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.

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.