts from my usual self, the self that says, “These things usually work out fine in the end, after a brief panicky adjustment period” and “One day in the future, you’ll look back and won’t be able to believe you didn’t know this baby was coming all along” and “Oooh goodie, a BABY!!”

Do you have a song you’re embarrassed to have an emotional reaction to, but you can’t help it? Mine is Martina McBride’s “This One’s For the Girls.” I hear it in the car from time to time, and I lose it every time. Extra losing it if I’m driving, music-video-style, past first a group of teenaged girls, then an older woman walking briskly, then a middle-aged woman with her dog. It makes me feel all connected to all those other “girls,” even the teenaged ones who usually grate on my nerves by shrieking and shoving as they walk along, giving sidelong glances toward the road to make sure everyone’s watching.

I just watched the new(ish) Adam Sandler movie Click. It’s about a guy who gets a remote that lets him fast-forward or pause parts of his life. He uses it to fast-forward the plodding time until his promotion, and of course discovers that this means he lost time with his family, too. The problem gets worse and worse until he’s missed practically his whole life, and also he’s lost his wife, missed his kids’ childhoods, missed the death of a parent, etc. Looking back, he realizes he’s done none of the important things and all of the stupid things, and he’s wasted his entire life.

Is there any movie more likely to strike a parent’s heart with fear and anxiety? Already I worry that while I’m “taking a break from the kids,” what I’m really doing is spending time with the computer that I’ll look back on later as a colossal waste of time that took me away from my dear, dear children. Okay, so they’re driving me nuts now and if I don’t get away from them the yelling is going to start, but what if one of them DIES? And then I’ll think back and I’ll remember all the times I said, “Not now, honey, just let Mommy check her email.” OH MY GOD.

And what about all the times I hope for things to be over? I hope for potty-training to be over, for the tantrum stage to be over, for the back-talking thing to be over. But then I’ll be old, and the house will be quiet and I’ll have nothing to do, and my children will be far away and will think I’m foolish and old, and I’ll pine for these days! I’ll want nothing more than to wipe up pee drops from the floor around the toilet again! I’ll have to beg one of my grown sons to come over and miss the bowl! I’m wasting my whole life!

I’ve been hoping for the morning sickness to hurry up and go away, but later I’ll imagine this pregnancy in a glow of morning sunshine, when everything was beautiful and full of hope, and there were things to look forward to.

What is the matter with our brains, that they have to screw with us like this? We shouldn’t have to feel as if we’re missing things if we’re not enjoying every single not-always-enjoyable second. This parenting thing is the best ever, but it can also be the worst ever, and it is a huge pain in the ass to realize that later on I’m going to be wishing I’d spent more time doing it. Right now I want to spend some time writing, or reading, or eating some Kit Kat Bites I don’t have to share, but later on that won’t seem important at all, and I’ll be beating myself up for the hours I didn’t spend cuddling the babies and playing games with my older kids. That sucks!

One reason I keep a journal (not this blog, but an actual physical journal) is that it lets me feel like I’m storing things up for later. I can’t enjoy this deluge of parenting right now, while I’m drowning in it, but I can put some of it in a book and take it out later on and enjoy it then. I take too many photos for the same reason: if I take photos, I’m storing little bits of time. I can’t see it now, when I’m so tired and barfy and just want to go to a store by myself, but I can see it later. Through TEARS, probably. URG.

And speaking of tears, I cried so hard during that movie I nearly barfed. Pregnancy hormones + pregnancy nausea + huge sentimental moment with the rain pouring down and declarations of love with music to match = sobbing + gagging.

I have first-haircut photos for each of my first two kids, and both of them are under a year old in those photos. Robert was about 11 months old, and I gave him a trim before his one-year photo. William was more like 10 months old, and he got a haircut because his hair was so shaggy.

Neither of the twins has yet needed a haircut, and they are 16 months old. They have short, fine, baby hair still. Elizabeth’s is a little longer than Edward’s, but only long enough for the silliest of teesy ponytails, the kind that slips out if she shakes her head. When I take the twins out in public, people often think they’re two boys.

When, oh when will I be able to style her hair in little styley ways? It was one of the main benefits of having a girl, I thought.