Oh, sure: Baby boys are just as good as baby girls. Sure.

I am thankful that my in-laws live so far away.

I am thankful that my bonehead asshole father-in-law never even visits.

I am thankful for answering machines. Otherwise I guess we would have to answer the phone, in case it was an emergency.

I am thankful for the leftover chocolate pumpkin cheesecake in the fridge.

I am thankful for digital photography because, seriously, I used to sometimes throw out a whole roll’s worth of crappy prints.

I am thankful for not living in pioneer times, because that must have sucked.

I am thankful that my fifth baby is a good sleeper. Dear child, you know when to shut up, and that is extremely valuable in a family of seven.

I am thankful for good sales and lots of excuses to shop, and I am thankful that I don’t have to go out there tomorrow when people will be using crowbars to wedge themselves into crowded stores.

I am thankful for you guys–and so is Paul, because I vent a lot of stuff here that otherwise he’d have to hear twice. And the shopping talk I get out of my system! He is a happier man, because of you.

Guess who has 254 posts in her RSS reader? No, guess! YES, IT IS ME! So if you are thinking to yourself, “Why is Swistle not commenting on this post when it is about the very things she normally can’t shut up about?,” that is why.

You know how sometimes all the joy has been wrung from the universe and nothing is left but the dirty rag squeezings, and there is nothing fun to do in the whole world? Well, I am the OPPOSITE of that right now: I have about fifty tasks to do, most of which are fun and interesting. I need to cruise Etsy and and make my Christmas list. I need to decide if I’m going to order some expensive perfume with my own money (Paul and I get allowances–is that too cute for words?). I need to eat a bag of Raisinets. I need to experiment with yummy coffees for a SundryBuzz post. I need to go through a bunch of funny photos I took of the kids. Sample shot of William and Rob:

I need to do some online shopping for Christmas presents. I need to finish watching season 3 of Angel. I need to go through a year of archives and move the sensitive stuff to a new blog I’m calling Swistle Confidential (more on this later). I need to finish Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy. I need to take photos of all five kids until I get one good enough to go out with our Christmas cards (who dares me to send out one like the one above?). I need to read those 254 blog posts. I need to do a load of laundry, which sounds boring until you realize it contains a bunch of new clothes for the kids. I need to show you THESE JEANS:

Are those TOO FUNNY? Size SIX MONTHS, baby! They are almost as wide as they are tall! Little square jeans! Target’s Cherokee brand, 50% off, $3.98. So obviously I also need to go back to Target and buy more jeans. Oh, woe is me, a trip to Target!

It was only after the emails started pouring in that I realized what a sad, sorry deal I was offering you: Reveal your real, actual baby names to me! And in exchange I will tell you nothing! NOTHING!

The one thing Paul has made me promise about this blogging thing is that I won’t use the children’s names. At all. Not in the blog, not in an email. He hasn’t even made me promise not to talk about our sex life or certain details of his anatomy (future post material!), but he did make me promise about the kids’ names. Paul is a computer guy for his job and for his hobby, and he’s worried that by having (a) five children and (b) twins, we are already (c) way too identifiable without me blabbing their real names.

But oh! You should have seen me sitting on my hands yesterday, trying to keep myself from telling every single person who emailed me! I even tried giving out freshly-minted pseudonyms that come closer to their real names than the English royalty names I’ve been using, but test subjects reported a 200% increase in tease. (Want the closer-to-real pseudonyms anyway? Owen, Riley, Clarissa, John, Aaron.)

Oh, shoot! I had like five other things I was going to mention, and now this names subject has put them right out of my head. Hm… I don’t think anything was crucially important, but I hate that feeling of forgetting something.

Oh! Here’s one! I’m not sure I mentioned that the SundryBuzz gig is a regular thing: I’ll be posting there 2-3 times per week. Yesterday I reviewed a cookbook that contains recipes for things such as “Bitch Bar Bacon Swimps,” “Fried Dill Pickles,” and “Connie’s Death-Corn Five.” Tomorrow I’m going to do a holiday-related tip.

Paul and I caught ourselves actually looking forward to the long weekend. Paul was like, “I have Thursday AND Friday off!,” and I was like, “Yay!,” and then we suddenly realized what we were talking about here: not a four-day weekend of sleeping in and reading books and watching movies and avoiding stores, but rather four days trapped in a ranch house with five children and one bathroom and no place to go because everything will be either (a) closed or (b) so stuffed with bodies, it may as well be closed for all the good it would do us to try to go there. We have had children in the house for nearly NINE YEARS. When are we going to learn that vacation days are no longer vacationy?

Now…what was I going to say? Oh yes! It seems impossible, but I don’t think I ever showed you the pictures of all the stuff I bought on awesome clearances at The Children’s Place! Oh, it is so pretty and fun. Why oh why do they not sell everything in MY size?

Anyway. First, here is everything I bought for Elizabeth for this fall and winter:

Skirts and corduroy pants in green/pink/brown. One patterned skirt. Seven long-sleeved shirts.

And then I bought a bunch of short-sleeved shirts that will go great with the same skirts and pants for spring, and then those same shirts can go with shorts/capris for summer:

The embarrassingly tall, teetering, falling-over heap in the upper right corner is all the shirts I got for $1 each at Target’s end-of-summer clearance. Then there are eight shirts from TCP with pictures on them, and the same skirts and pants as in the previous picture.

Here is what I bought for Henry, Fourthborn Boy Who Wears Tattered Handmedowns:

Four long-sleeved shirts, one short-sleeved, one pair of corduroy overalls he unfortunately outgrew within a month.

And now a fashion show. This is a sampling of Elizabeth’s mix-and-match potential for fall/winter:

And then only ONE picture of Henry in his new duds. How does this happen? Poor Henry.

I’m going to tell you how I totally sucked as a mother and as a human being this morning, and then I’m going to tell you how I handled it afterward. And some of you are going to be like, “Oh, I am so relieved I’m not the only one who sucks!” or “I’ve never done that myself, but it’s good to know that the world wouldn’t end if I did.”

But some of you are going to be like, “Dude, I guess you get points for fixing it rather than, like, thinking you did nothing wrong or pretending it didn’t happen–but you still really really suck, and I hope you don’t think that knowing how to glue things back together cancels out the part where you broke it.” And I’m going to be all, “Dude! I KNOW! I totally suck sometimes!” What I try to work on is (1) reducing how often my suckiness presents itself, (2) reducing the severity of the attacks I fail to prevent, and (3) finding ways to handle things so that we don’t have to get a third mortgage to pay for the kids’ psychiatric bills.

I get frustrated very, very easily. And when I’m frustrated, I’m FURIOUS. This morning I was frustrated with the children: I’d been working all morning on THEIR routines, and I finally took my TEN MINUTES to take a shower, and it was “Mommy, Rob hit me TEN TIMES and he’s doing that voice he KNOWS I hate!” and “Mommy, William sat in the baby swing and it made a CRUNCH noise,” and lots of crazy laughter and giddiness and the jarring irregular banging sound of toys being thrown down the stairs, and a toddler screaming and a baby fussing, and I couldn’t quite hear the older-kid reports/tattles over the shower/fan and had to keep asking for repeats.

As I dried off, I could hear part of my brain advising me that this was a good time to go to another room and calm down, but I couldn’t take the time to do that because we needed to be at the bus stop in 20 minutes and I was still in my robe, and how was it possible to even SPEAK to a child who would think it was a good idea to sit in a baby swing, and that swing cost $80 and I NEED it for Henry, and everything was so UNFAIR, and so I felt that little catch being released, and I flipped the flip out.

There was enough yelling that afterward my throat felt rough. There was self-pity at top volume. There was door-slamming. There was door re-slamming, and re-slamming, and re-slamming, with “URGGG!!!!” sounds of frustration and anger. Afterward, the door wasn’t closing right.

It was an ugly, ugly temper tantrum. Part of me was watching it happening, eating popcorn and saying, “Oh, girl, you are not going to say THAT. Oh you DIDN’T! Oh, girrrrrrrrl.” The rest of me was like a tower of flame. There is nothing like rage for feeling SO GOOD and SO HORRIBLE at the same time. Sickeningly exhilarating.

I went into my room afterward to get dressed. I felt stunned and sober. Lightheaded. I felt like trying to talk myself into thinking it didn’t happen. I dreamed it. I fantasized it. I read it in a book. I saw it in a movie. I didn’t really yell like that. No, my mind said back: you really did. Then I started thinking, I can’t fix this. There’s no way to fix that. It can’t be undone, and children are too young to understand, and this is terrible, and there’s nothing I can say to make things better, and nothing can be done about it.

But I had to go back out of my room, to where they all were. And so I went out like this: I said, “Geez, that was enough yelling to last us about TEN YEARS, wasn’t it? Man, I yelled SO LOUD, my THROAT HURTS!” The children visibly relaxed. I said a few more things along those lines, and Rob said, tentatively, “I thought the door was going to bend backward on its hinges!” and I said, “It was actually STUCK a little! I thought I was going to be locked in my room!”

Then I made strong eye contact and said, kindly but very seriously, that I should NOT have yelled like that. That no one should. That I was sorry. That they had indeed needed to be reprimanded, but not like THAT, not with anger and yelling. That although toddlers have tantrums (glancing in twins’ direction), adults should not. That I should not have yelled like that. That I was sorry.

I reminded them of conversations we’ve had before, about how everyone has their own issues to struggle with: some people battle self-pity, and some people battle discontent, and some people battle addictions, and some people battle anger–and I was someone who struggled with anger. That I was working on it, always working to control it and to control myself, and that a lot of times I succeeded, but that sometimes I screwed up, and that I had screwed up really badly just now.

The kids weren’t sitting silently this whole time, they were making eye contact and looking a little shy, and saying “Yeah” when they knew what I meant; and William was smiling but Rob was trying to keep himself from warming to me, because he was still mad about being yelled at, as well he could be, but on the other hand this kind of talk really appeals to him and to his sense of justice. I kept going.

I explained how I’d gone wrong. How in the shower I’d been thinking of things that had happened when I was working at the pharmacy, situations where the customer was so mean or blamed us for things that were not our fault. I’d gotten myself all worked up about these things that are long in the past, and I explained how that was another thing I had a problem with. I asked if they ever did that–thought of things that made them angry a long time ago–and they both said they did.

I said that thinking about those things had put me in an angry mood, and so when the kids’ behavior frustrated me, I had taken the anger I felt at those old situations and directed it at them. That I hadn’t even been angry “at them,” but rather just ANGRY. Since we’ve been watching the show Avatar, and there are people on that show who can take lightning and channel it through themselves to use it as a weapon, I used that as an analogy of how anger can come in from one direction but get flung out in a different direction. They lit up with understanding. I said it’s like how you can scuff your feet and build up more and more static, but you don’t have to put that static shock back into the carpet, you can use it to shock a person. I said that I should not have done that: that I should not have taken anger and shot it at them. I said that I should have gone into my room and calmed down if I felt like I was going to yell. Rob said, “You know what helps ME, is I read a book for a few minutes.”

We talked about it a little more, but the bus was coming and we needed to wrap it up. I was glad to see that the storm seemed to have passed, that we seemed to be coming out of the bad situation I had created. Rob said, grudgingly, “At least it doesn’t take long to get your temper BACK.” I agreed, and–lest they think that their mother showing human flaws meant it was open season on her entire personality–reiterated that that was one of my good points. That everyone had GOOD things about them, just as everyone had things they had to work on, and that “getting over anger quickly” was one of my good points. They agreed.

I took them to the bus. I felt wrung out. I’d slipped, and in fact I’d slipped badly. But I am okay, and the kids are okay, and I took a really bad slip and found a teaching opportunity: (1) people screw up, sometimes REALLY screw up; (2) people should acknowledge their screw-ups and apologize for them; (3) people should continue to work on their weak points; (4) fortunately, our weak points are balanced by strong points.

I don’t know if you’ll see it that way or not. Some people don’t struggle with anger, and I can see how those people might be appalled that I could think anything good came out of this, so I want to re-emphasize that in no way am I saying, “See? It seemed like a bad thing but actually it was good! I can yell all I want now!” My behavior was shitty, and I hope I communicated that to the kids: that I treated them shittily, and that people should not treat other people that way, and that there is no excuse for it.

And what is it I hope I’m communicating to you? I hope I’m not communicating that I need to be reassured, or that I need it re-emphasized to me that I should not have yelled. But I’m a fan of truth-in-motherhood, and I hope I’m communicating to you the same thing I was trying to get across to the kids: that I screwed up, and that we all do sometimes. That being flawed human beings does not mean we’re not qualified to be mothers.

Writing here is a little like having a big group of friends over for coffee and cookies (not that I ever do that in real life) (though maybe we would if we all lived in the same town) (not that you’d HAVE to come over, I’m just saying you COULD) (it’s not like I’d literally FORCE you, I’d just waft cookie aromas out the window and you would be drawn in AGAINST YOUR WILL) (I now return you to the sentence already in progress): it’s comfy, it’s easy, we rarely disagree except on the BIG issues such as how often children should be bathed, and I’m always having happy thoughts like, “I can’t wait to tell them about THIS!”

Over the three-day weekend, I worked on my first post as a contributing writer over at SundryBuzz. That was more like…giving a speech in front of my high school. Have I ever mentioned I won speech contests in high school? I liked writing the speeches, but if you won you had to give them in front of the whole school.

My high school was pretty nice to people as high schools go, and so no one openly taunted me or HOOTED or anything, but that feeling of getting up in front of ALL THOSE PEOPLE, many of them strangers, and then having to SAY SOMETHING—yagghhh. What I used to do was have my few good friends sit right in the middle, so I could deliver the speech to people with friendly familiar faces.

I wonder if you’d mind going over and sitting in the middle.

6:45 a.m.

• Entire family wakes up within 3 minutes of each other.
• Swistle nurses Henry.
• Paul checks his email, then sits on the couch with the children.
• Twins gradually leak through their diapers, which is what happens if they aren’t changed immediately after awakening. But how many times can Swistle tell Paul about this, considering she has told him so many times already? It is getting embarrassing. She will just change the twins herself after she finishes nursing Henry. After all, that is what she would do on a weekday if Paul were at work. It’s just a little extra laundry, no big deal. Besides, it’s good that he’s spending time with the kids.

7:15 a.m.

• Henry finishes nursing.
• Swistle stands up.
• Paul stands up. Paul says, “Well! Guess I’ll take a shower!”
• It would make a lot more sense if Paul would shower while the baby was nursing, since then he’d be all ready now and Swistle could get in the shower. Swistle could have said something about this earlier, but Swistle has explained this so many times. How can she explain it without Paul feeling like she thinks he’s the village idiot? It would also make sense for Swistle to shower now while Paul handles some morning chores, but Paul is always so crabby if he tries to do things before he showers, so she will just let it go.
• Paul showers.
• Swistle feeds the four non-nursing children breakfast.
• Swistle takes out the trash, into which Paul has dumped something rotten. She should leave it for him to take out, but he would take it out exactly as is: a whole bag, 7/8ths empty, tied up and tossed out the door. Swistle has the super-human intelligence required to realize it’s more efficient to add the contents of other trash cans to the bag, especially trash cans that will need to be emptied today anyway, such as the diaper pail which perpetually needs emptying, even more so when Paul doesn’t roll up the stinky diapers before dropping them in there. Swistle remembers that stupid “baby-and-me” class instructor who told one mother that she should be sure to praise her husband for changing his own child’s diapers, and to be grateful he even does it. Are the fathers receiving similar instructions about praising their wives, and are we all to be so very grateful that the mothers are willing to change diapers? Please.
• Swistle packs the diaper bags for errands.
• Paul is still taking a shower. Swistle and her mom are leaving to go on errands soon, so this is not a good time for one of these long, luxurious showers. But Swistle has mentioned this so many Sundays in a row! How can she mention it again without it sounded like boring naggy wife? She will just have to take a short shower to make up the time.
• Swistle unloads the dish rack.
• Swistle gets a load of laundry out of the dryer and folds it and puts it away.
• Swistle gets Edward changed and dressed.
• Swistle gets Henry changed and dressed.
• Swistle tells Rob and William to clear their dishes and sends them to get dressed.
• Swistle builds a sailing vessel, discovers the New World, settles it, harvests a crop of corn, and returns home with a boatload of gold and spices.
• Paul gets out of the shower.

7:50 a.m.

• Paul starts to get dressed. He starts sighing at the children because they’re “not letting him get DRESSED!” (They’re following him and asking him questions.) His tone implies to Swistle that he thinks Swistle should be keeping the children away from him, but it is hard to know which things Swistle is “picking up on” and which things Swistle is “totally imagining.”
• Paul takes Elizabeth downstairs to get her dressed. (Later Swistle will discover that Elizabeth has (1) uncombed hair, (2) no shoes, and (3) a short-sleeved shirt in November.) Having Paul downstairs makes it tricky for Swistle to take a shower, because she’d have to leave Edward unattended and Edward is the kind of toddler who dumps a box of cereal onto the carpet and sits there eating some and grinding the rest under his feet. Swistle tells Rob to watch Edward.

8:00 a.m.

• Swistle heads for the shower. She first has to remove Paul’s book, which has been left hanging on the shower bar. Why do they have to have the same “consideration for others” conversation so many times, particularly about taking unnecessarily long showers (READING in the shower, for god’s sake) when Swistle has to be somewhere, not to mention how it means the woman he supposedly loves more than any other in the whole world ends up with tepid water? If she explains this AGAIN, she will sound as if she thinks Paul is a child, not a grown man who can understand things and remember them later. And probably he doesn’t love her, either, since he doesn’t care if she gets enough hot water.
• Henry fusses. Paul doesn’t seem to notice. The fussing makes it difficult for Swistle not to feel tense and rushed, and also as if nothing gets done unless she does it.

8:10 a.m.

• Swistle is drying off and putting up her hair, and she can hear that Paul is impatient with the children already. How can that be, when he has NOTHING TO DO? Swistle makes an unpleasant expression and wears away a little more of her tooth enamel.

8:20 a.m.

• Paul asks what still needs to be done. He seems to expect to be praised for realizing that things need to be done in the mornings. Does he not realize that 1 hour and 35 minutes of work have already taken place?
• Swistle replies that all that is left to do is nursing the baby, and doing last-minute diaper checks, and putting on coats, and none of that can be done right now except the nursing, and would Paul like to do that?
• Swistle should leave it at that, but she cannot. Instead she explains to Paul again how it works best if they MESH their routines for maximum efficiency and fairness. That is, instead of Swistle working while Paul gazes into space, and then Paul doing something for himself while Swistle works, and then Swistle working while Paul does something else for himself, and then Paul asking what work still needs to be done when it’s all been done, it works best if Paul works too, in a way compatible with Swistle’s work. Yes, Swistle CAN do it all herself, since she DOES do so on weekdays, but the agreement was that when they are BOTH home they SPLIT the work, since otherwise Paul has a weekend and Swistle does not.
• Paul agrees. Yes, he remembers this. But he says, what was he supposed to do? He only just now finished getting ready, and everything’s done!

8:25 a.m.

• Swistle goes to Target and spends a lot of money.

Remember how I was all, “The two-year spacing sucks!,” and then a few minutes later I was all pretending to retract it? Now I really DO retract it. The two-year spacing is great.

Silly boys, two years apart

Big sister and little brother, two years apart

Baby namers, TO MY SIDE. We have on our hands the kind of situation that makes my fingers go all cold and tingly.

Reader Casey nearly gave me heart failure by telling me she is 24 weeks pregnant and has QUADRUPLETS to name. Are you getting this down? EIGHT NAMES to choose, four first names and four middle names.

Three of the quads are known to be girls. The fourth is going to be a surprise–which is particularly appropriate because the baby itself was a surprise to parents already getting used to the idea of having triplets. Oh my god, is this not the most wonderfully fun thing you have ever heard of? I have been thinking of this ALL WEEK. Don’t you wish we all lived in the same town so we could sign up for shifts to go hold babies? Newborns everywhere, plenty to go ’round! Imagine the surround-sound wahing!

Anyway! The three known-to-be-girls have somehow already been named without our assistance:

Molly Claire
Paige Lilah
Jordan Kate

The fourth quadruplet, if a boy, will be named Chase Tobias. The decision on the table, then, is what to name the fourth quadruplet if a girl.

The current contenders for first name are Olivia and Addison. (I don’t know why “Swistle” isn’t in there. I assume it didn’t sound good with their surname.) The current contenders for middle name are Grace, Olivia, Addison. This gives you the following name combinations to vote on:

1. Olivia Grace
2. Olivia Addison
3. Addison Grace
4. Addison Olivia

We are voting here for overall sound of the name, but also for compatibility with the other three girl names.

But Casey ALSO says that they’re open to new name suggestions, so BRING IT!

Well, VOTE first. THEN bring it.