I feel like I’m always cleaning yet nothing is ever clean. I feel like I’m blogging yet nothing is ever blogged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it all before.

It should be no surprise that I work out a lot of things in writing (and I’m only slightly ashamed to say that I frequently steal jokes from my own website to make myself appear quick-witted in the rare instance I engage in real, in-person conversations with live humans), so when I don’t have time to come to this space and toss things around, my brain starts to feel a little bit constipated, for lack of a term that doesn’t reflect how much of each day is devoted to poop-related shenanigans.

In trying, as ever, to be a good internet citizen (which right now looks like one who tries to comment on every blog post she reads), I was able to work out something in the comments section on this excellent post, which I’m recording here because I want to remember it (because it’s a sad fact that after ten years of blogging, my memory is indelibly tied to what I’ve written down, which makes not writing things down feel like an act of intentional forgetting, which I HATE). Anyway, I’ll try to make this brief because my blogging situation is unrelatable to 99% percent of the population, so who cares?, and also because I have a few excellent photos of the boys from this morning that I want to share because they’re the perfect example of how easy it is to declare, “When I am a parent, I will never do X” and then you become a parent and BOOM, you’ve bought ridiculous matching pajamas for your children and you are not even a little bit sorry because WOOKIT DA CUTSIE TWINSIE-WINSIES, and this, uh, disorder is, I’m sure, extremely relatable.

So, the thing I worked out was this: Not all blogging is created equal. As this applies to my situation as a person who’s currently writing five(!) columns* for clients, plus the sponsored things that find their way here, I’m not actually spending many hours a week “blogging,” I’m spending many hours a writing as a freelancer, for money, which makes it work, not hobby blogging. This is an obvious epiphany but an epiphany nonetheless, and it’s turned out to be very important for me to realize that over the past year I’ve transitioned from someone who makes a bit of extra money from my hobby to someone who relies on money that comes from legitimate employment opportunities that merely grew out of blogging. When I have to fill in the blank that says “Occupation,” I realize I’m not just a book editor anymore, I’m a writer. This feels strange and good and accurate and lucky.

All of the above is also my way of saying that I’ve been working a lot, and I’m TIRED. Some days it feels like I’m spinning my wheels and will never get caught up, but then I take a step back and look at how quickly things are actually moving and changing and I realize that yes, my wheels are spinning, but this cart I’m on is grounded and we’re actually going somewhere. Even just typing that makes the load feel lighter.

I’m looking forward to having my days to myself again once Fox starts daycare in a few months because then I won’t have to work in fits and starts and mostly on my laptop from the car because that’s still the only place he’ll nap, but of course I’m also preemptively weeping at the thought of not having my littlest buddy on hand for snuggles whenever the mood strikes, which is pretty often because holy crap he’s just keeps getting cuter. He’s also walking. Not taking a few wobbly steps now and then but full-on walking across the room on his feet like the personiest person who ever personed. He turned ten months old yesterday and I’m bitter because I feel like I’ve been cheated out of at least two months of babyhood and also because I haven’t been able to record every little twinkle in his eye on my hobby blog. Waaaaah.

Some photos from this morning:

AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! I LOVE THEM!!!!!!!

*If you’re interested in visiting me elsewhere, I’m continuing to blog for CafeMom about all things baby–baby gear, bringing home baby, baby milestones–here, and I’m also doing a campaign for them with Bisell and Febreze called “Pets and Babies and Rugs, Oh My!” about keeping my floors clean, which is good motivation for me to actually do that, and also, of course, HILARIOUS because they will never, ever, ever be clean. Over at Work It, Mom, I’m still at my basic “Working (on) Motherhood” column, I’m now writing for the Pregnancy and Parenting section, and of course there’s the craft blog, which I continue to be gut-bustingly proud of because although there are a lot of craft blogs out there, the world needs more of them geared toward busy [working] moms who may not always have the best craft skills and who definitely need quick and easy projects they can do with their kids and using everyday objects, a la this play tent made with shower curtains and a hula hoop and put together in twenty minutes in the car because my whole life revolves around things I can do in twenty minutes in the car, including this very post, for which I’m now all out of time, goodbye!

I can think of thousands of adjectives to describe my sons, and the differences between them, but perhaps the most efficient characterization would be to say that Wombat is a noun and Fox is a verb. Verbs. All of them. He seriously never stops. Verbing around the house at all hours of the day and night. (At nine and three-quarters months, he’s currently able to take eight Frankensteinian* steps in a row, but only if he has the imaginary stability created by holding something in his hand. Wile E. Coyote physics FTWalk.)

*Yes, yes, I know it’s the monster’s creator who is named Frankenstein, but breaking rules like this is how an uptight chick like me lets loose on a crazy Thursday afternoon, and it’s also apropos because Fox is kind of a little monster and I certainly have days of feeling like a mad scientist, having created this thing I can’t control.

My mom was here last weekend, and it was nice to not only to spend time with her and to watch my children dote on her but also to have an opportunity to step back, to step outside the room of my life for a few moments and observe from an outsider’s p.o.v. what it’s like to mother these two small children. My mom was up with the kids in the mornings while Simon and I tried to ignore them and get some sleep on the other side of the door (which is half glass and therefore not soundproof at all), and while I was lying (laying?) there not sleeping, I had a bit of an epiphany. Listening to the chaos in the other room was a happy little jolt of reassurance that it is indeed chaos I deal with on the reg and not simply my twisted interpretation of objectively peaceful and relaxing events. It’s not that things simply feel, to me, like chaos because I’m exhausted and/or easily overwhelmed and/or simply poorly equipped for motherhood in general. It is chaos! Objectively! It’s not just me. (Phew.)

It’s not that I needed this moment to feel understood by anyone other than myself. I don’t need to have other people walk in my shoes so they realize what hard work it is to mother [my] small children. My husband gets it, and my mom, although thirty years removed from her own two small children, certainly gets it (and I was a verb baby myself, it turns out; is there a statute of limitations for apologizing for that?), so the person I really needed to get it was none other than myself. It is hard. That’s the truth of it, and that’s okay. Sometimes I wonder whether I allow myself to get a little melodramatic about the chaos (“The house will never be in order and the kids will never be clean at the same time and there will never be a moment of peace and quiet again and I will end up homeless and penniless in a van down by the river, etc.”). I worry about it even though I know better because, hello, this is NORMAL. This is what parenthood is. Both the chaos and the self-doubt. Who out there is saying, “Oh, having two small children is not hard at all! Tra la!”? No one who isn’t lying or about to get a pop of reality right in the nose, that’s who.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the heck out of my kids, and I love being a mom, but in the same way that I also enjoy the heck out of French fries and I love, say, twirling on the tire swing, I don’t want to do any of those things all the time. And I don’t do them all the time, thank god (I have preschool! I have an active co-parent!), and I’m grateful for that, and yet the thing with parenthood–the thing that people actually mean when they say parenthood means your time is no longer your own–is that I don’t always get to take breaks exactly when I want to. Parenthood often gives exactly zero fucks about what I want or don’t want in any given moment. Yes, a woman can be a mom and still go out with her friends or throw pottery in her art studio or take a circus class and learn to ride a unicycle or whatever, but she can’t necessarily escape to those parts of her life when she most wants/needs to. I can’t always get off the twirling tire swing as soon as I start to feel queasy; sometimes I just have clamp my hand over my mouth and ride it out. And even though there are moments when I’d like nothing more than to hop on the first unicycle out of town, even if it means wearing a costume of bejeweled spandex in front of a tent full of spectators, I also know that this show I’m in is the real Greatest Show on Earth. (I hadn’t intended this to go the direction of running away with the circus to escape the circus at home, but here we are.)

Anyway, I love my family all of the time, enjoy being with them most of the time, and benefit immensely from watching someone else temporarily ringmaster in my place (thanks, Mom!) every few months or so because it makes me feel normal, and as a parent that’s always a welcome feeling. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be awesome or amazing or extraordinary or stupendous or any other splendiferous adjective you would be pleased to see written inside your Mother’s Day card. That’s all great, and all of us are those magnificent things, we really are, and especially in the eyes of our small children, but we are also normal–gloriously, beautifully normal, which, when you think about it, is just another way of saying “We are not alone.”

I guess that’s my wish for all you moms this year: May you never feel abnormal or alone. We’re all in this separately but together.

Today is my birthday.

I got a planter and a garden stool and new slippers and socks with pigs and hearts on them and a face massager (wrinkle remover?) and a handmade card with a cement mixer (“because I know you like them!” “…”) and two bouquets of flowers and triple chocolate mousse cake and fishnet stockings (FROM MY SON) and earmuffs, naturellement, which I wore during dinner on the hottest day of the year.

All that and the baby also let me have what I wanted more than anything: a shower. Aim high in your latter years, kids. Aim high.

Here’s to thirty-four. (THIRTY-FOUR!)

This summer marks six years since we bought our house in Oakland, California. As I imagine most homeowners do, we immediately set about making it our own, which in our case meant painting the walls a rainbow of realtor-unapproved colors (red! navy! purple!), hanging guitars from the ceiling, stringing twinkle lights pretty much everywhere, and letting the front and back yards become totally, jungletastically overgrown because we have no idea what we’re doing. We’ve never had gardens like these before. We’ve never had a home together.

Click through to read more about why I love owning a home here. (It’s a sponsored post but not a review.)

In some ways we’re still getting used to this place, I think in part because as our family changes so do our needs. We moved in as a couple and have become a foursome. Suddenly we’re paying more attention to things like the size of the bedrooms and the safety of the treehouse and the single solitariness of the one lonely-but-never-alone bathroom. It’s not always ideal (oh my lord do we need to get the non-sleeping baby out of the master bedroom), but at the same time, we feel lucky to have this steady, solid, fabulously imperfect, ours-all-ours place to raise our family. It will help define who we are for years to come.

And that’s the best part about owning a home here, I think: becoming part of the history of the place, just as it becomes a part of our history. I suppose as a renter the same thing happens, especially if you stay somewhere for a long time, but I also think there’s something different, bigger, about owning. Maybe it’s just that you can literally put your mark on the place, whether it’s planting a new tree in the yard, pressing your handprint into fresh concrete on the sidewalk, or scrawling “LEAH SLEPT HERE” in purple paint on the bedroom wall. Maybe it’s the way the house leaves its impression on you.

As for owning a home in this area of California, my favorite part has been having wonderful neighbors—and, as owners rather than renters, a greater incentive to get to know our neighbors. The people around us are part of the history of this place too (the couple on one side has lived in their house since 1969, when they bought it from the daughter of a Very Famous Writer whose partial archives are still jumbled in their basement(!)), and the neighbors on the other side moved in during the dot.com boom of the early 2000s. (They babysit our cats when we go out of town, they give us gardening advice, and they feed Wombat blueberries through the slats in our shared fence.) The people across the street bought their house a few years before we did and now have a son six months younger than Wombat and a son five days older than Fox. Our old neighbors say it’s nice to have kids running the streets again, the way their kids did back before I was even born. And this makes me think about what I know of the earliest history of this house, whose first occupants, in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, were a family of FIVE. Wait, no. They had five kids. A family of seven crammed into our little Craftsman bungalow! I feel less bad about our single bathroom now.

Is it hard to live away from family, especially now that we have kids? You betcha. Very hard. So hard we sometimes think it’s not worth it. So what keeps us here? First and foremost I believe it’s the people. Californians are cool. We are complicated and diverse, and we are okay with that. We teach each other and learn from each other. And since you can’t know someone’s story just by looking at them, that prompts you to ask. This embracing of history–of the larger history of the place as well as the individual history of its denizens–is why I will always feel lucky to have owned a home here.

***

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective, and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

The other day while I was chitchatting with a flock of respected colleagues around ye old office watercooler (okay, it was on Twitter), a few people were engaging in that beloved national pasttime known as Snarking on House Hunters. (Do you do a lot of entertaining? I do a lot of entertaining! Oh, how I love to entertain. Which means nothing but granite countertops and a farmhouse sink and this rare stripe of travertine tile will do!)

There are many things about HH that feel like someone jabbing a finger in my eye socket (STOP GETTING IN THE GARDEN TUB, PEOPLE), but the one thing about HH that always gets my goat is the single homeowner insisting on nothing less than three (or more) bathrooms. Three! Bathrooms! Insisting! And you live alone! And maybe I’m being presumptuous, but…you only have one butt, right? Or does it sometimes feel like you have two because you’re a giant ass?

Okay, yes, I am fitfully jealous of anyone with more than one bathroom–even people who live alone–there’s no getting around that, but I also just…well, some people come off as grossly entitled (entitled to poop in various locales on one’s own property; is this the true American Dream?), and it makes me heave many exasperated sighs at the t.v. and at my countrymen and -women in general, and then–emotional payoff!–I get to feel quite smug about my own humble, one-bathroom-for-four-people-plus-guests (while entertaining!) abode, even though I’m positive that if I were on the show I’d surely insist on some feature that would make a large contingent of viewers roll their eyes at me. (A circular three-story library with a stained-glass roof and a waterfall in the middle that magically doesn’t damage the books with its refreshing mist? Make it so!)

Also, what’s with the nation’s collective boner over pedestal sinks? You lose all counter space and all undersink storage, and I just don’t get that on any level. Is it some sort of conspicuous consumption thing to show off how much storage you have elsewhere, in your apparently-giant-according-to-the-number-of-bathrooms house? Or–wait, I think I just figured something out–is one of your extraneous bathrooms dedicated entirely to storage, and that’s why you insisted on having so many in the first place? Does the toilet even work in bathroom #4 or did you drain the tank so you could use it to hold your collection of cologne and Axe body spray? I’ve figure it out, haven’t I?

Anyway, what I really wanted to discuss was whether having a double vanity in the [main] bathroom falls under the category of eye-rollingly entitled and assy, or if it’s actually a legit desire for regular homeowners. People on Twitter were all “Whyyyyy would you need a double vanity? Do you and your husband, like, brush your teeth together? Ugh! Gross!” To which my response was, “Yes? Should we…not? Does that fall under the category of things best left unseen?” Even if you’re not using them at the same time, isn’t it still nice to have separate sinks? Because honey, I love you and I love your hair, but I do not love seeing your hair places where you are not.

I get that some people are more private than others–I don’t think anyone’s ever seen my father brush his teeth or clip his nails–but I’m guessing it’s not unusual for couples to share space while taking care of at least some daily hygiene rituals. I have no problem applying makeup on my side of the bathroom while Simon does his hair, for instance. That’s not “gross,” right?

Now, I will not use the toilet in front of my husband*, and I do not want to be anywhere near him when he’s clipping his fingernails or toenails (and frankly it’s best if I stay out of the drop zone for a few hours after he does because sometimes he gets distracted and forgets what he’s doing and *trigger warning* leaves A PILE OF NAIL CLIPPINGS ON THE COUNTER and, oh god, I just gagged). Brushing teeth together is okay on one condition: that he when he spits he has the sink running so it masks that horrific splooshy slop sound when his mouth foam hits the sink. Ick ick ick. You might as well just stir a tub of mayonnaise next to my ears. *HORK*

Furthermore:

If you’re inclined to share your household’s bathroom rules, please do. Especially if your proclivities will make me feel less like a cretin.

*Actual thing I said to my kid this morning: “Honey, sometimes Mom just wants to poop alone, okay?”

Yesterday I jogged past some of the places we had our wedding portraits taken two years ago to the day, and in between huffs and puffs I marvelled at how much is different now. The pink blossoms are on the decline, the weather is crazy hot for April, and here I am out and about with a whole entire new member of our family. Simon has a different job–one that doesn’t beat down the happy whistler that makes himself heard when times are good–and Seersucker Wombat has grown a foot and a half and a million dreams inside his little-big head. As for me, there’s no way my current chest could fit into that wedding dress, for starters.

What’s the same is that we’re still a family built around a couple who swarms each other like two hybrid lightning bug-moths, each unstoppably attracted to the glow of the other. I love him shallowly, like a new girlfriend loves her new boyfriend for all the easy stuff like his talent and his good humor and his twinkly chocolate eyes, but I also love him deeply, like a wife loves a husband she has known for a decade, a man whom she has made a home with and made children with and made jokes and compromises and signature cocktails with. This life isn’t always a piece of cake–sometimes it’s a pie with burnt crust and an underdone middle and off-center decorations on top–but you know I’m gonna eat that up anyway, crumbs and all, and it will be delicious because we made it together. Also, PIE.

Marrying Simon is the best decision I ever made, followed closely by having our wedding catered by a taco truck. Some things are just Right.

According to the books, the second anniversary is cotton, so…underwear? I don’t know! I’ve never done this before, unlike some people. (Ooh, anniversary BURN.)

Happy weddingversary, you old so-and-so. You just danced past me doing the shuffle off to Buffalo move using an overturned champagne bucket as a top hat, and if you’ll allow me to turn my response into a metaphor: You don’t have to ask me twice. I will, I do, let me at it, tonight and tomorrow and forever.

You are the best thing [that] ever happened to me.

Fox, you are nine months old and I…HOW? How did this happen? I still haven’t sent out a big stack of your birth announcements (I shall hie me hence to Etsy and order an envelope-sized stamp that says “BELATED” and that shall make it all right, right?) and yet somehow that valiant act of procrastination didn’t keep you in the squirmy wormy newborn stage any longer than was your due, and certainly not long enough for me to get used to it. Would it be too much to have my babies stay babies long enough that I’d eventually achieve a state of equilibrium such that I’d be able to respond to the coos of strangers with nonchalance, all, “Oh. Yes. This old thing? We’ve had this baby forever. We’re quite used to him. No biggie.”

Instead, you’re suddenly nine months old and lolloping around the house (or more often your caged area because YOU MUST BE CONTAINED), slap-sliding across the floor on four fat limbs, mowing over baby stuff like dumb rattles and stupid crinkle books in pursuit of enthusiastically wedging yourself between the toy bin and the side table because that’s where the Hot Wheels are. The Hot Wheels with their tiny, delectable chokeable parts and delicious radioactive metal-alloy fillings. This week you’ve also spent a fair amount of time sitting in a bin full of wooden train tracks while you use a maraca handle as a tongue depresser and a miniature steel drum as a jaunty beret, and I hardly know what to say about that. Baby, you are drunk.

Other preferred toys at nine months: remote controls (but not the old one with no batteries, the NERVE!), car keys (but only when I need them to drive), Wombat’s artwork left within two feet of the ground, a plastic bear head (named Bear Head), Duplos (best if built into something already), and anything in the t.v. console, because that’s not where you’re supposed to be, young man.

(Yes, that’s him saying his first word. Although he’s since used it in similar contexts several times–”No, NO climbing on the fireplace grate”; “Yes!”–it’s not what I’d call consistent, which, honestly, is FINE considering he’s using it to sass. Nevertheless, what is consistent is the attitude. Here is a child who knows what he wants and when he wants it and quite literally won’t take no for an answer. I’m…scared.)

Fox, you are a challenge. Discipline is a challenge, sleeping is a challenge, eating is a challenge when it’s anything other than boob or ingredients pureed into the silky-smoothest slime. (Seriously with the gag-barfing on mashed banana?) As second-time parents, we’re newly learning to walk the tightrope between, on the one end, enforcing our family structure (we obey our parents! we eat food! we sleep at night! all night! try it, you’ll like it!) and, on the other end, working within our newest member’s preferred methodology (e.g., my home office is the front seat of the car, because you’ll only nap in the back seat and I need to get some work done, some time, somehow). Life these days is…interesting. I’m…learning. I’m figuring out how to reframe the way I think about working, about not working, about parenting, about not parenting, about so many things I didn’t think I’d have to think about, or at least not yet. Yes, you’re nine months old (enormous! ancient! big enough to stand straight up in the middle of a room and clap your hands in self-congratulations!), but you’re also only nine months old. You want your mommy. You want your milks. You’re an itty-bitty baby, for crying out loud. (So sit down and stay put, why dontcha?)

According to the official officials, you are 18 pounds and 28 inches, making you short and skinny for your age, of all unexpected things. Your cheeks lie. Your thighs lie. To my eyes, you are a roly-poly classic baby, a wind-up caricature of what all babies are, with peaches-and-cream skin and sapphires for eyes, and I kind of want you to stay this way forever. Would you mind?

At nine months old you like to play peekaboo under blankets, get tossed in the air, and stroll outside (as long as you’re facing forward and not back at the cruel woman who won’t pick you up right now now now). You like when Dad brushes your four whole teeth with the squishy blue shark toothbrush, and you like turning the pages in your board books during bedtime stories. You like your brother so, so much. (Just wait until you get to know him even better. He astounds.) You like the cats too, although sometimes more than they would like you to like them. You bite when you nurse (HOLY HOLY), but I’m still so glad it’s something we can do. I’m proud of it even, just like I’m proud to strap you into the carrier and show you off at the grocery store, and like I’m proud to post too many photos and videos of you online, and like I’m proud that you can do all the wonderful, amazing, perfectly normal baby things that, in your doing them, feel to my heart like the first time any baby has done them ever.

More than proud, though, I feel lucky. You are cute beyond measure, strong[-willed] beyond reason, and funny in a way I never could have expected you to be. Your face is a small round filigree handmirror of how happy we all are to have you with us, and your smile reflects the beam of our love so bright that it lights up the hemisphere.

I am exponentially more busy now than I have ever been in my entire life, and that’s why although we spend all day together, I always feel like I’m running after you with a butterfly net, my feet tangling in the overgrown grass and the sun blinding my eyes as I try to capture your fleet-winged babyhood, so exquisite and unique that I can’t help but want to pin it down under glass and keep it on my nightstand. Will I ever catch up? I’m chasing you, I’m chasing deadlines, I’m chasing tea with tablespoons of straight-up sugar and sometimes wishing it were something a little bit stronger (don’t do drugs, kids!), and it’s exhausting and humiliating and not what I signed up for and also thrilling and invigorating and just exactly what I never knew I wanted. My heart quickens just thinking about it.

Now listen close because here’s the kicker: I don’t think I’m particularly good at being your mom (yet), but oh, I’m having the best time. This, coming from a girl who rejects pretty much everything she’s not naturally good at, is quite out of character. In fact, I hardly recognize myself anymore some days. In a way, I’m getting to know the both of us at the same time, which I guess is what you’re doing too. Together, we’re figuring out each other and ourselves and the world, one snuggle, one glee-shriek, one naughty “yes” at a time.

You are as big on the inside as you are little on the outside, as vast as the universe, as tiny as the twinkle of a faraway star. You are one part mischief, one part mystery, one part eyebrows, and one part little blonde Superman curl right in the middle of your forehead. That’s the recipe for you, the Big Bang that brought into being life as we now know it.

What’s next, my boy? What’s next? Not even the sky is your limit.

I had a fairly significant epiphany a few weeks ago in regards to the never-ending saga of Fox not sleeping, and although I’m afraid the epiphany did not include any pass-alongable advice about actually getting my child (or yours) to sleep through the night, I feel like it’s worth mentioning because (a) it still might help someone and (b) I have a feeling I’m going to have to learn this lesson again and again, so I might as well learn it from myself.

Here it is:

I don’t just want Fox to sleep, I want him to sleep how I want him to sleep. Rookie mistake.

The corollary/solution to the above is that if I…er, if we can rein ourselves in and give up the fantasy that it’s possible to completely override this [crazy] infant’s biological set-up, we can actually get him to sleep just fine, provided he’s doing it the ways he can and does best (swaddled, in motion, in small increments, and stuffed with a pacifier made out of boob and attached to yours truly). This arrangement isn’t ideal for the rest of us but it is, nevertheless and all things considered, still SLEEEEEEEEEEP SWEET LIFE-AFFIRMING SLEEEEEEEEEEP, and we’re at the point now when that singular goal trumps all else. I don’t know whether I’d call this shift of paradigms resigning, giving up, coming to our senses, or letting the baby win, but you can call it whatever you like so long as it significantly reduces the incidence of hour-long crying jags at 2 a.m. while we try to convince each ourselves he’s totally just seconds away from soothing himself back to sleep even though he’s got a death grip on the crib rail and is bouncing up and down on the mattress like a caged chimp hooked up to electrodes.

Ideal: I want him to sleep from 8ish at night to 8ish in the morning without waking up. I want him to sleep in his own bed the whole time. I want him to sleep unswaddled. I want him to nap in the afternoon for at least an hour at a time, in his bed, unswaddled. Currently we’re 0 for 6 on most days, and it’s keeeelling meeeee. (“Why can’t you be more like your brother?”) That we keep shooting for these goals is what, I’m slowly coming to realize, is making the process feel like a nightly bout of shooting ourself in our collective parenting foot like morons. It has to stop.

Now…if I just want the baby to sleep, no conditions attached? That’s accomplished easily enough. In fact, it’s so simple it’s stupid. He likes the swing, he likes the swaddle, he likes the car seat, he likes our bed and its roll-up all-night open bar. We’ve got gadgets and gizmos aplenty, whoozits and whatzits galore. Thingamaboobs? I’ve got two. That’s all he really wants.

A month or so ago I was sent a review copy of Harvey Karp’s latest book, The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep (but this is not a sponsored review!), and as I read it (in random parking lots during Fox’s car naps) I kept waiting to find something useful about getting the kid to stay asleep without help. It seemed to be more about soothing than sleep training as I knew it (we Ferber-lited Wombat for three days before he claimed his the spot as the Best Sleeper Ever), and talking to people on Twitter confirmed that yeah, the Happiest Baby method is more about soothing and therefore contains lots and lots of soothing tricks and advice (and I recommend it to anyone who needs help in that area, especially if you’re having your first baby), but unfortunately we don’t need soothing tricks and advice, and that’s why I once shattered a parking lot nap by shouting “Baloney!” at a book. In short, I want to train my kid to not need me to soothe him to sleep, and I certainly don’t want to train him to expect it, you know? At one point the text said something like “You may have to do this technique fifty times in a row in one night,” to which my response was a less polite version of “Fuck that shit!”

Ahem.

Anyway, I already know how to soothe him. (Boob.) I know how to get him to sleep without any tears. (Boob.) I know how to make him go right back to sleep if (WHEN) he wakes up in the middle of the night. (Boob.) After weeks of twenty-minute crib snoozes that weren’t long enough for me to check my email let alone accomplish other pressing tasks like take a shower, do the dishes, or organize the entire house, I even finally figured out how to get him to take a decent afternoon nap: drive him around the greater Bay Area or let him sway to sleep in the swing he’s way too big for. (When he’s awake, he can rock back and forth in the swing with such force it shimmies across the hardwoods like something out of the Jetsons, which I’m guessing falls under the WARNING: DANGER section of the manual and not the SPECIAL FEATURES one.)

Today he took a two-and-a-half-hour(!) nap in his car seat while I sat up front and read a book just for fun. Here in the land of post-sleep-epiphany, I’m glad to say that now, instead of driving home and taking the car seat inside, which inevitably wakes him up and dashes all hopes of getting something productive done, I’ve learned I’m better off just letting him sleep in the car while I take advantage of that forced “me time.” A different kind of person might even use that opportunity to take a nap herself. (I’m writing on a new campaign for CafeMom, and one of my first posts is about how I ignore all advice to sleep when the baby sleeps because naps make me ragey. If this is you too, you are not alone.)

Anyway, that example is the perfect illustration of the New Way of Things. If the baby wants to sleep in the car, I’m going to let him sleep in the car, and I’m going to try reeeeeally hard not to be bitter about it. It’s exhausting not getting uninterrupted rest at night, but it’s even more exhausting spending every day (and night) negotiating sleep when the monologue goes, “Is today a good day to be an Enforcer, or do we really all just need to take the easy way out and get some rest however we can?” That kind of inconsistency will obviously kill any kind of training plan, and besides, the answer is pretty much always that we really all just need to get some rest however we can. Neither of us is never like, “Nah, tonight feels like a fine time to just let him cry and fuss and whine until we feel like digging out our eardrums with a grapefruit spoon!”

It’s a bummer that our non-sleep-trained kid is making us miss out on certain things (we can’t really go out on a date, and we’re probably cancelling our trip to the Mom 2.0 conference over my birthday weekend because we can’t leave a baby overnight with anyone we don’t hate, and I’m not keen on leaving my children with someone I do hate), but it’s also a bummer to keep applying sleep strategies that aren’t working, even though they were easy and magical for our naturally easy and magical first kid. And here’s where I’d like to say that if I ever assumed the cry-it-out technique only failed for parents who were doing it wrong, I was wrong to assume that. I still think Ferber is worth a shot (when it works, it tends to work FAST and MIRACULOUSLY), but if you have a baby like Fox who doesn’t cry it out but cries it up to 11, I guess all we can do is try our best to do our best, which is what all of us are already doing anyway, isn’t it? Fifty gold stars and sympathetic back pats for everyone!

My blogging fingers have been itchy while I’ve been busy doing other things like hosting parties, dusting my home and everyone I love with glitter, attending a child’s birthday celebration with twenty-six kids and their parents with my fly down the entire time (winning!), putting heavy things on Fox’s head to keep him from just standing up in the middle of the room like an actual biped or something (losing!), and composing blog posts dominated by nervous laughter as I reveal I’m, ha ha ha, OMGPREGNANTAGAINNOOOOOOO, hee hee hee?, although I’m happy to say that one stopped as soon as I could confirm it was a false alarm (OMGOMG). I’ve been doing a book project for work, sneaking in freelance blogging here and there, and trying to be very patient with the schizo spring weather, which is easier said than done some days, as I’m sure you can relate, even those of you whose “good” spring weather means the icicle hanging from the end of your nose is melting rather than embiggening. Although it never feels like the best use of my time to steal the baby’s naps to journal here when the dirty dishes are stacked eyebrow high and the cat box has actual cartoon stink lines wiggling off it into the air, I never, ever, ever, ever regret it. That whole bit about “warm family memories are more precious than a clean kitchen” (I made that up) turns out to be true (and not just because I made it up). I’ve been thinking about what has changed in the way I write here now compared to how I did a decade ago, and although I think the realization that it might have made more interesting reading when I was pulling significant stories from my past instead of just recounting what we did last weekend, and the one before that, and the one before that, I also know Future Me will be happy to have whatever it gets out of this tangle of brain translated into pixels, and you can bet your butt Present Me is happy to have these minutes of downtime put a pretty frame around the scenes that aren’t always so picture-perfect as they’re being created.

Wombat’s on Spring Break from preschool (margaritas by the pool bar at 10 a.m. wooooooooo), so I only have a few minutes before I have to go rescue him from Netflix (mini-plug for the new WiiU, which has a touchscreen, so four-year-olds can navigate the movie menu themselves!). I’ll wipe the drool off Miserable Teething Baby’s nap-wrinkle face, put on some pants, and then take the boys out for some old-timey Vitamin D, the kind that doesn’t come from the bathroom cabinet via medicine dropper. I can’t think of a better way to avoid the dishes and the glitter and the packing list for our impending road trip than to spend the afternoon in a park (unless there’s a real possibility of having a margarita by the pool bar, in which case I choose that).

Here are a few photos from our life lived in between the lines.

Deshaggifying:

Red, read:

St. Patrick’s Day:

Chick nest:

Simon almost worked here:

First school playdate (hi, Jessica!). They found some abandoned cake pops and were this close to eating them, although something tells me if I hadn’t stopped them the girl in the background would have:

“Gardening.” Well, digging in the garden, at least:

Spring:

Gratuitous munchfaces:

You know you have a true friend in the person who will spend Sunday morning reading to your bony-butt boy from the dictionary while he tries not to spill cafe au lait on her lap:

And, finally, a shameless promo of what has quickly become a beloved craft blog: here’s how we’re doing Easter eggs this year.

What have YOU been doing? (This is not a lame way to end the post–well, it’s not JUST a lame way to end a post–I really do care what you’re up to. Seeing how people spend their springtime is always a kick because some of you are buried in snow and some of you are walking on sunshine (whooooaaa) and some of you are having margaritas by the pool and I will try not to hate you. So please do share [your margaritas].

Ever since I saw photos of Amber after her Color Run last year, I knew the “Happiest 5K” was A Thing For Me To Do. I’m famously rubbish at life lists, so I didn’t bother declaring it a formal goal, I just closed my eyes and clicked when I landed on the registration page one afternoon. Closed-eyed clicking goes against my very nature, but/and it’s just exactly what I need to do every now and then.

Also equally against my nature and good for me? Running. This is where I’m especially glad for my half-pint tag-along teammates, who I hoped were obviously burden enough to convince the 9,996 other people at the event that I wasn’t “slow” and “out of shape,” I was “accommodating” my children because I’m “nice” like that.

Lordy but I’m slow and out of shape. All told, I jogged a grand total of about two minutes, made up of tiny spurts that lasted just long enough for me to remember that the sinus malady I’ve suffered valiantly for going on three weeks now makes my teeth hurt when I do anything more strenuous than tap at my phone with both thumbs like a science mouse pushing a lever for kibble. Meanwhile, Wombat took a break atop Simon’s shoulders every now and then, Fox fell asleep in the stroller while we were standing in front of a giant loudspeaker waiting for our wave to start (AND YET YOU REFUSE TO NAP AT HOME, CHILD?), and in the end we finished almost dead last, which meant nothing more than that the official color throwers were being extra generous by the time we passed their way.

I thought it was fun. Wombat thought it was the FUNNEST THING EVER. I’d painted our nails in matching rainbows (note his varied look-at-mah-nails poses), and I didn’t let myself think of the laundry until after we’d crossed the finish line as a messy, happy kaleidoscopic team. Afterward, I waited with the baby while Simon introduced Wombat to his first dance pit, from which they emerged drenched in ROYGBIV and joy, hands pink from powder and high-fiving strangers. Fox was lightly dusted with wonder. I was considering dyeing my hair permanently blue because why the hell not?

Sir? It looks like you’ve got a little something behind your ear.

It was pretty great. I don’t think I can honestly add “Ran a 5K” to my list of did-dos after this, but none of what that means–accomplishment, fitness, hipster cred–is what this was about.

Two final words: Technicolor boogers.