I voted, and I brought three children with me, and I was queasy, and there was very little parking and I had to parallel park, and as far as I’m concerned this makes me some sort of American hero. I was all set in case a newspaper reporter wanted to interview me about my brave struggle to vote: “Voting is a responsibility,” I’d say. “We’re all ‘busy,’ but that’s no excuse.” Then I’d smile blindingly for my photo, hoping there wasn’t shredded wheat in my teeth and that none of my children had a finger in his or her nose.

It’s harder to get excited about non-presidential elections. I admit it was only this morning that I went online to research the candidates. I couldn’t find anything that didn’t make all the candidates sound all the same (either all lying dirtbags or all “pro-education! pro-people! pro-love!”), so finally I went with my usual voting technique when there aren’t clear differences: I voted for Democrats for policy positions, Republicans for positions budgeting the money or handcuffing criminals or filing paperwork, and girls over boys because there should be more girls in office. There. *Briskly whisking my hands together* I did my part for the country.

Evaluating my voting technique put down in black-and-white like that, I’m glad that each individual vote doesn’t make much of a difference, and that it’s the big clumps of votes that count. I wouldn’t actually want to be in charge of choosing who wins, I only want to add my driplet of water to the barrel and hope that any dumb-ass decisions I make get canceled out by someone else’s driplet.

I have written 17,000 words of my 50,000-word NaNoWriMo novel, and holy crap is it ever boring. I think I mentioned that, as I usually write non-fiction, I would dip into fiction writing by making it as close to non-fiction as possible: I made it about a woman with four children, and she’s pregnant again. This idea sucks so, so bad. I start getting drowsy every time I try to work on it. Have you ever played that computer game The Sims, where you control little people? And if you don’t give them enough to do, they’ll stand their tapping their virtual little feet and looking at their virtual little watches? That is what the characters in my book are doing.

My main character is sitting around pregnant, wondering when the hell I’m going to let some action happen. I’m trying to follow the rule about “plowing through it” (not getting stalled when you have nothing to say, but just continuing to write anyway), but it’s hard to keep writing about the groceries and the sitting around waiting for something to happen. Finally out of desperation I let her be someone who came to the rescue in an accident involving screaming and blood, and the book STILL won’t wake up. It may be hopeless.

In the meantime, I am so tired of the queasiness. I can’t believe how it suffuses everything I do. All day long I am thinking about what to eat to reduce the queasiness, or what I can eat despite the queasiness. I am like a newborn, needing to eat every 2-3 hours or I start whining and crying. But a colicky, fussy newborn, who cries harder when you try to feed it.

I love tuna, and I have been wanting it, but I’m worried about the mercury. I ate a whole can of it tonight (the chunk light, which I don’t like as much as the chunk white but it’s supposed to be lower in mercury), feeling furtive and dangerous. Low-fat, high-protein fish! I’m such a maverick.

I don’t want to imply that I ate it plain right out of the can, as if I am a highly healthy person. No, I mixed it with Miracle Whip and salt, and I ate it on potato rolls. So when I say “low fat,” what I mean is “before I added fat to it.”

I highly recommend this NaNoWriMo thing, if you’re still teetering on the edge. It’s not too late to catch up. The daily writing task is about two single-spaced pages, which is not as much as I’d thought it would be. Considering your only goal is to fill those pages with writing (not to fill them with quality writing), you can natter on and not worry about what you come up with. And you feel like you’re being all creative/expressive, which is happy for those of us who usually express our creativity via our choice of children’s outfits. I am not particularly inclined toward fiction writing, and so I am writing a story about a stay-at-home mom. With four children. And she’s pregnant. Instant brilliance!

Paul and I went out for dinner last night, and so I wore clothes I don’t usually wear. And they…looked funny. It’s not that things don’t fit–although that’s thanks in part to two pairs of “fat pants” that are ALSO stretchy denim–it’s that they don’t fit right. A shirt stretched kind of funny, and made me look lumpy. Well, okay, I DO look a little lumpy, and the shirt showcased it. I don’t look pregnant, I just look lumpy.

I noticed as we were walking around that for the first time I started to feel my pregnant body emerging. Before now, I’ve only felt sick, or tired, or maybe a little loose-jointed, but basically my body has felt the same as usual. Last night I felt the first indications of the pregnancy. My stomach seemed to curve out more, and it made my back remember how painful that would be later on. I felt tired just walking around. Here it comes.

Next month I’m participating in NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month. The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel (that’s the size of a thin paperback) during November: you can’t start until November 1st, and you have to stop after November 30th. Expectations are very, very low: quantity is valued much more highly than quality, and loopholes and serious plot problems are assumed. It’s low pressure, it sounded like fun, and I’m hoping it will distract me from my pregnancy queasiness.

This means I might not be blogging much during the month of November, unless I fink out or unless I’m looking for things to do other than work on my low-quality novel.

If you’d like to do NaNoWriMo, too, we can use the comments section of this post as a place to meet up! Meet back here to moan about how bad your book is!

Go to www.NaNoWriMo.org to sign up, or to see more about what it’s like.

My husband smells like hair oil. Stale salsa. Meat. Even the smell of his toothpastey breath is nauseating, and if it’s not toothpastey? Oh my dear Til-death-do-us-part, I can’t sleep unless you turn the other direction. The kids smell like dried sweaty hair, like sheets that need to be changed, like too-strong fabric softener. What on earth possessed me to buy such an intense fabric softener? When I wasn’t pregnant, it smelled so nice, a faint lingering smell of freshness long after the clothes were washed. Now that I’m pregnant, those air molecules are too big to fit in my nose. I can’t breath that in, it’s so strong and chemical.

It’s the same with my shampoo, and the leave-in stuff I usually put in my hair afterwards, and our hand soap: it’s so strong, it slaps me across the face. I’ve switched to my usual pregnancy shampoo: Suave clarifying, a cheapie that for some reason doesn’t bother me with its smell, and which also helps with the hormonal oily hair problem.

In the few days after learning I was pregnant, I was super-charged with adrenaline. Remembering earlier pregnancies, I took advantage of that energy. I concentrated especially on the bathroom, particularly the toilet, over which I knew I would be leaning in no time. (The only thing worse than barfing is barfing and then breathing in the smell of old pee drips.) A week later, the smell of the bleachy cleaner I’d used, which should have been long dissipated, started bothering me. Now the shower curtain and the edges fastening the pieces of shower wall have come down with one of their cases of Sudden Mold, and I can’t deal with it: the only way to banish it is bleachy cleaner, and I can’t stand the smell; but leaving it there makes me feel like throwing up every time I see it.

I understand that this crazy affliction is helping to keep the baby safe. I’m avoiding strong cleaning supply chemicals, and there is no way I’d eat meat that’s even slightly off, I can guarantee you that. The problem is, it’s taking things too far: sometimes there’s no way I’ll eat any meat at all, because of that “meat warming to cooking temperature” smell. Sometimes I can’t drink milk, because of that strong…milk flavor. The stench of cooked eggs lingers for days. Vegetables? Oh god, the smell of the steam while they’re cooking, it is going to send me running for that nice clean toilet.

This morning I feel like hiding from the children. I ducked into the computer room to get away from all the noise and all the questions. There are days where it’s just too much stimulation, you know? It’s like a barrage of teeny pellets. The babies are saying “Dah DAH!!?,” and Robert is saying, “Mommy, can I bring my Rubik’s cube to school? Why does WILLIAM get to cut up paper?,” and William is saying, “Mommy, I ate all my breakfast! Can I have a dessert?”

(And here they are already, joining me. Robert is flopped in a chair, playing Tetris on a Gameboy and keeping up a running monologue about Tetris. William is wondering, repeatedly, when it will be time for lunch. It’s 7:55 a.m.)

I’m regretting subtitling this blog “Blogging With Twins.” I’d thought I would be writing mostly about twins and twin care, a sort of reference blog. But it turns out I have to almost force myself to write on that topic; it seems boring to me. Also, there are so many twin-themed blogs already, perhaps we don’t need more. I’m thinking of changing the subtitle to reflect the largeness of our family—but as large families go, we’re small. We’re only large for a small family, if you follow me.

My plan was to have a blog that was good-natured and funny, like Sundry’s. Instead, I find I mostly feel like whining and complaining and taking strong stands on minor, unimportant issues, and bitching about how queasy I feel. I have always wanted to be one of those even-keel, non-complaining, go with the flow people, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to work out. Instead, I’m going to be one of those people always getting into a huge cheese fit over nothing.

Isn’t that discouraging, when you realize you aren’t going to be a way you were hoping you’d be? I’ve had that disillusionment set in several times with parenting. When my first baby was still an infant, I bought a set of alphabet cookie cutters. We’ve never even taken them out of the package, and it’s been almost 8 years. It turns out I don’t like “helpers” when I’m cooking.

At least I didn’t have any delusions about my patience levels (= low), or about how much I like playing children’s games (= not at all).

It occurs to me that I have left some information out of the prior post about breastfeeding twins.

For one thing, you may be wondering how you manage “sides” with twins. With a single baby, you’re supposed to nurse the baby on both sides each feeding, alternating which side you start with. Twins are different. Each baby nurses on just one side per feeding. Some women assign each twin a side of its own, and always nurse the babies that way; other women switch the babies at each feeding; other women switch the babies every 12 or every 24 hours. The nurse at the hospital advised me to switch every 12 hours because it would be easier, but I found it easier to remember to switch at each feeding. I was keeping a log anyway, of what times they nursed and when their diapers were changed (more on this in a minute), and so I just added a notation about whether the baby nursed on the left or the right, and I switched it the next time.

The log was essential to me for a long time. I took a large pad of paper, drew a line down the middle, wrote “Edward” at the top of one column and “Elizabeth” at the top of the other, and every time any substance went in or out of a baby, I made a note of it. I can’t believe how many times I had to check to see if it had been one hour or three since the babies last nursed. Same with diapers: I would feel as if I had just changed a baby’s diaper a second ago, but look, it had been hours. And the pediatrician’s office was calling me every day for the first week or two, “just checking in” but also asking me very specific questions about how many wet diapers each baby had had. Without my log, there is no way I would have had any idea how to answer that question.

There was one period when I assigned each twin a “side,” and that was when I got a breast infection. It was so painful, and one baby was doing that thing where they latch on and off repeatedly just for fun, so I put that baby on the non-hurty side, and put the all-business baby on the hurty side. Even after the infection subsided, I kept doing it this way because it was so much easier to keep track of. But then after a few weeks, I noticed that one baby always seemed hungrier, and always nursed longer. I wondered if it was possible that one side was producing more milk than the other side, so I immediately went back to switching sides at each feeding, and the hungrier baby got less hungry.

You also might be wondering when I stopped breastfeeding the twins together. When the twins were 7 or 8 months old, they were nursing fewer times per day, and for less time at each feeding. They were more able to wait for a feeding, and more able to be distracted by toys while they waited. They were getting a little big for the tandem nursing pillow, and I was running into a problem with one twin being done long before the other twin was done, so that one twin was restless and squirmy and wanting to play and poke at the other twin, but I couldn’t put that twin down because I was stuck under the nursing pillow. That’s when I started nursing them consecutively instead of together. I would occasionally run into problems in the middle of the night, if both twins were screaming to be fed—but then Paul would just cuddle one baby while I nursed whichever baby was currently the faster eater, and before long everything would be back to sleep.

There. Is that everything?

I remember when the twins were teeny babies and I would take them out, the first questions people would ask were “Are they boys or girls?” and “How much did they weigh?” After that, the women would ask in hushed tones, “You’re not…nursing them, are you?” Why, yes! Yes I was. And so I had to say so, and accept my new reputation as some sort of Hard-Core Breastfeed-or-Die type.

I was fully prepared to bottle-feed, and in fact I had pre-purchased a small supply of bottles and formula in case it was an emergency and I couldn’t nurse them even one more single second. But as it turned out, neither twin ever took a bottle. It happened this way not because I am so philosophically firm on the issue of breastfeeding, but because I am lazy and breastfeeding was genuinely easier for me.

It wouldn’t have been easier, though, without two things. The first thing was the training the nurses gave me at the hospital. They let me get all the way to 4:30 in the morning the first night without intervening: I’d said I wanted to feed the twins separately at first, and learn to feed them together later, so they let me go to it. All night long, I was feeding one baby while the other baby cried, back and forth between them.

I was actually more incredulous than miserable: still high from the birth, and from the feeling of not being pregnant anymore, my feeling was more, “Um, this isn’t going to work!” than “Open that window so I can leap out.” At 4:30, the nurse came in. “So,” she said. “Would you like me to show you how to tandem-nurse now?” I did not fall to the floor and cover her white sensible shoes with kisses, whatever you may have heard. But I did say, “Um, yes. Please.” So she showed me how to stack pillows and how to arrange two babies and how to sit properly so I wasn’t dying from discomfort, and that was the first thing that made everything easier. From then on, I breastfed both babies at the same time, so I was never jittering one leg nervously as a baby screamed and I mentally begged the other baby to hurry up and finish already. Also, it takes half the time of feeding babies one after the other.

The second thing that made everything easier was a gift from my cousin Lee: a tandem nursing pillow. It was inflatable, which turned out to be one of its best features: I could make it a little firmer or a little softer depending on the babies’ sizes and positions. It came with an inflatable back pillow, which made me much more comfortable. And it propped both babies to exactly the right height, so that I could even take my hands off them and read a book while I nursed them. I could theoretically nurse both babies at the same time using piles of pillows like they did in the hospital, but that was much more difficult to arrange.

I got so comfortable using that pillow and scooping up babies and having peace and quiet while they nursed, it never seemed like the right time to start fussing with bottles. The one time I really, really wanted bottles, though, was when we were out. How do you breastfeed twins discreetly in public? The answer is that you do not. What you do is you nurse one baby discreetly while the other one wails, drawing attention to you sitting there with a huge squirming lump under your shirt. It confuses people: there’s the crying baby who clearly wants to eat, so what are you doing? They come in for a closer look. The baby unlatches to see who that is coming over, revealing half a boob. Jesus.

Oh, did I mention that breastfeeding twins burns about 1000 calories per day? Yes. It is glorious.

I’m reading a book called The Girls, which is about a set of conjoined twins. One of the twins becomes pregnant. Two things she says about pregnancy resonate with me:

– “Having been born, as Ruby and I were intended to be born, joined at the skull, we are normal to ourselves. It’s normal for me and Ruby to be who we are and to live as we do. But being pregnant did not feel normal. For the first time in my life, I felt fully freakish and monstrously, hideously, deformed.”

– “…my delight and my horror, and my misery and my bliss, at the occupation of my body.”

Okay, so I don’t truly feel freakish, or monstrously hideously deformed, nor would I say I’ve experienced “horror.” But it does feel peculiar, this possession by baby.

Considering how much of my mental activity is taken up with being pregnant, it is a surprise to me that no one knows about it unless I tell them. They might think I look tired, or ill, or that my skin sure doesn’t look as good as usual, or that my hair seems to need washing, but they don’t know I’m pregnant. My own husband wouldn’t know, if I hadn’t told him.

That is one of the satisfactions of early pregnancy, and also one of the things that makes the information difficult to incorporate. It is pleasing, walking around with that “I’ve got a secret” feeling. I know I’m pregnant, but the clerk at the grocery store doesn’t. I know I’m pregnant, but the old woman who just said, “FOUR children? I can’t imagine!” doesn’t. I can still sleep on my tum if I want to, or I can lie on my back. I can sit normally in a chair. I’m wearing my “fat pants,” but other than that I’m in regular clothes.

But it is hard to accept the realness of the situation, when everything seems the same. I don’t look pregnant. I don’t feel pregnant. I feel like I have stomach flu. I can leaf through The Baby Name Wizard a million times, but I’m looking at names for a theoretical baby, not one who will actually be here next year.