I dreamed awhile back that I went to the doctor because I was feeling so tired, and she discovered I was pregnant. She did an ultrasound since I had no idea when I could have conceived (and was, in the dream, counting backwards to Paul’s snip) (fun fact: at the time of the dream, it had been fourteen weeks), and she said I was fourteen weeks along (which means conception would have been two weeks AFTER the snip, but my dream brain is apparently oblivious to such obstetrical details) and she also told me that the baby was a girl (she added “Every so often I can tell this early!”—my brain’s solution to the problem of how she could possibly know). I wonder if you were able to follow that in spite of all the parenthetical remarks.

In the dream I first got a rush of happy excitement, then a rush of anxiety about telling Paul. Then I thought I’d like to get a paternity test done when the baby was born—not because Paul would kick up any fuss, but because if _I_ were Paul and _I’D_ had a snip and MY wife were pregnant, I would…well, I imagine I’d get a certain peace of mind from having the test done, but I sure as no longer shootin’ wouldn’t want to ask for it or imply there was any need for it.

And then in the dream I thought, “Oh. But I LIKED Henry being the baby of the family. And I LIKED Elizabeth being the only/special girl.”

********

If you’re trying to severely reduce sugar in your diet, and you do really well for awhile but then one day a doughnut and a candy bar go RIGHT DOWN, seemingly before you’ve even had a chance to evaluate the wisdom of such a move—are there any disaster-moderating things to do next? I’m thinking along the lines of “Quick, eat some protein to moderate the insulin impact!”—smart sciencey stuff like that.

********

Elizabeth wanted cupcakes as her birthday dessert. I’d seen other people bringing in cupcakes to school with the child’s age piped onto the cupcakes, so I did that for Elizabeth’s. It turns out that “six-year-old party” = “inadvertent Mark of the Beast theme”.

*******

From Miz S, a post I think she should send to a teacher magazine for publication, it’s so perfect. If there are teacher magazines. I’m kind of assuming there are teacher magazines. There SHOULD BE teacher magazines. Anyway, I read it twice through, riveted and emotional. It wasn’t even the POINT of the post that got to me, it was more the way it gave me one of those neat brief glimpses into what it’s like to be someone else.

From Jive Turkey, a post about whether we can avoid doing unto our children what our parents do unto us. She hits that perfect mark of thought-provoking and introspective, mixed with little shots of comic relief.

A longer essay from Shit My Dad Says—special for Father’s Day. That guy makes me laugh until I cry.

Lakeline linked to a post from PajamasMedia, a kind and compassionate set of tips for how to avoid appearing crazy on the internet (when you really ARE crazy).

I hope you won’t mind if I agitate fretfully to you for a couple a few seven paragraphs about a stressful morning, none of which is a Big Deal but all of which is otherwise going to have to be vented to Paul the minute he walks in the door and I try not to do that. And if you DO mind (and I don’t blame you one bit: YOU just walked in the door TOO), you can skip down to the bottom where there’s a link that made me cry in a more positive sort of way.

This morning the twins had their 6-year-old check-up. Edward has lost several pounds in the last year, and he was none too plump to begin with. Elizabeth has gained only half a pound in the last year. Both of them seem healthy, but these new measurements mean their height and weight percentiles have drifted apart to a point that caused the doctor to hem and haw throughout the appointment, wondering if/what he should do. Because on one hand: both children look/seem fine. But on the other hand: unexplained weight loss is one of red-light-alert markers of Issues. But back to the first hand: it can also be a normal part of growth. But back to the other hand: Edward is a little pale and has under-eye circles, and it’s hard to know if that’s He Gets It From His Mother, or if it’s More Markers. And both of them are a little PICKY with the eating, so perhaps a nutritional thing? Hem, hem, haw, haw.

The pediatrician finally came down on the side of “I’m sure they’re both fine, but…” and he sent Edward for blood work. (Elizabeth did gain SOME weight, and her percentiles didn’t gap as much further as Edward’s did, and she doesn’t have under-eye circles, so for now he’s not sending her.)

Have you…accompanied a child for a blood-draw? Oh dear mercy. I should have known from the expression on the technician’s face, which was the look of someone hoping the kidney stone at least passes quickly if it can’t pass painlessly. I’d mistaken it for “not having a good day,” but no, it was the face of experience.

In case you have a similar event in your future, Edward would like you to know that it hurts more than a mosquito bite and it was very scary and it went on much longer than he expected. I too was surprised how long it went on, and how many adults (three) it took to keep still even a child who is TRYING to hold still. I think if I had to do it again, I’d prepare the child by saying things like “It will seem like it’s going to go on FOREVER, but it will not, and the more you can hold still, the faster it will go and the less it will hurt; it may seem very scary and weird, and it IS scary and weird, but it’s also fine and it’s what’s supposed to happen, and I will be right there with you, and I have had this done too and it was weird but fine.” (I would also put in more solid information about what exactly would happen, but I’m sparing those of you who would rather not think about it.)

Afterward, I made it worse by being too shaken to remember I’d said BEFORE the appointment that on our way out AFTER the appointment we could get a package of Doritos from the vending machine to eat with lunch. We were all the way home, and Edward almost halfway back to normal, when he realized. So instead we had lunch at Wendy’s, and something is going wrong with the Wendy’s near us so the order was screwed up in three different ways, one of which was the “Assembling everything else right away even though there’s a 5-minute wait on one item, which means everything else gets cold/melted” error, and that added to my frazzled/unsettled feeling.

ALSO, Elizabeth got to skip the blood draw but she got referred to an ENT for her enlarged tonsils, which do look alarming. I’d never noticed them until the dentist mentioned them, and even I could tell something wasn’t right: they take up nearly her whole throat. So I had to call the specialist and make an appointment, and that meant having to work through a suspicious receptionist who seemed to think I might be trying to SNEAK IN a visit to an ENT. And she kept asking me questions like “Do you have our business card?” which, why/how would I have their business card? And then she said I needed to call my insurance company to get a referral, and I said I had a referral, and she said no the other kind of referral, and also I would need to call my insurance company, and I said okay and thank you very much and wished an oxygen mask would drop out of my phone at times like this.

I called the insurance company and had to dial THREE TIMES before I got into the system, because I kept messing up (OMG SO MANY “For ___, press 8” menus, with the options spoken SO SLOWLY and none of them what I needed), and then I finally got through to someone, and she was nice as toast, I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to a nicer insurance person. But still. I didn’t have the address of the ENT doctor I’d made the appointment with, and after she very nicely went to see if she could look it up, I realized I DID have at least a PARTIAL address (street and city) that would have been helpful. And then I didn’t have the ENT doctor’s first name, and didn’t know how to spell his last name, and ack. And then she confirmed that it was fine to see him, and she was wrapping up the call when I said, “Wait, and do I need some sort of…other referral?,” and OH YES INDEED I DO. And to get this referral, I had to CALL BACK the pediatrician and ask for it. Meanwhile, of course I was thinking I DID have “a referral from my pediatrician,” since I had a piece of paper that said across the top “Thistletown Pediatrics Referral”. Could this perhaps be made a little less confusing SOMEHOW?

********

Perhaps because of being rather TENDER from this morning’s events, I started crying IMMEDIATELY after clicking through a link Paul sent me to Dear Photograph. People line up a photo against the real life background. I don’t know why that’s so very, very touching, but it just IS. I suppose it’s in the category of “Time: Oh How It Flees.” I don’t think the “Dear Photograph” format for the captions works (wait, WHO is writing WHAT to WHOM?), but the photos themselves are great.

Today I needed to make Elizabeth’s birthday dessert (she chose yellow cupcakes with strawberry frosting) (I love that “yellow” is an actual flavor of cake), so it seemed like the perfect moment to stop being shy with the new mixer.

I wouldn’t say I was sorry to see the old mixer go…but I’ve had it a lonnnnng time, so it’s a little poignant. My first husband and I bought it with money we got for our wedding, so that makes it about 17 years old. Please don’t say, “Oh, I was in third grade when you bought your mixer!” No, it’s not any better if it’s fourth grade. Really, that sort of remark never works out well.

After that marriage ended and I graduated from college, I got a job in a bakery, working with the big mixers the countertop ones are smaller versions of. Part of the reason I got that job is that I knew how to use a Kitchenaid mixer: the big ones are the same, you just have to put your arms all the way around the bowl to get it off the stand, and then lift with your legs. I’ve never quite understood how to make “lift with your legs” work, so I always had an ouchie back with that job. Also, I picked up some habits that work well in a bakery but not so well at home, such as just FLINGING flour across a counter to evenly flour it before working with dough. (Bakery: There’s flour all over the place anyway, and someone else comes in after to clean the floors. Home: Tag, you’re it.)

When Edward was about three years old, he was climbing on the counter (NOT ALLOWED) and started to fall. He grabbed the mixer to steady himself, and he and the mixer both went down. We were very lucky they fell in different directions. The noise the mixer made when it hit the floor, combined with Edward’s shrieks (which turned out to be panic rather than pain) had me re-evaluating what a “good outcome” was.

Edward was just shaken and scared, but the mixer hasn’t been right since then. The back of it has to be held on with duct tape, and it’s still very loud and vibratey unless you put pressure on the wound. The beater doesn’t quite line up with the bowl anymore, so there are missed spots and scraped spots. And the knob that lets you change speeds got bent straight down; in order to change speeds, you have to sort of TWIST it as you move it—and it can slip suddenly. Going from speed 1 to speed 8 all at once is…not good for most things you might have in a mixer.

Paul and I agreed it needed to be replaced, but it still worked okay so there was no rush. I couldn’t decide on a color. Pink was my long-standing favorite.

(photo from Amazon.com)

But over the years the attitudes of some other women toward the color pink had made me feel self-conscious about liking it. It’s rare to hear someone express dislike of, say, green, in the spit-on-the-floor way they might express dislike of pink. And that made me second-guess my like of it, which then made me mad because the whole “girls have to like a certain color because other people say so” is exactly the kind of principle the hate-pinkers are generally AGAINST. And also, mad because spitting on what other people like is mean, and pointless, and poor for the development of one’s character. And also because, what about Ice?

(photo from Amazon.com)

And what about Green Apple? I LOVE green. I SAY pink is my favorite color, but when I’m choosing stuff I more often choose green.

(photo from Amazon.com)

And what about Buttercup? I love that shade of yellow.

(photo from Amazon.com)

But then pink went on one of those one-hour deals, for the best price I’ve ever seen it (and I’ve been watching it for YEARS). That made the decision for me, and I bought it. (I’m glad I didn’t realize that Ice was going on the same deal an hour later.)

So here is my old mixer, with its subtle and barely-visible duct tape repair:

And here is my new:

I’m second-guessing it, of course (maybe I should have gotten the green! no, the yellow! no, the green! no, the blue! no, the green!), but it’s good to have the decision made (and the cupcakes too).

As you have already seen if you follow me on Twitter, Paul and I had a huge fight about whether .333… = 1/3. (Why WOULDN’T you follow me on Twitter, when it can keep you UP TO THE MINUTE on such things?) This was a fight in which my concluding argument was to break a laundry basket.

I just…you know? You live for 16 years with another person and there are certain arguments that turn it up to eleven just like THAT. For some couples it’s money, or unwise extramarital flirting, or what kind of Christmas tree is “right.” Until now, I thought the only such fight topic Paul and I had was the Monty Hall problem. We CANNOT DISCUSS IT.

But what I hadn’t realized is that the Monty Hall problem was only an EXAMPLE of the real, ROOT issue in our marriage, which is “Theoretical Math” vs. “Actual Reality.” And when he tried to apply Theoretical Math to Actual Reality in the .333… vs. 1/3 thing, and then stood there asking calmly if I wanted him to show me the references that backed him up…well, that’s when it was clear to me that the only form of self-expression that would accurately represent my reply to that question was to smash something UP.

We can talk ALL DAY LONG about how IN A MATH PROBLEM you sometimes have to use .333… to represent 1/3rd, and that it’s the closest decimal equivalent of 1/3rd, and I will AGREE with that all throughout that same long day—just as I will agree that, with rounding, .345 is 35%. But if you say it IS THE SAME—well, we are going to lose a laundry basket in this argument.

May I demonstrate briefly? First, remember that putting “…” after a number means “into infinity”—and so, “.333…” is a short and convenient way to express a decimal point followed by a line of 3s that goes on FOREVER. And now, my point: .333… plus .333… plus .333… is .999… . Whereas 1/3 plus 1/3 plus 1/3 is 1. DIFFERENT. As Shriekhouse said, “.333… is infinite. 1/3 is finite. That’s about as big a difference as you can get!” Exactly. For the problem in question, we were finding out information about a group of 12 having lunch, and 4 had tuna sandwiches. Is 1/3 (4 people) the SAME as .333… (3.999… people)? No. Close? Yes. Close enough for many math problems? Yes. SAME? NOT UNLESS WE CARVE A LITTLE SLICE OFF THAT FOURTH PERSON.

For another demonstration, imagine this problem on a math test, and two students answering the question in these two ways:

Which student is THEORETICALLY right (and about to get a note from the teacher to stop smartypantsing around and just give the right answer), and which student is ACTUALLY right?

Not following this? NO MATTER. The takeaway here is that SWISTLE IS RIGHT AND PAUL IS WRONG. And that if Math agrees with Paul, then MATH IS ALSO WRONG, and you may think I am kidding but I AM NOT. Giving “being backed into a theoretical corner” precedence over “reality” is “ridiculous,” and I don’t really care if a whole bunch of Smarty McSmartypants say it isn’t. EINSTEIN HIMSELF could arrive at my house bearing “references,” and I would break a laundry basket for HIM, too. I will DIE ON THIS HILL, even if ALL OF MATH wants to fight on the other side of the battle.

Antiangie wondered “Do you ever wonder if people who aren’t married to scientist/engineer/computer types have this type of ‘discussion’?” Which brings up an interesting conversation topic.

My last boyfriend (aka my first husband) and I had our two hugest recurring fights over (1) applied pacifism and (2) thank-you notes. As in, those were the fights horrible and passionate enough that they could have ended our relationship. And my high school boyfriend and I had near-relationship-ending fights over (1) how he spoke to his co-workers at the fast-food restaurant where he was a shift manager and (2) the logical likelihood of get-rich-quick schemes working.

I do hope you will tell me the seemingly-silly-to-an-outsider NUCLEAR HOT BUTTON issues in your current/past relationships (it doesn’t have to be a romantic relationship, because family relationships can be JUST AS KRAZY), while I find all the shards of that laundry basket (those suckers SCATTER, man).

Our last female adult platy fish died last night, and now the male platy that always swam around with her is hiding almost motionless in the low plants. He always seemed a little dim even for a fish; I think maybe he doesn’t know how to swim around unless he’s following someone else.

Also, I am trying not to anthropomorphize this situation and make him a grieving widower, but it’s a little trickier than it would usually be because he ONLY followed her: that is, the other male would follow ANY female platy and didn’t seem to know the difference, but this one ONLY followed this particular female platy. Normally I would be thinking “Do I get a new female platy, or do I just continue the slow natural discontinuation of the fish project?”—but I’m not sure getting a new female platy would even help. Isn’t that…sadder than you’d expect?

********

On a school memo to parents: “Volunteers: Please leave younger siblings at home. THANKS!!” Oh, okay, I will just leave a younger-than-a-kindergartner sibling at home, alone or with the other stay-at-home parent because it makes sense there would be two of us home during the day!

I think it’s reasonable to ask volunteers not to bring children. But that should have been made clear BEFORE signing up the volunteers: I saw the memo asking for volunteers and it didn’t mention siblings. Also, that is an obnoxious/unrealistic way to phrase the post-sign-up request. “Leave them at home”?

********

A dog pooped on our lawn, and notice how carefully I have edited that from its original version, which was “Someone let their dog poop on our lawn.” Not only is the original version dissatisfying for its singular subject with plural pronoun, but it’s also aggressively accusatory and could be completely unfair. I was so upset about the nearly-unfaceable task of having to clean up that poop (despite being fine with diapers, cat box, other people’s kids’ diapers), I had to use my Coping Thoughts to come up with situations in which it was not as big of an outrage as I was imagining (I use the same technique in mannnnnny situations). I came up with several:

1. This was a dog that got out of its yard unexpectedly. The owners had no idea it pooped on our lawn, and would be mortified if they knew.

2. The owner was walking the dog and stood talking to another walker while standing in front of our house. So intense was the conversation, neither of them noticed the dog. Later, the owner wondered why the dog hadn’t Succeeded on this walk, and spent part of the evening fretting about it and hoping there wouldn’t be an Accident later on.

3. The person walking the dog was doing it as a favor for the owner, who was suddenly hospitalized with a very bad illness. The dog-walker doesn’t own a dog and was also completely distracted by worry about the dog’s owner, and so didn’t think to bring any clean-up equipment. When the dog went on our lawn, the dog-walker was mortified but had no way of dealing with it.

4. This dog is extremely reliable: for a decade, he has pooped one time per day, never more, never less. The owner therefore brings only one clean-up bag. This time the dog pooped twice. The owner was shocked, amazed, and mortified, and intends to bring an extra bag on the very next walk to clean up our yard—but I cleaned it up first, which will make the owner even more mortified.

The levels of frustration I’ve experienced trying to install LeapFrog applications on my computer have been UNRIVALED. …Well, perhaps the levels of frustration I felt when a baby cried jusssst as I was dropping off to sleep after the third feeding of the night, MAYBE that rivaled it.

I am not kidding when I say I have spent TWO SOLID HOURS trying to set up the Leapster 2 we got Henry for his birthday. I installed Connect, and it informed me that I need to install Adobe Flash Player, and then when I said “okay” it got those two installations tangled so that they were rapidly flickering between two error messages and I had to force the computer to shut down.

Then, when I tried installing the flash player FIRST and THEN doing the Leapfrog thing, it has told me that another user is running Connect, and I need to have that user log in and close the application. THERE ARE NO OTHER USERS ON MY COMPUTER. Okay, actually there are two other users, so that my dad and Paul can get into the computer if they need to—but neither of them DO get into my computer, and certainly neither of them has tried to install Connect, and I couldn’t have accidentally installed Connect as them because I don’t know their passwords.

I searched the error message and found instructions for fixing it—but the things I am supposed to remove from a folder are NOT THERE. Neither is the folder. I did a system-wide search for the folder and the items; not there.

I tried deleting ALL Leapfrog stuff from my computer and starting over. TO NO AVAIL.

The Leapster 2 told me I needed to click Eject to disconnect it, but there is no Eject until Connect is installed, which it will not do because another user is supposedly using it. AIIEEEEEEEEEEE.

It lost my tabs and re-sized my browser window. Meanwhile, Henry is crying because I told him he could play his new birthday Leapster, and he is now 4 years old so he is a very big boy and very patient, but even a very big and patient 4-year-old can only wait SO MANY HOURS.

I’ve done ZERO work this morning: no baby name post, and it’s lucky I already wrote my Milk and Cookies post but I do still need to proof it and post it [edit: okay, posted it, so now you can tell me what face moisturizer to try]. The children are not dressed. The dishes are on the table. Because I have spent ALL MORNING on this, and it is still not even CLOSE to being done. I am about ready to kill someone with my bare hands. Perhaps the Application Installing Please Wait lady:

(photo from Leapfrog.com)

Her hands are in NO WAY at the correct angle to be typing on that keyboard, and she would NOT be smiling if she was installing that Leapster 2.

Edited to add: FOLLOW-UP. Holy dice on a cracker. Okay, the key turned out to be this help page, which contained this information in case you can’t see it or the link no longer works or whatever:

I’d been searching for these documents and couldn’t find them. Then I noticed my search settings were on “this Mac” instead of “[name of my Mac],” or possibly the other way around, but anyway it was like I had two entire computer systems, and one of them had this set of documents and the other didn’t, and so I deleted them and everything worked fine—if by “fine” you mean “it still took another hour of sweating, swearing, and entering wayyyyyy too much personal information.”

I’d decided to just have him play with it WITHOUT doing the initial connecting to the computer (it’s not that it needs to be connected every time—just the first time to set it up), but then it nagged him every time he turned it on, and two of the four functions couldn’t be used. So I guess I’m glad I persevered but JEREMY PIVEN that was an ordeal.

Henry is four! Here he is with a sword he made out of Tinker Toys, and the giant forehead mosquito bite that prompted me to reschedule his portraits:

Good call.

I don’t generally do much Kid Birthday Talk here (oh, Kid Birthday FRETTING, sure, but I mean I save the developmental lists and sentimentality for my own journal, where even _I_ generally find them boring), but I’m a little different about Henry because he seems like a Blog Baby: he was BORN here. And today, when he turns 4 while the twins are still 5, it seems a little crazy to look back at when he was born: those little toddler twins, and then bringing a baby home before their 2nd birthday. But there he was. Henry. If there’d been two of him, I’ll bet we would have made the local paper: “Two Sets of Twins Under Two!”

Here we are, right before he arrived:

Tired much?

This is a picture I didn’t want to keep because I thought I looked so dreadful. Now I’m so glad I made myself keep it, because I care about “having a picture of me pregnant and holding my toddler twins” more than I care about “my neck wrinkles and double chin and pinkish pregnancy skin and pulled-weird neckline and tensely-clenched hand.” Those neck wrinkles aren’t going to get any SHALLOWER over the years, anyway.

And then a few days later I was back in my chair:

With a slight change.

And then less than two weeks later, the twins’ 2nd birthday, which I must have BAKED CAKES for while recovering from a c-section:

Yeah, I don’t really remember it. Good thing I have photos.

Henry’s birthday also feels different to me because he’s the caboose child: every birthday he has, the train pulls further away from the station. And sometimes that seems like a very happy, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of thing, and other times it seems like a very sad, midlife-crisis-inducing kind of thing. Because this is great:

But it means no more this:

I am finally reading The Year of Magical Thinking. Paul is wondering why I keep clinging to him tearily when he is just walking past me in the kitchen.

********

Speaking of books, if you have not yet purchased LIFE The Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, I advise you NOT to. I pre-ordered it before there was even a description of it, still caught up in the unexpected happiness of re-watching the wedding three times when I’d thought I’d only be half-interested in seeing it ONCE. I figured that if it was by LIFE it would be pretty much guaranteed to be good. I imagined page after page of gorgeous photos, like other LIFE books I’ve read.

Or maybe I’m misremembering that the other books were by LIFE? Because in fact the book is almost worthless. It’s something like 125 pages, and about a dozen of them are about the wedding. All the rest is regurgitated photos of Diana, and of Will and Catherine as children, and of Kate in the sheer dress AGAIN FTLOG. And you know, that kind of thing is interesting TOO, but in a book ABOUT THE WEDDING, I want it ALL and ONLY about the WEDDING, and I want photos of EVERY MOMENT.

Furthermore, the writing quality is…iffy. Iffy AT BEST—as in, I kept TRYING to read it, and kept thinking, “No, never mind; I will just look at the photos.” Really, VERY disappointing. I put it in the library donation pile so at least maybe someone ELSE won’t have to pay money for it.

********

I did not think that a CHRIS ROCK documentary about black women’s hair was going to make me burst into tears not once, not twice, but MANY TIMES—-but there it is. And this was BEFORE I started reading The Year of Magical Thinking. (Though, now that I think of it, AFTER the wine.)