I remember learning in a high school psychology class that the average person can keep about seven things in mind at the same time. Add an eighth and one of the first seven gets knocked out.

I’m reminded of this when Paul seems able to retain only a very small number of household instructions. If I say, “Do not put food down the sink. We do not have a garbage disposal,” he will stop putting food down the sink. If I say, “Please take out the trash when it’s full, rather than standing in the trash can to compress the trash so tightly that it can no longer be removed without ripping the bag,” he will start taking the trash out instead of stomping it. But then if I say, “You can’t just rinse a cup when you’re done drinking out of it and put it in the drying rack, you have to use actual soap and washing motions,” he will wash his cup–and then scrape food off his plate into the sink.

I am not sure I can adequately express how frustrating this has been over the dozen or so years Paul and I have shared a household. It isn’t as if I’m a difficult, controlling person making up complicated, arbitrary rules. I think the things I ask him to do are intuitive, or at least easy to remember once mentioned. I think a normal person should be able to retain the information that if you put sticky brown soda in a cup and then you put your germy mouth on the edge of that cup, a little swish with cold water is not “washing” the cup. I think a normal person should be able to remember that information even if I then add new information, such as that if your shoes track huge clumps of mud down the hallway, you should clean that mud up rather than leaving it there.

But apparently he can’t. Before we were married, I got as far as calling around to find out the cost of studio and 1-bedroom apartments, thinking that probably I shouldn’t stay with a man who was going to drive me so crazy. After we were married but before we had children, I wondered if I should be willing to help him pass on his genes. Post-children, I’ve again and again felt despair, like I’m shackled permanently to someone who would whistle in a clean-conscience way as he peed into a kitchen sink filled with dishes. (In the interest of fairness, I should say that he does not in fact do this. As far as I know. But then again, I didn’t realize until recently that he wasn’t washing his cups.)

There comes a point where it is useless to continue trying to change someone. I think I reached this point ten years ago or more, but I can’t make myself stop trying. It just seems so REASONABLE that he should learn these things, and so UNREASONABLE that I should have to keep mentioning them in my kind and patient and trying-hard-not-to-be-shrill-or-naggy voice.

I have realized that I am in a pickle if I want to leave the house after the new baby is born. I have a double stroller. I have two toddlers. Where does the small baby go?

I could put the infant car seat in one of the two stroller slots, but then I have a walking 2-year-old. I don’t know about your 2-year-olds, but my 2-year-olds are not of the sort who trail behind me placidly like Mary’s little lamb. Mine are the sort who need complicated restraint systems, and, in a perfect world where such things were not so unfairly frowned upon, muzzles.

So the toddlers will go in the stroller, and then I suppose I need a frontpack carrier for the new baby. I have tried frontpack carriers with every baby so far, and every time I have been sorry after about 5 minutes. My back starts aching, and soon it is the predominant sensation in my universe. Perhaps it is because I am tall? Perhaps it is because I am “long-backed” (a nice way of saying “short legs for her height”)? Perhaps it is because I have crappy posture? Whatever the reason, frontpacks have, to date, been a failure. But I don’t see any way around it other than (1) buying a triple stroller, which, no, or (2) not leaving the house.

Whenever I mention frontpack infant carrier failure, people mention the Baby Bjorn. It’s wonderful, they say. It doesn’t hurt your back, they say. It is comfy-comfy-comfy, they say. It makes you coffee in the morning and brings it to you in bed, they say. It is well worth the eighty-for-god’s-sake-dollars, they say.

This is where you come in. Are you a Bjorn Againer? Or do you recommend a different frontpack? Or have you found they’re all terrible, and you personally would vote to put the new baby in the stroller and put a muzzle and leash on one of the toddlers?

Sorry to spring a Christmas song on you like that, but it’s going through my head incessantly and I want company. Besides, I’ve thought of it as more of a back-to-school song ever since I heard it in that commercial where the parents are springing through the store tossing school supplies into the cart while the children drag sullenly behind.

The song is going through my head right now because for me, this is the best part of the whole pregnancy. Every time I look at the calendar to see what appointments I’m forgetting today, I can see “PRE-OP” and “C-SECTION” way at the end of the month. I bought the car seat this weekend, and it struck me that I did that none too soon. When Edward is on the changing table, I sometimes crick the drawer open a little to peek at those teensy sleepers waiting for the new baby. I could pack my hospital bag this very afternoon and no one would accuse me of jumping the gun; in fact, a few of you are probably thinking, “She doesn’t have her bag packed yet??”

I’m tired and I’m sore, and it takes serious resolve for me to do an errand. When I stand up, it takes me half a dozen steps before my body remembers how the walking thing works. I change positions often, and none of them let me breathe normally. But the whole pregnancy has had its discomforts, and at least these discomforts are accompanied by the thought of only 3 weeks and 1 day left to go, as opposed to, for example, the morning sickness at 7 weeks, which was accompanied by the thought of 32 weeks left to go.

Earlier in the pregnancy, I tried not to think too often about how much time there was left. Now I think of it many times a day, with relish. “Three weeks and one day!,” I thought this morning. This is the Christmas Eve of pregnancy, and for me it lasts from 30 weeks until the c-section at 39 weeks. Next up: Christmas, which is on May 31st this year. Then: the post-holiday blues, which start the day I get home from the hospital.

One of my favorite games to play during pregnancy and child rearing is “A Year Ago Today, A Year From Now.” I made that name up on the spot. Great, yes? You’d better agree, because I am too tired and pregnant and sore to think any better than that.

I will demonstrate how to play. Let’s say you are not pregnant right now. Assuming current ovulation and a fast conception and also that you are female and of child-bearing age (this game allows all such assumptions), one year from today you could have a 3-month-old baby. A baby who doesn’t even exist as you think about it now! Isn’t that crazy, that you could do that, that you could change your life so much in a year?

I was thinking of this tonight as I was looking at the calendar and realizing that the next time we turn the page, I’ll have a fifth child. One year ago, I wasn’t even pregnant; in fact, I was almost five whole months away from missing my period and taking a pregnancy test. I was still breastfeeding the twins, who hadn’t yet had their first birthdays or started walking; they were still babies. How can things have changed so much in just one year?

One year from now this baby will be about to have his first birthday. He’s not even born yet as I’m typing, but in one year he’ll already be shedding babyishness like summer cat fur.

Hey, this would make a good question for a mini-essay comments section, wouldn’t it? Or you can do your own post and link to it in the comments section. Where were you a year ago, and where do you think you will be a year from now?

Here is something I have noticed about my mother-in-law, and I am wondering if this problem is universal: she expects ME to handle all the communication between our house and hers. If she feels she hasn’t heard from us recently enough, she complains to ME. If she thinks we’re going to forget to send a relative a birthday card, she reminds ME. If she wants to ask ridiculous questions of the “Has the baby been born and you just haven’t told me?” variety, in order to highlight her pitiful state and our shameful neglect, she asks them of ME. Paul is totally in the clear, totally exempt; for some reason she considers it the daughter-in-law’s responsibility to handle these things.

That’s stupid, obviously. But I can understand why she leans on me for this, since if Paul had his way we’d be totally estranged from both his parents. It is in fact my own fault in some ways that this situation has come about, but I couldn’t stand watching Paul fail to send birthday cards, Father’s/Mother’s Day cards, Christmas gifts, or letters/emails of any kind–and so I started doing it. I see it as a kindness to them that I am willing to handle that communication, and I think she should be grateful to me and pissed at him. Instead, she not grateful, and in fact she is pissed at me for not doing more, and he retains Perfect Child status. In fact, the only thing that makes him less than Perfect is that he married an insufficiently dutiful wife who doesn’t take care of her in-laws as she should.

What I hate most about the work/home so-called “mommy war” is the very fact of its existence. Well, that and the stupid term “mommy war,” which is as condescending as “mommyblogger.”

I’ll bet most of us believe that there are lots of good choices on the work/home spectrum, and most of us could imagine making different choices than the ones we made. I’ll bet most of us don’t think that other people should necessarily make the same choices we made, any more than we think other people should get the same haircut. Sure, there are a few people who think there’s only one way to do things, but we don’t like those people, do we? Nor do we care what they think. Losers.

But then some stupid new study comes out, a study that will probably be overturned within a year. Or somebody abrasive gets on the radio with an all-the-way-to-one-side point of view. Or there’s a TV special designed to get people all upset because it’s so very good for ratings. And here is the part that surprises me every time: women line up on one side or the other as if obeying the command to fight at the sound of the bell. Women who felt attacked raise up their defenses. Women who felt vindicated get all smug.

Dumb! All of it is dumb. Here are some things I think we can all agree on: We don’t want to be told by other people how we should live our lives. Right? We don’t want people shoving their way into our houses and saying that the choices we’ve made are stupid or wrong. Right? We don’t want to be told that the only way to do it is someone else’s way. Right? And we don’t want to fight about this stupid topic anyway. Right? So why do we turn against each other when those study/radio/TV people open their fat yaps? Why don’t we instead turn as one whole united body and give those fat-yapped people the finger. New study? The finger! Abrasive radio personality? The finger! Television program pretending to be concerned and unbiased? Two fingers! Then we can turn away, a solid row of backs not interested in anything as stupid as a war we didn’t start and don’t want to fight.

As the end of the school year approaches, I am turning my mind to the subject of teacher gifts. I enjoy buying gifts, but usually I know the teacher only in her teacherness–nothing personal that would tell me what she might truly like for herself. This means I buy the “hostess gift” type of present: things that most people like or can find a use for, such as candles, soaps, chocolates. I try to go for good stuff in those categories: Yankee and Crabtree and Lindt. But my goal is “nice treat” as opposed to “compensation for year spent with room full of brats”: I aim for about $10 per classroom teacher, $5 per assistant teacher.

Here are a few things I never give. (1) Plants. I don’t like giving someone something they have to take care of. (2) Any gift such as an ornament with the child’s face on it, a craft made by the child, or a framed piece of the child’s artwork. These are thrilling to parents only. (3) Teacher-themed gifts, such as wooden apples with “#1 Teacher!!” painted on them.

Other people might be avoiding the things I choose, for equally good reasons. A teacher might be diabetic or dieting. A teacher might not be able to use scented items, or might not like the particular scent. A teacher might have sensitive skin and only be able to use particular types of soap. I think of my ideas not as “safe” but as “safer”: they may still fail, but they’re a better bet than the 8×10 glamor shot of my child’s face, and they’re easier to regift if they’re not right. On the other hand, one year I was looking online for ideas and I found a teachers’ message board where teachers had written things like, “I have all the scented bath crap I can ever use!” and “Yay, more candles.”

I’m always looking for more “do” and “don’t” teacher gifts, so weigh in. You don’t have to have school-aged children to give an opinion on this. If you’re a teacher, do a whole post on it! Even if you have to hurt my feelings a little with words like “scented bath crap.”

William came out of his room this morning and said, in the voice of a child who has just realized there is a surprising gap in the chain of what he knows, “What starts the baby inside? I mean, it starts from nothing!” He did a lightning-bolt clap to emphasize the word “nothing.”

At the time, I was trying to persuade the twins to eat their breakfasts rather than using them to test the theory of gravity, and I was responding to Rob’s third polite request from the couch where he is nested in with a fever this morning, but this is one of those drop-everything moments when the question at hand is too important to let slip by. Also, it was just a few days ago that an anonymous commenter asked if I’d do a post on this very topic, so secretly I was delighted to get more material for what had been looking like it would be a skimpy post. The anonymous commenter speculated that I had a lot of experience with this, but in fact I’d only discussed the Whole Scoop with Rob so far.

I’ve read funny anecdotes about parents who panic and tell the entire story, complete with tangents about the Kama Sutra and birth control options and sex for love / not for love, only to find that the child wanted to know something more like “Babies are usually born in hospitals.” So my approach when a child asks a question is to answer it in a distant, general way and work toward specifics as the child keeps asking. The first time Rob asked me a question, what he wanted was reassurance that the baby was not growing in the same tummy where food went, and when that matter was settled he was contented. The next time, he was curious about how the baby grew, but he was looking for information about the umbilical cord and the breathing/dining/peeing conditions, and wasn’t yet looking for specifics about conception. I think he was five when he wanted access to the classified files.

William has been present for some of my conversations with Rob, but I wasn’t sure how much he’d listened to. He’s six years old, and I think of that as old enough to hear the whole truth if he wants it, but it’s still young enough that he might not want to know yet. I asked if he remembered about sperm and eggs, and he said he did but I reviewed it anyway at the “sperm comes from the daddy, eggs come from the mommy, and a sperm and an egg combine to start a baby” level to see if that was all he needed, but no. He said, “But how DO they GET to combine?” and that’s when I realized I was going to have to use words like penis at 8:00 in the morning.

I have a book I like to use to brush up on the basics before I explain it to a child. You’d think all this information would be clear to me by now (unless you were one of the many people who greeted the news of this pregnancy with a cautious “You know how this keeps happening, right?”), but it can be helpful to review it in simplified terms. This is the same book my mom used when she was explaining the truth to Young Swistle: Where Did I Come From?, by Peter Mayle. The illustrations show the whole naked thing, but in a friendly way that isn’t too embarrassing for those among us who might feel a little embarrassed. It’s a good book to use for your own education before you have to explain elements of the process, and a good book to read aloud to a child who’s ready for the whole story.

For older children like Rob, who can read to themselves and might be starting to feel embarrassed about asking questions, I like It’s So Amazing!, by Robie H. Harris. This book goes into a lot more detail than Where Did I Come From?, including topics such as adoption, different kinds of families, and good/bad touches. It sticks mostly to boy parts and girl parts and reproduction, though. The format is comic-book style, with a bird and a bee who have different feelings about learning more about this topic (the bird is interested, the bee would rather not know). There are some good diagrams of internal reproductive systems; I don’t like to admit it, but I learned a thing or two myself.

My mother-in-law just emailed me to remind me to get my rest now because I “sure won’t get any after the new baby arrives!” Thanks, mother-in-law! Because as everyone knows, it’s really easy to rest and relax and put your feet up when you have only four children! Also, I certainly wouldn’t have anticipated that I’d get less rest after the baby arrived, so it’s a good thing she warned me! She had two whole children, so I guess she’s the voice of experience guiding the newbie daughter-in-law on this mothering path!

I’m in a super crabby mood today because guess who’s home sick? Why, yes, it’s Paul! Yes! He has a headache and feels chilly! So he’s going to stay home from work! He’s like those children who see a sibling stay home from school and suddenly they’re sick and need to stay home too. And although I am technically up and around, I spent most of yesterday lying down whenever I could, and feeling sick when I couldn’t, so I’m not really prepared to play Nurse Swistle around here. And then Edward woke up with red cheeks and a cough, so it’s beginning to look as if I’m going to have to take things out on my mother-in-law. “YES,” I’ll write to her; “I WILL get lots of rest while caring for my ENORMOUS AND SICKLY family at 8 months pregnant and still on antibiotics! Thank you for telling me to or I might not have done it!”

(long gap of time)

Elizabeth woke up, and I went down to get her, and she’d thrown up in her crib. What do you think is next, boils or locusts?

I bathed her, and cleaned up her crib, and put all the barfy stuff in the washing machine with some baking soda, and got Robert off to school with the muffins he’s bringing for the Teacher Appreciation Week buffet, and now it is just past 9:00 in the morning and I am about ready to call it a day.

Okay! *brisk clapping* Let’s find something to talk about other than the sickness hovering over my household like some dark dooming cloud!

Oh, I have something good! It’s the first day of May! And the c-section has been scheduled for May 31st! So we are in the month the baby will be born, and that is happy news. I saw the OB yesterday and he wasn’t worried about the infection or about the amoxicillin or anything, and he’s a big worrier so it made me feel better to see him so casual about it. I also asked him a bunch of dumb questions (dumb in that I knew the answers but wanted him to tell me again) and he didn’t even flinch. He’s a nice OB.

And let’s do some follow-ups. First, the sandals. I hope it will not be disappointing that after all that fuss, I didn’t get either pair. I think the story here is that although I love the whole idea of Dr. Martens, the sandals are not in fact my style. Granola is delicious, and hiking is good for you, but who hikes in sandals? You’d get ticks between your toes.

Second, remember my dilemma about those earrings I got from Target and then found hadn’t been rung up? I didn’t want to get all goody-two-shoes about it, but on the other hand I thought that if I just kept them I might have an icky feeling every time I wore them. I came up with a solution that some of you wisely pointed out could turn Seinfeld-esque: I was going to sneak the earrings back into the store, then casually purchase them with the rest of my stuff. And many of you kindly offered to bail me out / send me a nail file / testify as to my innocence if the store security caught me with the earrings and thought I was shoplifting them. Anyway, the plan went fine, no pratfalls or unlikely explanations: I brought them into the store tucked under the diaper bag, and then I bought them on my way out. Whew.

Now go say congratulations to Shannon, who had her new baby girl on Sunday! Shannon was supposed to wait and have her baby on the same day I was having mine, but apparently she abandoned our agreement for the sake of the baby’s health or something. Whatev. Congratulations, Shannon and baby Elise!

Do you know where I’ve been this weekend? Sick in bed! That’s right: actually in bed, sick. I had a bad cold last week, and then Friday night things went downhill fast: chills, fever, burning throat, hurting all over. On Saturday morning my parents took all the kids, and Paul took me to the urgent care office that has weekend hours. “Upper respiratory infection” does not seem adequate to describe how crappy I felt and still feel, and so I’m not sure there has been a correct diagnosis, but I am willing to give it a little time. After all, on Saturday morning I wasn’t sure I could wait the one hour until my appointment, whereas today I am sitting at my computer complaining, so clearly things have improved.

I haven’t been this sick since I had strep throat several years ago, and that time was a real bummer because Paul had it too, and so neither of us could stay in bed. Since then, Paul has been “sick enough to stay in bed” (that is, run-of-the-mill headcold) about a zillion times, and I have been “sick enough to stay in bed” (that is, sick enough to stay in bed) zero times. So this was an interesting opportunity for me to see just how things would run without me, and how things will run without me when I’m in the hospital having the baby.

Here is what happens. Paul does a good job in general: children are dressed and fed and alive, and they have fun. But even though I think of myself as a crappy housekeeper, it is clear from even two days’ absence that I must be doing certain levels of cleaning that keep things from falling apart. After two days without me, the kitchen floor is covered in crumbs, and there are chunks of food that fell under the high chairs without being cleaned up. Dishes have been done and even put away, but they are gritty and/or greasy, and they are in the wrong cupboards. My pink-and-white spring towels have evidently been used to clean up some sort of industrial accident. The twins’ teeth haven’t been brushed. They had pizza one night and no one’s clothes have been stain-treated. Rob and William played outside in the mud twice, and their caked, muddy clothes are sitting in the hampers, chunks of mud sifted all the way down through the rest of the clothes. Saturday’s mail is sitting on the counter. Elizabeth had a dreadlock that took me fifteen minutes to pick out this morning, because that’s what happens if her hair isn’t combed three or four times a day.

But I did get to stay in bed. And there were only about two total interruptions of the “Where do we keep the…?” variety. And there was not one single “Oh, do you want to go in there to be with Mommy?” And those are valuable things indeed.

In some ways it’s nice to know that things don’t go perfectly without me. It makes me feel as if the work I do for the family is important, useful work that improves the quality of our lives. On the other hand, it’s irritating to see how quickly so many things fall apart if I don’t handle them, as if I’m somehow the only person equipped with the magical powers necessary to hang up wet towels. I remember this being the same in the workplace: it’s nice to be missed, but annoying to come back to piles of work that no one else seemed able to figure out how to do–especially the things a hamster could have done.

Also annoying, both in the workplace and in the home: having to congratulate co-workers or a husband for managing to do even a small fraction of what you usually do. I made it a point to thank Paul several times for handling everything. My intent was to set a good example for the next time HE stays in bed all weekend and I have to handle everything. It is hard to tell, though, when I’m “setting a good example” and when I’m “reaffirming that all of this is my job and he’s a total hero to handle anything at all.”