Paul and I have this thing we do. It flies in the face of an almost sacred convention: that families should eat dinner together. That’s what we fly in the face of. I’m flinching, anticipating produce (produce if we’re lucky) flung in our faces in return for this admission.

Paul and I have four children, ages 7 and under. One of Paul’s friends said it best: we’re no longer playing one-on-one, we’re doing zone defense. (Or it was something that that effect, anyway. Sports metaphors don’t quite reach me.) Dinner time is a difficult time of day: I’m tired and I’ve had my fill of children; Paul is tired and has spent an hour with children climbing all over him; the children are tired and getting hyper and wild and crabby. So what we do is, we divide and conquer. Paul takes the older boys and handles their dinner at a table we have in the living room. I take the twins and handle their dinner in the kitchen.

When the children are fed, we continue the division for their bedtime routine: Paul supervises Robert and William as they brush their teeth and get into their pajamas, and then he reads to them; meanwhile I read to the babies while they’re still in their high chairs, and then I get them into their pajamas and put them in their cribs.

Then, when all the children are theoretically asleep in their beds like little lambs, that’s when Paul and I have our dinner. We eat together, just us.

I’m re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, about how a situation can be going along steadily with a slight increase or slight decrease of something, and then abruptly there’s a BIG increase or a BIG decrease. This happens with fashion fads, he says: a few people will be wearing something, and then suddenly everyone has to have it. It’s not a steady slope, it’s a big plummet.

Where I notice this concept in action is the mold on our shower curtain. There will be a few little dots of grey, and I’ll think, “Huh. Probably should get around to cleaning in here some day.” A day later, there will be a colony of little dots, and I’ll think, “Better move that up the priorities list.” And a day later, the entire curtain is covered in gross, bad-housekeeper mold, and I’m frantically spritzing it with Tilex Mold & Mildew, trying not to scream or breathe.

At 15 months, the twins are eating almost exclusively bite-sized finger foods. I make a peanut butter and jam sandwich and cut it into little bites. Cheese, cut into little bites. Fruit, cut into little bites. Dry cereal. Goldfish crackers. Quesadilla, cut into little bites. Fried egg, cut into little bites. Toast, cut into little bites.

I do still spoon-feed them a few things: applesauce, yogurt, and the “vitamin A fruit or vegetable EACH DAY” so firmly demanded by the handout from the doctor’s office, which for some reason I have trouble facing in any other form (carrots, which take so long to cook; cantaloupe, which goes all mushy if you don’t use it quickly; peaches, which are only briefly in season). I have read that other children this age are spoon-feeding themselves, to which I say “Bwah ha ha ha ha! No way.” I am not giving these children a “spoons and mushy stuff” combination until they are DRIVING.

There are a few things I give them whole, and let them take bites of: graham crackers, mostly. They CAN take bites of other things, like sandwiches and bananas, but given the opportunity to do so, they will more often get transfixed by the way those foods mush through their fingers when squeezed. And so in the interests of my sanity, I mostly still cut their food up for them. (See “take so much, a mother can only.”)

They drink milk from sippee cups. If they are allowed to keep the sippee cups on their trays, they will sometimes take sips and then gently put the cup back down until they want another sip. More often, they will wait until I am lulled into thinking they will do this, and then they turn the cups upside down and shake them vigorously until their trays are lakes of milk to be splashed in until milk coats the walls.

I have finally given up on bibs, except in extreme circumstances such as pasta. Both twins would rip their bibs off and fling them to the floor, again and again and again and again and again until I was nearly going mad. I hear my mother-in-law in my head, saying in That Voice, “So they WON, huh?”–but too bad. The twins are tidy eaters. My firstborn practically needed TWO bibs, he was so messy, but these two babies only occasionally get anything on their clothes.

We have two high chairs, side by side. Edward always sits in the one with the seatbelt, because he is the only one of the four children to figure out that he could turn around and then stand up.

Each twin tries to jettison food he/she doesn’t want by putting it on the other twin’s high chair tray. If they are sharing a cup (if, for example, I have only one that’s clean), they will hand it back and forth.

If I’m spoon-feeding them, I use one bowl and one spoon, and I alternate bites between them.

I have to stop myself from feeling as if they have to eat the same amounts of everything. The other night I made them fried eggs and buttered toast. Edward was eating tons of toast and only a little egg; Elizabeth was eating tons of egg and only a little toast. This made me feel agitated, and as if maybe I should start giving Edward only egg and Elizabeth only toast so they’d “even out.” Then I thought about how if either of them were a single baby and eating that way, I wouldn’t give it a thought, and so I continued to offer both twins both foods, but didn’t worry that Edward was favoring the toast and Elizabeth the egg.

I’ll tell you this, I’m not doing those dishes. Paul and I, we have a deal: we each do our own dishes, plus each person does the dishes created by any meal he or she prepares for the children. This comes out pretty even.

Here’s what lights me: when he leaves his own dishes and the kids’ dishes from the night before, and skys off to work. I have to look at those dishes all day, thinking about the possibilities. I could do them and end the issue–except that I’ve learned that if I give Paul an inch, the next day he’ll take the same inch and those dishes will be left there again. Plus, I’d feel like a patsy.

I could leave them there for him, but then I have to see them there, all messy and bad-housewifey in the sink, reminding me every time I’m in the kitchen that I have an inconsiderate husband who is sitting in his totally clean office (cleaned by an actual maid) while I languish in squalor. And then he’ll do them that evening, and I’ll sit there thinking, “Since it takes the SAME AMOUNT OF TIME EITHER WAY, why couldn’t you have done that LAST NIGHT?” And he will not sway under the force of my thoughts, but will hum a tune as he dries his hands.

Third possibility is today’s favorite: fling them out the window to shatter on the driveway below. No, I’m not going to do that: they’d just sit there until I cleaned them up.

Some days I feel like I am this close to falling apart. I’m getting the twins dressed for bed, and there are diapers all over the floor of their room from earlier when they unpacked the entire cupboard where I keep diapers and then broke into a fresh pack and scattered those too. There are toys all over the floor that I keep stepping on and nearly tripping over, because right now the twins think the best fun is taking things OUT of things–but then they don’t want to play with those things, they want to find a fresh bin to take things out of.

I try to get Edward out of his clothes, and there’s food all over the front of his shirt because he kept flinging his bib off during dinner and I couldn’t work up the caring it would require to fetch it yet again, and when I try to remove his shirt the food gets dragged across his hair, which I finally washed this morning when it was so crusty I was starting to wonder if it would start snapping off like little twigs–and now there’s food in it again.

I get his clothes off, and I take his diaper off, and immediately he’s grabbing at himself so ferociously I’m worried he’s going to tear it OFF. He’s itchy, and I guess I should remember to take him in to the doctor about that. I try to keep him from doing permanent damage to my future grandchildren, but I only have one hand to restrain him: I need to get a diaper off the floor, using my foot to pull one closer and then grabbing it with my “spare” hand. I get his sleeper on, and he’s trying to twist over on the table. His big brother Robert has left a bunch of blocks up there in a special pattern, and I finally fling them across the room in frustration because Edward keeps grabbing them. There’s also a baggie on the table (suffocation hazard!) and a pencil (stabbing hazard!), and a piece of paper (paper cut hazard! soggy choking hazard!) that I need to deal with, but geez, why do Robert and William keep leaving these things in here? Do I have to tell them they can’t even come in here anymore?

Meanwhile, Elizabeth is crying and whining in her high chair, this whole time.

I put Edward in his crib, and I get Elizabeth. She’s happy while I’m taking her clothes off, but as soon as I put a fresh diaper on her she gets suspicious. When she sees the sleeper, she knows the score and rips out a bunch of grating screams. I get her into it anyway, but I’m reaching my limit. Edward, meanwhile, is tossing all his blankies out of his crib.

I put Elizabeth in her crib, stepping on two toys on my way over and hearing one crack in a way I’m going to have to deal with tomorrow. She’s still screaming. I accidentally put her in her crib lying down, which she hates; when I correct this by sitting her upright, she arches and cries and won’t accept her blankie. I give Edward’s blankies back to him, and I get the hell out of that room, using the very last scraps of my life force to say “good night, babies” in a pleasant tone over the angry cries. I switch off the light, and go out into the rest of the house, where there are lightbulbs burned out, toys on the floor, papers to file, months of photos to go through.

Now Elizabeth is working herself into a real fit. Edward is starting to cry tiredly; she is keeping him from falling asleep. Downstairs, Robert and William are supposed to be in bed, but I can hear them starting to fight. Some days I am barely holding it together.

They’ve weaned, I guess: the twins are weaned. It happened gradually, and it snuck up on me.

With my first two children, the weaning was cold turkey. This wasn’t a good way to do things, for me. Afterward, I had all these unhappy feelings, thinking I’d made the worst mistake of my life by weaning and that I should go back to nursing. I know that must have been hormonal: I don’t even enjoy breastfeeding. I do it because it’s cheap, it’s easy, it burns calories, it lets me sit there reading a book many times a day without anyone being able to say boo about it, and it lets me feel like I’m making at least one right decision out of all the millions of things I feel like I’m screwing up.

But that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. I feel trapped and restless in the chair, waiting for the baby to be finished. I hate the cracked nipples in the beginning days: La Leche League says that won’t happen if you do it right, but that’s just to make you feel like it’s your fault if you’re not sitting in a sunbeam-ensconced rocking chair feeling the sweet joy of beautiful breastfeeding. It makes total sense that if a baby is sucking the hell out of a nipple many times a day, and if that nipple has previously entertained only brief, gentle visitors, there will be an adjustment period during which some women will experience “discomfort”–by which I mean the kind of pain that makes your baby’s sweet rosebud mouth look like a pirahna’s maw. I hate the leaking milk, which makes me feel like a damp cow. I hate the lumpy breasts that get increasingly uncomfortable as I wait for the baby to wake the hell up and nurse already. I hate the way nursing makes my breasts feel off-limits to my husband. I hate the way I have to nurse furtively in public, worrying that someone will come up and say something to me about it. I hate the way I’m the only one who can feed the baby.

As the twins’ first birthday approached, I started looking into ways to alleviate the bad feelings I got when I weaned before. I found lots of advice about tucking cabbage leaves in my bra, taking Tylenol, expressing little bits of milk, using ice packs. Mostly the advice about lessening the emotional (and also the physical) side effects was “Don’t go cold turkey,” which I already knew.

Fear and uncertainty kept me nursing them beyond their first birthdays. I cut down to four nursings a day, then three, then two: one in the late afternoon when they were fussy, and one in the middle of the night when they woke up crying. The next nursing to go was the afternoon one; I gave them graham crackers and sippee cups of milk instead.

This left the middle-of-the-night feeding. I worried: what would I do when they woke, if I couldn’t nurse them? I’m so tired in the middle of the night, I can’t think reasonably about strategies for dealing with crying babies. Nursing always works.

Then Elizabeth stopped waking up most nights. And one night when Edward woke, I felt like I didn’t want to nurse him, and I felt awake enough to try other things. I offered him his sippee cup of milk instead, and he took several long drinks from it, and when I put him back to bed he went back to sleep just as if I’d nursed him.

Since then, I’ve offered the sippee cup to anyone who wakes. Edward is fine with that, as long as it’s accompanied by a snuggle. Elizabeth hardly ever wakes.

I feel some hormonal effects, but hardly any. I’ll notice that I’m feeling low and sad, but that’s all. No feeling as if I’ve made the worst mistake of my life. No wondering if I should go back to nursing. No leaking milk all over the bed during the night. Really, a vast improvement.

For those of you who breastfed babies, how old were they when you stopped? Do you have any excellent weaning advice to impart? Has anyone tried the cabbage leaves in the bra? Because that sounds interesting, but no way.

I’m making lunch: a sandwich for William, a sandwich cut up into little bites for Edward and Elizabeth to share. Grapes. Whole milk for the twins, in the pink sippee cup. Water for William, who will otherwise fill up on milk and not eat his lunch.

The twins are still young enough to need their grapes cut, so I’m cutting grapes into quarters. Periodically I eat a grape. Now we’re down to three grapes, one for Edward, one for Elizabeth, one for me. I select the best grape, and eat it. Then I think maybe this makes me a bad mother.

That’s the 1950s I’m thinking of, though, right? The days when what defined a good mother was that she put everyone ahead of herself. She ate the burnt toast, as Teri Hatcher recently put it, or I guess that’s how she put it, from the title of the book I haven’t read. She took the piece of cake with the frosting peeled half off, the piece of pie that got all cheesed up because it was the first one out of the pan. (Mmm, cake. Mmm, pie.) She served everyone dinner, and then didn’t get to eat much of her own because she kept leaping up to get things for everyone. My grandmother was this kind of woman: my grandfather, standing in the kitchen, said he’d like a glass of water, and she hopped up from her chair in the living room to get it for him. That’s screwed up, though, right? We can agree on that?

Still. Taking the best grape.

Kids are legendary for making their parents notice the little things in life, by which we are to understand we mean the Truly Important things. I’ve read the diaries of many other mothers, and it’s a recurring theme: the flowers in the crack of the sidewalk, the shape of the clouds, the busy little ants–all the beauty and wonder that life has to offer. Mine? Tacky novelty lamps.

While Robert was in school, William and Elizabeth and Edward and I went to Target. I was walking right past the lamps when William found the lamp that rises above all other lamps in his estimation. It is made up of shiny silver round cut-outs, dangling in rows. I never would have noticed this lamp, except to think, “My god!” The lamp is 75% off (because everyone else had my “My god!” reaction), and so I bought it for him. I like it better than standing around looking at the stupid ants.

I can’t believe how much these children already eat. I remember when we had only Robert, and he was about 18 months old, and it cost me about a dollar to feed him if we went to a fast-food place: he’d eat one taco, or one hamburger, or one order of chicken nuggets.

Now Robert is seven years old, and it costs about three dollars to feed him: he can eat two hamburgers, half a thing of fries, and half an order of nuggets. My five-year-old William costs about a dollar-fifty to feed: he can eat a hamburger and the other half of the fries. The twins cost about 75 cents each: between them they can eat a hamburger or an order of nuggets, plus some fries.

The cost of raising children, brought to you for the first time in fast-food terms.

At home, where we USUALLY eat, Mr. or Miss Critical Thoughts, I now need to make three full 2-slice sandwiches for four children, plus four mozzarella cheese sticks, forty grapes, and four cups of milk. When peanut butter goes on sale, I buy eight jars.

I am wondering: should I even be thinking of the teenage years, when I will have THREE teenaged boys chewing up the sofa in their ravenous, ravenous hunt for food?

I have a new friend I met on the internet. I read her blog and liked it; she read my blog and liked it. Now we’re feeling out a friendship. She writes to me, and I wait a day to reply so I don’t look too clingy. I volunteer a little personal information–but not too much. She volunteers a little more personal information than I did, but then she makes her email shorter so it evens out. We’re playing it cool.

One of the first conversations I had with Joy was about how little we cared if other mothers made choices that were different from ours. We agreed that our attitude was this: That of course we think our own way is the best way, since that’s the way we’ve chosen; but that we don’t think that is the best way for OTHER mothers, necessarily. Other mothers are other people, and their children are different from our children, and their families are different, and their priorities are different. Obviously we won’t all choose the same selection from the cafeteria of choices.

Even though we’ve had this conversation, I still worry that Joy will disapprove of my way. She mentions feeding her daughter Annie’s Cheddar Bunnies, and I look sidelong at the bag of Goldfish crackers I’m feeding the twins and think, “Dang.”