I’ve been paging through books on choosing paint colors: our house is done in mostly Apartment Cream throughout, with a few Model Home Inoffensive Pastels to break up the monotony, and the number of smudges and chips is reminding me on a daily basis that it is getting to be time to repaint. One book assured me that choosing colors was no more difficult than choosing an outfit. The author didn’t understand how a woman could put together skirt, blouse, jacket, hose, shoes, belt, earrings, and necklace, but not feel able to choose colors for a room.

I don’t know how to tell this author that every day I wear: (1) one of two pairs of nearly identical jeans, the only difference being that one pair has, mysteriously, red pocket linings, invisible from the outside; (2) one of three t-shirts, two in muted blue and one in muted green; (3) white socks; (4) orange/khaki/white sneakers; (5) one of three pairs of gold hoop earrings. Every day. I don’t think this qualifies me to pick out a piece of fruit, let alone colors for a house.

One problem I have is that I decorate in a style I call “75% Off At Target.” If I commit to a wall color, I drastically cut down on which things from the clearance section will look right in that room. Plain cream gives me more options. It also helps me showcase how tall my children are: just consult the smudge line. It gets a little higher each year.

I do envy those homes I see where the bold colors in one room flow in beautiful contrast and harmony into the next room: oranges into yellows into blues, so lovely. I don’t know how anyone knows which colors to choose; those little rectangles on the strips from the paint department are far too small. I read a great idea about buying a pint each of the colors you like, painting pieces of poster board, and pinning them up on the wall so you have larger samples to consider. But how do you narrow it down to the point where you know which ones to get pints of?

Holy crap, am I the only one who hadn’t realized that the United States is a republic and not a democracy?? I don’t know how I missed it, since it’s right there in the Pledge of Allegiance, but I did, and there it is, and maybe we can move on now from how little I was paying attention when I was droning that pledge in elementary school.

There is so much talk out there about democracy, I guess I just assumed that’s what we were. I was getting exasperated about how supposedly democracy means we all make the decisions together and yet sometimes it seems as if a small group, or even a group of one, is making huge decisions against the wishes of a larger group, and there’s nothing the larger group can do about it except be dragged along. That’s when I discovered the republic situation.

I don’t know if I feel better or if I feel worse. It’s nice to have things make more sense (“Oh, I see, the reason it seems like we have no say in this is that we DO have no say in this”), but on the other hand it makes me feel even more helpless. Not only do we as individuals hand over decision-making power to other people, we don’t have much choice when it comes to which individuals we can hand it to.

Sometimes I feel like I’m making one purchasing mistake after another (a conditioner than makes my hair look greasy, a shirt that looks bad on the kid I bought it for, a toy that is so loud I have to put masking tape over the speaker to dull the sound), and other times I am on a roll. Recently I have been on a roll.

A purchase that improved the quality of my life this week was a baby gate for the playroom/nursery doorway. The twins’ room is also the playroom, and when I was in there with them we had to have the door closed. I couldn’t hear the phone, and I couldn’t hear if Rob or William needed me unless they really yelled. If I needed to leave for a minute to pee, I felt as if I was leaving the twins too alone. Plus, Edward just learned to open the door, and he can really take off down the hallway.

So this past week I bought an awesome “one-hand open, closes automatically behind you” baby gate (on clearance, $15 down from $60 at Target) that changes everything. When I’m in the playroom with the twins, I don’t feel cut off from the rest of the house. When I step out for a minute, which I do more often now that I have a gate, I can still see them and hear them. In fact, William and I took down all the Christmas decorations while the twins were in their playroom, because I could see them from the living room. Genius.

Did you catch that last part, that I actually took down the Christmas decorations? And it wasn’t even three weeks after Christmas! Go, me!

Every year I get a phone call from a university doing a study on…well, I’m not totally sure, because it’s one of those studies where they don’t tell you exactly what they’re looking for, because they don’t want you tailoring your answers to skew their results. They seem to be looking for changing attitudes toward various media. They ask me how I feel about newspapers, books, television, the Internet, etc., and how much time I spend per week with each thing, and how much I trust the information I receive from each source.

I remember the first year I participated in the study, in I think 2002, they asked me if I had a blog and I said, “A what?” The next year I said, “No,” and I said it in that dismissive tone of voice you’d use if someone asked you if you had a Delorian. “Clearly not,” my tone of voice said. This year I’ll be saying, “Why, yes! Yes I do!”

I am so glad that blogging got started around the time I became a stay-at-home mother. I don’t need a lot of contact with other people, but I do need some, and reading other people’s blogs helps. It makes me feel like there are other people out there, and I’m not all by myself here in this parenting thing. It gives me other things to think about as I do laundry and wash dishes and change diapers: I might be thinking about the latest Ask Beth question, or about some funny thing Sundry said, or about Semi-Desperate Housewife’s exciting pregnancy news, or about how much Baa Baa Black Sheep reminds me of my adored sister-in-law, or about how Catherine Newman always manages to articulate things so perfectly, or about how much I hope Farrago has good news soon, or about how awesome I am that I can do html links without looking it up now, or WHATEVER, but in any case I’m thinking about people other than myself and situations other than my own, and that seems like a good thing for anyone. It makes me feel like I know people, like I have contact with other people, and I’m not going to act like that’s pathetic because I don’t think it is: Internet contact is contact.

I don’t know how people handled the isolation of motherhood without the Internet. I suppose they were just less isolated. I have this mental picture, probably not even real, of mothers talking over the fence and dropping in for coffee. Maybe they really did that. I can’t picture being un-shy enough to do that, but I can see how desperation could drive the shyness out. I’m grateful not to have that desperation, and I give credit to this international bloggerhood: we talk over our virtual fences, we drop in for virtual coffee, and ideally none of us lose our minds.

I saw the OB on Wednesday, and he freaked me out by looking at my file and saying, “So! You’re halfway through.” Halfway through?? How did we get here already?

On Monday I have an ultrasound. I’m hoping to find out if the baby is a boy or a girl. The name hunt is so difficult this time, I don’t want to have to find two names if I can look for only one.

Hey, did you know there was such a thing as Delurking Week? I had never heard of it, and now I am feeling chastened about all the blogs I read and don’t comment on. I knew of the term “lurking,” but didn’t realize it was considered sub par behavior. I guess the negative connotations of the word should have tipped me off.

Some blogs I don’t comment on because I’m not sure I should. There are a few I stumbled upon accidentally (like I was doing a Google search and something on that blog happened to match), and sometimes I feel like I’m looking in somebody’s windows and maybe they’d rather I didn’t tap on the glass. Other times, it seems like the group of commenters already knows each other, or are in some major way different from me, and I feel like I’d be an intrusive outsider if I butted in with my remarks.

Anyway, I am totally stealing this idea from Courtney, but she says she’s stealing it from someone else so really I’m balancing out the universe by stealing it from her: To celebrate Delurking Week, I’ll donate one crisp new dollar bill to St. Jude’s Children’s Research for every comment I get on this post. (The idea about using the donation to count towards my monthly good deed, I’m stealing from Beth. I’m also stealing from her the fine print about how it doesn’t count if one person comments 40 times.)

Edited to add: It occurs to me only now, a day later, that Delurking Week is a manipulative attempt to force people who would rather not comment, to comment. Do you think that’s true? That’s it’s really just a way to flush out silent readers, and not in fact a holiday of joy and celebration? Well, hm. As an introvert and a lurker myself, I feel more allegiance to the lurkers than to the ones who want to expose them. So let’s make two changes. Change the first: Anonymous comments that reveal no personal information whatsoever (e.g., “Hey! You owe St. Jude’s a dollar!”) are totally allowed. Change the second: I’ll add the $1-per-comment to a certain amount I’ll send ANYWAY, say in the $10-20 range, so that allows for 10-20 lurkers to not comment and still get their dollars sent. How’s that? Better?

I want so badly to color my hair. My natural color is difficult to describe, and in fact that’s why I like to impose other colors upon it. My mother, who loves me and has never given me any reason to think I am less beautiful than the superest of supermodels, calls my hair color “wheat,” and let’s go with that, despite the fact that my hair lacks the golden waves usually associated with grain. It sounds better than “mouse” or “dishwater,” and it will give you a lingering impression of health and goodness even as I explain that actually what we’re talking about is a flat ashy light-brown color that absorbs light and looks almost dark brown (but without the richness and depth of brown) in photographs. Even “ashy light-brown” is too positive a way to describe this color. If it sounds like a description on a box of hair dye, it is the wrong idea.

What I like to do is add red or blonde. Typically I use the demi-permanent Natural Instincts, even though they wash out disappointingly fast, because I am too scared to commit to a permanent dye, and also because the permanent dyes are worse for lazy people who color irregularly and might not get around to taking care of those roots, and also because I once used a lovely soft blonde and on me it looked like crayons (note to self: they really mean it when they say that the color you choose “works with” your natural color and may yield different results than shown; also, my natural color is a poor co-worker). I once used a rich dark brown, which was super fun until it failed to wash out after hitting the dull-brown stage, and then I read the box and found that it wasn’t recommended for my shade of hair.

Right now what I want, as I gaze into the mirror at my light-and-happiness-absorbing hair, is something bright and metallic and obviously fake. As soon as this baby is born and I’m awake and focused enough to read instructions on a box, I am so there.

If one of your resolutions this year was to do some good stuff for other people, check out Playgroup Dropout’s column for today: Do Good. What I like about her idea is the way it allows for small acts of good stuff. As Beth mentions, it’s easy to feel as if there’s no point doing anything if you can’t do a lot–but small stuff adds up.

Paul and I normally sort of agree on baby names. Even if one of us is saying “bleah,” it’s a mild bleah, and it’s in reaction to a name the other person doesn’t love anyway. The most common situation is that one of us really likes a name and the other one sort of likes it but not enough to use it, not that one of us really likes a name and the other one hates it with the intensity of an imploding star.

However, last night I brought up a name I liked. It was a name I had been thinking of all day with a starry-eyed feeling. The name had never before occurred to me, but once it did I thought, “Why is no one using this name? It’s a GREAT name! Sure, it sounds like an old lady, but that wouldn’t linger on a cutie baby girl! And the sound is so pretty! Definitely this name should be dug up and reused!” Shyly, I mentioned it to Paul. Who TOTALLY shot it down: no discussion, no thinking it over, no “hm, not bad but I don’t love it,” just POOF into a million tiny shards, absolutely no way would he ever even consider it.

I thought I would ask you what you thought of it. Because of Paul’s reaction, though, I am feeling a little tentative about putting this name I like so much in front of a possible firing squad. So first I want you to get yourself into the right mindset. This is a highly unusual name, and it is one of the most old-ladyish old lady names there is. However! I think it falls into the same category as other old-lady names such as Emma, Ava, Violet, and Lily: names that used to be elderly but are ready for reuse. This one just hasn’t been noticed yet.

You have to picture the name on a little girl, let’s say she’s about three years old and has ponytails. And then I recommend saying the name over and over until it stops sounding like it needs a walker and all you hear are the bare sounds of it. Okay? Ready? Open minds, everyone? Here’s the name: Millicent. Discuss.

This is such an awkward stage for clothing. I’ve been wearing 2-sizes-too-big jeans with an XL men’s t-shirt, and it’s not going to do the job much longer, but when I put on maternity clothes this morning I looked ridiculous: the soft panel of the pants came up nearly to my bra and kept falling down, and the shirt looks like a pretty triangle I can spin out into a circle when I twirl.

Part of the problem is that my maternity clothes are a little too big for me. When I was pregnant with the twins, I read a tip that said that even though normally you buy maternity clothes in your usual pre-pregnancy size, with a twin pregnancy that won’t be big enough and you should buy a size larger. Sure enough, by the end I was in a huge pair of men’s pajama pants, because the jeans were too small. The shirts were larger and DID still fit, but perhaps that’s why with a single-baby pregnancy (and only an 18-weeks pregnancy at this point) they look comically large.

“And what of the Christmas decorations?,” you are asking. “Surely when you went down to the basement to bring up the maternity clothes, you brought down at least one box of decorations.” Let me answer that with another question: Wouldn’t Christmas lights be pretty for Valentine’s Day?