You know what makes me feel a little queasy, and causes me to lose faith in my fellow man? The fact that spammers would not send out spam if it didn’t sometimes work. There are ACTUAL PEOPLE clicking those stupid things and handing over money. I know this observation has been made before, but it keeps hitting me afresh.

And speaking of spam, I was looking idly to see if an email I was hoping for had maybe gotten stuck in the spam filter, and I found FOUR non-spam emails in there. FOUR! Two containing time-sensitive questions! And that’s just in the last month: spams get deleted automatically after 30 days, and I had TOTAL FAITH so I NEVER CHECKED! How many people have I appeared to TOTALLY SNUB over the last year and a half? AAAAAAAAAGH!

And I can’t even say, “If I haven’t gotten back to you, it’s my spam filter’s fault,” because sometimes I do take kind of a LONG TIME to answer, and I HAVEN’T been answering emails for the new baby name site but have just been tucking them all aside for later use. Well, how about this: if you have been thinking, “…Hey, why hasn’t she answered my email?” (unless it’s for the baby-name site, because so far I’m not answering those, just saving them), it wouldn’t hurt to re-send your email. And I’ll start checking the spam filter more often.

Also, look how Henry sucks his fingers:

I’m just going to start saving for braces now. No sense waiting.

I haven’t mentioned the diet for awhile, and you are probably thinking you’re on to me. “Yes,” you nod wisely. “This is what happened with Couch to 5K, and with Modified Couch to 5K, and with that whole Cleaning Program: big talk, and then a Suspicious Lack of talk.”

But no! I am in fact still on the diet. I’m past the stage where the weight loss makes clothes “less tight,” and now I’m into the stage where it makes them “loose and unflatteringly sloppy-looking.” I’ve had many, Many, MANY slips (brownies! cake! clearance Valentine’s candy!), but I haven’t had that feeling of kind of HOPING I’ve blown it so I can go back to eating what I want. I keep thinking, “Okay, Swistle, right back on it now dear.”

It helps that I am a person who likes eating the exact same meals day after day. The less I think about food, the better. I have chocolate-milky coffee (half microwaved skim milk, half coffee, with Splenda and baking cocoa) for breakfast (with cereal or eggs if I’m hungry), turkey-vegetable-chickpea soup for lunch, chicken-vegetable stir-fry on rice for dinner, and fat-free sugar-free pudding for dessert (I recommend the cooked kind, which is an utter pain in the ass to make but I think more delicious than the instant kind). Snacks are milky tea, furtively-eaten marshmallows, various foods purchased “for the kids,” swigs directly from a bottle of booze, etc. (Snacks need some work.)

I have a Freebie Day coming up: Easter candy is the best of all seasonal candy, so on Easter I eat ANY KIND I WANT and as much as I want, all day long. Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs! Cadbury Eggs! Hershey candy-coated eggs! Cadbury candy-coated eggs! Hershey marshmallow eggs! On my last diet, this led to a several-day binge instead of the one-day planned splurge, but life went on after that so I’m not much worried.

In the meantime, Diet P0rrn:

See’s Candies: the centerfold.

10:30 p.m.– Swistle goes to bed and lies awake thinking about something totally stupid.

11:00 p.m.– Still thinking. And now also thinking about how many minutes this has wasted.

11:20 p.m.– Drifts off to fantasy of winning a $1,000 gift card to Target.

11:30 p.m.– Elizabeth wakes up crying. Swistle goes and gets her and brings her back to Swistle’s room, then lies awake again thinking with increasing anxiety about how she would get the kids out of the house if there was a fire.

11:40 p.m.– Swistle gets kicked in the neck by a toddler who wants to lie sideways with her head on Daddy’s pillow.

12:15 a.m.– Drifts off.

12:30 a.m.– Henry calls for service from the 24-hour cafeteria. He would like a refill on his bottomless cup of milk, purchased 9 months ago.

1:00 a.m.– Back to bed. NO THINKING. GO TO SLEEP. STOP THINKING. Swistle falls asleep and dreams about a gentle, pleasant canoe ride. A canoe ride that cruises past a giant, half-submerged, tipped-over, dark-metal boat.

1:45 a.m.– Swistle is actually grateful to be awakened by the sound of a nearby toddler about to barf, and before reaching full consciousness is already halfway to the bathroom with the toddler, who throws up mostly into the sink, greatly reducing barf clean-up time.

2:05 a.m.– Back to bed, with toddler on towel. Swistle lies awake wondering if this means the whole family is going to start barfing. Is she imagining it, or does her tummy feel a little queasy?

2:25 a.m.– Drifts off. Dreams about elevators, and about missing the bus.

5:28 a.m.– Paul’s alarm goes off. Swistle thinks, “Oh, thank goodness I can sleep for another 37 minutes.”

5:29 a.m.– Henry wakes up yelling.

5:35 a.m.– Edward calls, “My get up too?”

6:05 a.m.– Careful not to move her sore neck too much, Swistle puts the coffee on.

6:30 a.m.– Swistle realizes the coffee maker will not work when it is not plugged in.

1) Giant nasty vehicle-like robots that destroyed anything out after sunset. I was out after sunset. I took refuge in a house that didn’t have a working bathroom.

2) I went to Jen‘s house for a mothers’ group meeting that opened with each person doing a little improv a capella singing. Jen’s husband was in the background telling the triplets that he still needed to fix the freight elevator, so they should take the regular elevator. I dream about elevators frequently.

3) Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were in my bedroom explaining how Scientology could improve my sex life. Tom was being really gross about it.

Meanwhile, a toddler was kicking me in the neck because she wanted to lie sideways with her head on Paul’s pillow and her feet on mine.

Coffee brewing? CHECK.

Edward, as a DVD started up: “YAAAAAAY! Cah soon to DVD!” (coming soon to DVD)

+-+-+-+-+-+

Me: forgetting to put creamer in my coffee and not wanting to get another spoon dirty. Seeing sippee cup of milk abandoned in living room. Considering. Shrugging. Using.

• The other parent will see how much work you do as you are racing back and forth with spritz bottles and laundry baskets.
• You will have another adult to watch the children while you are working, rather than having “helpers” and distractions.
• If the other parent is goofing around, you can use the “toddler choices” format to say in a friendly, pleasant tone of voice, “Do you want to clean the bathroom, or do you want to watch the kids while I do it?,” instead of bringing out the screeching tone of voice to say, “Why is YOUR weekend ‘a weekend’ while mine is just MORE OF THE SAME??”
• The other parent will then have a mental picture during the workweek of you working-working-working, rather than having a mental picture of you lying around complaining.
• This will free up time during the week, when no one is around to see you lying around complaining.
• Instead of Monday being the day when you have to deal with all the mess generated by having an extra person but less work, the Monday House will be the best.
• Weekends are a disappointment anyway (We’ll get to sleep in! It’ll be great having another adult to help! We can relax and have fun!), and so you might as well improve the rest of the week.

I am feeling a little shy this morning after spending the night dreaming about David Boreanaz. I mean, not only did I cheat on my boyfriend John C. McGinley, but I know David Boreanaz is YOUR boyfriend. I’m really sorry. Nothing really “happened,” if that helps. And whatever DID happen, he seemed distracted so I’ll bet he was thinking of you.

Yesterday was a busy day, and I was glad that I at least got one load of laundry through the washer and dryer. I put the basket on our bed to fold later, and forgot all about it.

Fast-forward to bedtime. I’m tossing my dirty clothes into the laundry, and Paul says, “Oh, wait. That’s clean laundry in that basket. I put it there to keep it safe.” He and the kids were playing on the bed earlier, and he remembered how much I hate it when clean laundry gets strewn around the room. So he put the basket WHERE WE KEEP DIRTY LAUNDRY IN LAUNDRY BASKETS. And so of course for the rest of the day I’d been tossing wet washcloths, baby-food-saturated baby bibs, etc., onto the clean clothes.

The look in my eyes must have been presenting an Idiot Award, because Paul started trying to do that thing guys do when they get in trouble for being idiots: he said in an injured voice that next time he wouldn’t try to save the laundry, but would just leave it on the bed where the children could throw it all over the room. His tone was of someone who had tried and tried to do right, but had been thwarted by scoffers and ingrates and nitpickers and control freaks at every turn, until now he was ready to lie down and give up this heavy burden of unappreciated righteousness.

I explained as if to a slow child that the issue here was not that he shouldn’t keep the laundry safe, but that he shouldn’t be an IDIOT (*pause to raise eyebrows for emphasis*) by putting it “for safety” (*eyebrows*) in the dirty laundry pile, where it was in fact LESS SAFE than on the floor. And happily, the pants he wanted for the next day were right on top, under two wet washcloths and a peached baby bib, so I could demonstrate with a visual aid—so helpful for slow learners—that this was really more HIS problem than MINE.

Idiot. Makes me feel a whole lot less guilty about the whole David Boreanaz thing.

My RSS reader has been painfully empty the last week or so. If you, too, are hitting refresh every few minutes, perhaps you’d like to go visit my brick-and-mortar friend Astarte, who started up a blog after I wore her down with my incessant nagging. Astarte and I have been friends since high school, and she is my go-to girl when I’m FREAKING OUT about something.

And you could go visit Katie and see her exciting news.

You could go tell me what kind of expensive face stuff I should buy before Paul has time to regret his offer (I don’t think he knows how much face stuff can run to).

You could go give an opinion on a baby name. Nobody likes Lawson? I knew such a cute boy in high school named Lawson (hi, Jonathan!).

You could go fill out Sarah’s funny Would You Rather? survey.

You could go tell another of my brick-and-mortar friends, Mairzy, what mental image you get when you think of someone nice. (Dark blonde hair and green eyes, right?)

You could go see this tea and tell me if you think it’s worth risking. It looks kind of yummy, but I’m not sure I want to buy 100 teabags without trying it first.

There. That’ll keep us busy for a few minutes while other people compose their posts to entertain us.

One of my friends and I have been emailing about something, and we’re stuck, and we’re hoping other people can help us figure out what is going on. I’m going to cut a big chunk out of one of her emails, because I think she does a good job explaining what we’re wondering:

Why is it that when you are young and married, and you are out with other young married couples who have children (and you don’t have children), and they spend the whole evening complaining about their children (which, okay, whatever, some of it is funny, some of it is sobering when they get serious about how. bad. their. lives. have. turned. out. because of offspring–this conversational tone is awkward, yes?), do they have to follow every paragraph with a question like, “Oh, I bet you guys have changed your minds, right? You’re never gonna have kids, you didn’t know what it was like!” or “We’re really opening your eyes, aren’t we?” or “I bet we’ve ruined any chance you’ll ever have kids!” Why do they say these things so smugly? Why do they seem so horrified at their lives, and yet act superior because we don’t have children? What is this smugness?

And I know I haven’t had a child, so I haven’t experienced it and don’t know from experience all of the stuff. Obviously. But why do people have to complain and complain and complain, and tell you how awful it is, and how hard it is, and THEN freak out if you even consider NOT having children? And why do people call that selfish?

Maybe, my main question is, why do so many parents complain so much, when, duh! You are responsible for the complete well being of a tiny human! These conversations make my skin crawl.

I have been thinking and thinking on this topic: Why DO Parents Say Things Like That? Because I am totally familiar with what she is describing, and I can’t quite pin down what happens. Here is what I THINK happens:

1) New parents think that they are the only ones to ever have negative feelings about parenting, or about their children. (I don’t know how this happens, since we hear it all around us, but it does seem to happen.)

2) In a group of new parents, where everyone wants to talk about parenting the way a group of engaged people want to talk about wedding plans, someone finally tentatively broaches their negative feelings. Everyone else is so relieved, they’re practically high from it.

3) Searching for more of that high, parents bring up negative things more often. When that high becomes insufficient, they get more and more negative, saying bolder and bolder things. People who actually dislike the entire parenting experience (as opposed to the people who enjoy parenting but also enjoy complaining) start getting more confident and vocal.

4) And when parents realize they’ve been talking that way in front of non-members, as it were, they suddenly get self-conscious. They’re torn: on one hand, they kind of WANT to tell you the sucky stuff, because they’ve been working the whole “Nobody tells you it’ll be like this” angle (true or not), and because they want credit for dealing with something so diffcult. On the other hand, they know it sounds awful when they describe it this way, and they don’t literally mean all of it, and they think you’ll think they’re bad parents, and they wonder if they’ve gone too far and will talk you out of having kids. Also, when they look at non-parents, they remember their own non-parent selves and feel embarrassed about whatever opinions they might have had back then. CONFLICTED!

5) So then they get even stupider, and talk more when they should be talking less.

I think the SMUGNESS she describes is basic “We know something you don’t know” smugness. Like when someone has been to another country and keeps bringing up how they do things there. Or when someone has been on a missions trip. Or when someone has worked in a job you’ve never worked in. Or when someone has had something awful happen to them. Or when someone has done ANYTHING where (1) they now know more than you, and (2) they want you to know that there is NO WAY you can know the same thing unless you go through the same thing. Man, you can’t even BEGIN to understand. And so now we’re going to explain it to you AT LENGTH, even though we JUST SAID that there’s NO WAY you could understand, because there is NO REASON you shouldn’t be able to do this too.

Married people do this to non-married people. Graduates do it to students. War veterans do it to civilians. Exercisers/dieters do it to non-exercisers/non-dieters. And, as we’ve noticed, parents do it to non-parents. Parents also do it to other, less-experienced parents: parents of two children do it to parents of one child, parents of toddlers do it to parents of babies, and parents of teenagers do it to parents of toddlers. Kind of makes the human species look bad, doesn’t it? We want credit for being more awesome than you, and we also want you to know that you have no excuse for not being this awesome too.

Anyway, that’s my theory: we do it because of one of our strengths as a species (our eagerness to bond with each other and to empathize with each other) combined with one of our failings as a species (our eagerness to one-up each other and be superior to each other).

That’s not quite as . . . useful a theory as I’d like to have, though, so please add your voice to the discussion and maybe we can hammer this out a little better.

When Valentine’s Day candy was 75% off, I reminded myself that the COST of the candy is IRRELEVANT: the CALORIES are not 75% off.

But today it was NINETY percent off.