Momedy

I’ve officially been a Mom now for three and a half years. In that time I’ve had three and a half babies. I’m counting Pippa as a half because while I did not carry her, birth her or nurse her (there’s a thought), she can be every bit as demanding as my actual children (see giant pile of puke next to the couch that I walked into this afternoon.)

Though my kids aren’t old enough yet that they know to ask me if I have a favorite child, I can unapologetically tell you that I do. And it’s this one:

Yep, Lottie is my favorite. Today. Yesterday it was Evelyn. Alex had a three day run last week. My favorite child is whichever child is currently being the easiest for me, and it’s my belief that any parent of toddlers who tells you otherwise is either lying or so thoroughly medicated that all her children are surrounded by a rose-colored haze.

I plan on clueing my kids in on this fact as soon as possible, in hopes that if they grow up competitive, they’ll immediately enter into a lifelong competition with each other to be the easiest kid for Mom and Dad, thus securing permanent favorite child status.

Social media has a way of making it look like all of our children are always easy for us, and all-around wonderful, and that they eat vegetables and tofu and curried anything for every meal, and that we have perfect marriages and ride unicorns on the beach in our downtime. Probably because we usually post just this.

Meanwhile behind the scenes you’ve just been in a row with your spouse, so you throw Pop Tarts on the table for the kids, who then get so hopped up on sugar before 7 a.m. that they run full speed at you with their fists blazing and they end up giving you a fat lip to go with your bloodshot eyes. And the closest you’ve been to the beach or a unicorn is the Lisa Frank folder you just pulled out of your daughter’s backpack that contains the snack schedule, reminding you today’s your day to supply a peanut-free/gluten-free/dairy-free/dairy-substitute-free/sugar-free/rice-free/corn-free/color-free/flavor-free/fun-free/easily-chewable/non-stainable/individually-packaged snack, and you’ve completely forgotten.

So, in case I’m guilty of over-posting/over-gramming the wonderful aspects of my kids, here are some of their not-as-wonderful truths to balance everything out.

Lottie. My current favorite. The day she was born I shared a beautiful, filtered image of her that welcomed her to the family. A few hours later my sister called and I answered the phone in tears, asking if it was too late to put her up for adoption, and I was only 95% kidding. Maybe even 90%. Those first few days postpartum were rough — I’d been so excited for the hospital stay as a break from my older two kids that I’d forgotten about the ridiculous round-the-clock cluster feeding of a fussy newborn who is impatient for your milk to come in.

And I’d forgotten just how violently ill I get every time I’d nurse for those first few days as my uterus shrinks back down from the size of an elephant to the size of grape. Therefore, what the first few days really looked like was this:

One cute little baby all snuggled up and nursing, and one not-so-cute puke bag to throw up into so I didn’t throw up all over her.

And next to me on my little hospital table:

More puke bags, two Starbucks that I was dying for but couldn’t keep down, a gatorade to wash down the anti-nausea meds, and the stress-gingerbread-boy that had gotten me through labor, passed out facedown on a banana I couldn’t eat. Not very glamorous.

But we got through it, and my crying cluster-feeder became a sweet baby who quickly became my easiest. Until this week, when instead of sleeping in her carseat she decided to hate it. Now she’s the baby that screams unless she is moving, and moving at a certain speed. Which is bad news for everyone else because she basically lives in her carseat on Monday and Tuesday. It also means that my tolerance for slow, elderly and/or indecisive drivers has plummeted, which rules out any grocery store parking lot between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2, and The Dollar Store parking lot at all times,

Now Alex. My sweet smiley boy who we call The Ambassador because he has a smile and a “Hi!” for everyone he sees.

He also whines for 86% of his waking hours and screams for 45 minutes when goes to bed. He currently refuses all food that isn’t a Brach’s Jelly Bird Egg, so he eats an average of one meal a week when he finally gets hungry enough, and acts like a jerk the rest of the week because his tummy hurts and he can’t figure out why. And he’s a lot like a dog in that he always wants to be on the other side of the door, then as soon as he is he changes his mind and wants to go back. Even if that “door” is time out:

Please excuse A) the state of my floors (this was about a week before I had Lottie and I was completely over wiping up paw prints.) and B) the state of our deck — it had just been ripped up so they could fill in the old septic tank. And by “Just”, I mean the previous September. We should get around to finishing it by this summer. And by “We” I mean my super-handy husband, Father-in-law and Dad. I helped for an afternoon and have now been promoted to supervisor.

And then there’s Evie, my sweet Evie. She’s truly delightful, until she ingests a single grain of sugar or is the slightest bit overtired, at which point her personality is best explained by this picture:

She’s the one I was thinking of when I mentioned a kid running at you fists blazing. Fatigue and/or sugar turns the girl into an absolute maniac, which is why I’ve been known to put her to bed for the night at 4:30 and also why we still haven’t finished her Valentines Day candy from 2016.

Then there are moments when they’re all my least favorite:

I shot this video as a Public Service Announcement — and its message is to anyone considering multiple children — don’t … don’t do it until you can hire someone else to take them to the doctor for you.

Of course there are also moments when they’re all my favorite — like when they’re all smiling and sweet and looking in the same direction and no one is picking their nose and eating it.

So you see it all evens out. And speaking of evening out, never forget that for every nice, happy, sunshiny picture I post, I’m probably sitting at the computer with a fresh black eye from a toddler head butt and I’m only posting it because it’s the one day this week that my kids have been in real clothes and hell, I’m proud of that.

Sometimes I feel like I live online, specifically on social media. I’m often guilty of overgramming, and there are days that I scroll through Facebook so frequently that there have been no new posts since the last time I logged on. Not a single one. That means I’m signing back on about a minute and a half after I sign off.

Is that sad? I try not to think about it.

What makes me feel less pathetic – albiet slightly – is that there are a handful of other people I notice on social media with this frequency — mostly others with young kids at home. These are my people, and I love every picture I see of their babies sleeping peacefully or their toddlers throwing tantrums or their hands on 12 oz. pours of wine at 3 pm.

I read an article last week about how while “it takes a village”, we no longer have a village because of changing societal norms.

It’s true — even if I was okay letting my kids roam the neighborhood all summer or walk the mile and a half to school, Social Services would be on my doorstep before they even made it to the end of the block.

But to me it seems our village is still there, it has just moved online. I may not be sending my kids to play with the older kids next door while I run to the grocery store, but I can jump online and ask for recipe ideas with whatever ingredients I happen to have in my pantry.

For the record, TetraFin/Hoisin Sauce sandwiches are supposed to be amaaaazing.

It’s definitely a different world that we live in, and there is plenty to make me nostalgic for a day and age I never parented in. That Nesquik is one of them.

“Good Dog Carl” is another. The original “Good Dog Carl” is one of my favorite children’s books. Mostly I like it because it has no words and so I can “Read” it in two minutes flat, a trick that comes in handy when trying to get three kids to bed in a twenty minute timeframe.

I also love it because it’s ridiculous. So Mom leaves her baby in the care of the family Rottweiler, Carl, which immediately endears the book to me because I have a special love for any animal with a human name.

The year is 1986, so I can only assume she’s off to see Top Gun. The baby is in a crib that’s since been recalled with a drop side that’s been banned. If this woman was on Instagram and this was her post, there would immediately be fifteen people down her throat demanding she remove that blanket from her baby. But she’d never post this picture on Insta, because that nursery is definitely not Pintrest-worthy and she can’t have anybody seeing that.

Anyway, Carl goes on to try and kill the baby in every way possible, except for the one way a Rottweiler could actually inflict harm.

Then he turns on the record player and teaches the baby The Macarena, ten years ahead of its time.

Somehow the baby survives the day and the Mom is none the wiser when she returns, presumably because she can’t stop thinking about Tom Cruise.

Another of Evelyn’s favorite books that takes me right back is “Where the Sidewalk Ends”, which I’ll read to her even though nine out of ten of the illustrations creep me out and I can’t look directly at the picture on the back.

I love me some Shel Silverstein, but did anyone tell him that this picture was going on the back of a children’s book and not his speed dating profile?

And while I’m on Mr. Silverstein and bad decisions, I still haven’t read Evelyn “The Giving Tree.”

That poor tree needs to get herself to an Al Anon meeting immediately. I mean this jerk of a kid shows up every time he needs something from her and then disappears. Every time he comes back he gives her just enough to trick her into giving him something else he wants.

“Can I have all of your branches since I carved our names together in a heart?” And then when he turns into a jerk of a man, “I squandered my money and failed at love, can you rescue me by letting me chop you down and make you into a boat that I can use to escape my bad choices?”

These are not exactly the lessons I want my kids learning.

I want them learning that if they think they can, they can – like The Little Engine That Could.

This book I take no issue with, except for this one page:

This little train is happily traveling through what appears to be Holland, and then all of a sudden there’s Butch Cassidy running after it, armed with a pistol. The first couple of times I read it as an adult I did a double take. But then I figured if Little Bo Peep and the lawn jockey don’t seem bothered by him, I shouldn’t be either.

Last summer while I was pregnant with Lottie, I took the kids to my first prenatal appointment. My doctor got called away to deliver a baby so we were stuck waiting for about an hour.

My kids lost interest in the activities I’d brought for them after four and a half minutes.

Happily, they were well stocked with children’s books and even more happily, one of them was a sequel to “Good Dog Carl” that I didn’t know existed.

I like this one even better than the original because the Mom — whose name turns out to be Sarah  — takes her deplorable parenting public, leaving Carl in charge at the park. It makes me laugh, and it also makes me jealous, because this is exactly the kind of thing that you can’t do anymore. Not that I don’t love living online … but I want to be part of Sarah’s village.

Lottie slept through the night last night. Insert all the celebration emojis here.

I used the uninterrupted sleep time to have a dream that Eric was leaving me.

He and I often discuss how dream-Eric can be a real jerk. Last night dream-Eric told me he was leaving me and the kids, and that he’d been secretly meeting another woman at one of his vacant properties. Dream-Melissa cried and begged him not to walk out of what seemed to be a car dealership showroom that was our house, but he walked out anyway.

When I woke up, my first thought was “What an a-hole.” My second thought was … “am I more jealous that there was another woman, or that he was in a vacant property?” I mean, all that peace and quiet…

One of my memories from early in our marriage is of a morning that Eric went to work before me. I was still in bed when he left and he came in to kiss me goodbye. “You’re hard to leave,” is what he said.

This was back when I wore decent pajamas and would secretly wake up and brush my teeth while he was downstairs making coffee, then jump back into bed and pretend to just be waking up.

This is now:

Somehow I think leaving has gotten easier for him.

This is my rattiest sweatshirt, pulled on over the nursing tank that I’ve both leaked through (thanks Lottie) and sweated through (thanks postpartum hormones) overnight. I’m mouth-breathing so I can’t smell the baby poop that is somewhere on me but I can’t locate.

And if this beautiful scene doesn’t make leaving difficult, the chaos that follows will. By 7:15 there is so much peanut butter and yogurt smeared all over the kitchen that it will be a full 48 hours before I locate the last of it. One kid’s at the table spilling his milk and another’s at the top of the stairs screaming because she can’t come downstairs until her bed is made and mean Mom and Daddy refuse to do it for her. The baby is crying because she needs to be fed but I’m too busy making lunches to do it right now. I’m at the counter seriously considering whether or not I could send Evelyn’s water for her lunch in a flask, because I forgot to run the dishwasher last night (again) and washing her water bottle at that particular moment just seems like way too much work.

Meanwhile it looks like the fish is swimming in horchata, because I want Evelyn to be part of cleaning its bowl and last week turned out to be so crazy that we haven’t done it yet.

I must have lost my mind the day I agreed to take on one more creature to care for. Apologies, Nemo.

Honestly when Eric breezes through the kitchen on his way to work and the kids are running after him calling for one more hug and kiss, it’s all I can do not to dive for his ankles myself, grab on and beg him to take me with him/not to leave me/to send help as soon as he gets to civilization.

These days its the staying that can seem the hardest, not the leaving. When I worked, I’d dream of the day I could stay home with my kids. My house would be spotless, I said. I’d be in the best shape of my life, I said. The reality of it now feels a little like seeing a house online and then walking through it and realizing “man this isn’t nearly as big as the pictures made it look.”

I am blessed to be able to do it, and it has its wonderful moments. But man, it can be  isolating. I am jealous of my former self, the one who could leave the house without having to worry about finding childcare. Or better yet, who could leave the house without toting three kids along. Because that’s a whole different sh*tshow.

Some mornings, by some miracle, I manage to have my act together. I’ve packed lunches the night before, everyone’s woken up and eaten right on schedule, the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, my hair is combed and I have real clothes on. These mornings I get to where I’m going and look around for my round of applause and pats on the back, and no one is there to witness it.

Then there are mornings like today, where I sprint out the door ten minutes late, looking completely unkempt and the personification of the word frazzled. My empty light is on in my car, and I’m halfway to my destination before I realize I’ve forgotten to put any shoes on Alex.

Sure, at least the socks match, but I don’t think anyone at the gym was giving me credit for that as I dropped him off in childcare shoeless, with a flask for a water bottle.

Then during my workout I pee in my pants every time I do a jump squat, come home and take a 45 second shower with the door open, because, toddlers. By the time the morning is over I may actually look worse than I did when I woke up.

Honestly now that I see it in writing I’m not at all surprised that dream-Eric left. I should probably be waiting for the day real-life-Eric goes out on beer run that he never comes back from.

I’ll just offer to do all the beer runs myself from now on. And hopefully I’ll remember shoes, but I make no promises.

Today is man crush Monday, at least I think that’s still a thing. As has been the case with most of the crushes I’ve had in my life, my current one (my son) has made it clear that he does not return my feelings.

There are a few reasons that Alex and I don’t get along, the main one being that he doesn’t like me.

Alex is my favorite boy in the whole world, and at night when I snuggle him I give him a kiss on the bridge of the nose where my lips fit perfectly, and I’m honestly afraid I might bite him I want to eat him up so badly. Then his chubby little hands reach for my face … and slap it away with surprising strength for an almost two-year-old. And his sweet little velociraptor voice screeches “No Mommy no!!” or “No kiss!” or “Many thanks for growing me for nine long months in your belly and bringing me painfully into this world, but now that you’ve served your purpose, kindly get the f out of here and send Daddy in.”

You see while Alex tops my list, on his list of favorites you’ve got Daddy, his siblings, both sets of grandparents, all aunts uncles and cousins, every pet including the fish and at least 19 acquaintances before you get to me.

Last week I told Alex Daddy was on his way home and captured his reaction:

Then I told him that he wouldn’t be home in time for bed so Mommy would be putting him down:

I keep hearing about this magical bond between mothers and their sons, but right now the only thing bonding Alex and I is our agreement upon the banana.

My sweet baby boy has grown into a mini man with only one dream — to eat exclusively raisins and crackers, and I’m mean mommy who refuses to let him achieve it. So we’ve reached a truce, and that truce is bananas. It’s the only food he’ll eat that I’ll let him eat for every meal, and so our fruit bowl looks like this:

I’m at Piggly Wiggly every other day stocking up on more bananas, and then I can’t pass up the Sweet Trio caramel apples strategically placed between the bananas and the checkout, so I’m actually starting to look a lot like a pig. I am Piggly Wiggly. Thanks a lot, kid.

I can’t imagine what his problem with me could be. I’ve definitely never smothered him…

I’m sure I’ve never embarrassed him …

Yet somehow he still favors Eric. I guess if I think about it I can’t really blame him there. Eric takes him on four wheeler rides while I put him in four time outs a day. I’m also inclined to blame Evelyn, who’s been attached to me from day one despite my promises to Eric that little girls DO grow up to adore their daddies. So when Alex came along, Eric was hell bent on turning him into a Daddy’s boy.  Like — vetoed a Llama Llama Birthday theme because there’s no Dad in the Llama Llama books. (I stand by my argument that a “Llama Llama Mad at Mama” party would have been perfect for this kid.)

He truly has become a Daddy’s boy though and as a result, he yells “Daddy home!” from the moment Eric walks out the door in he morning. Currently it’s happening while he’s supposed to be napping:

When he’s not yelling for Eric, he’s just standing at the window, waiting for him to come home.

So it’s clear. My crush has a crush on someone else … a reality 16-26 year-old Melissa was more than familiar with.

But I’m not giving up on this one, not even in the face of full on rejection:

He’ll come around someday. And until then, we’re having a Curious George birthday party.

Curious George, who has a father figure yet no mother. Coincidence? I think not.

Apparently today is International Women’s Day, or so I gather from Facebook, which seems to be my only news source these days. That last fact, paired with all the impressive women I’ve seen posts about today has really served to remind me that I have never been less interesting.

I used to be interesting, I’m sure of it, or I never would have tricked Eric into marrying me. I’m not sure what I was texting him about five years ago when he was a week away from proposing, but I know it wasn’t this:

A few clarifications: I have my husband entered in my phone as Sweet Baby Ray because of his intense love for barbecue sauce, not because we have freaky nicknames for each other. I’m pretty sure I’m entered in his phone as Mrs. Berg, if you’re looking for proof. If he wanted to name me after something I have an intense love for, I’d be in there as Big Mac or Chardonnay or Online Shopping or Full Nights Rest, and none of those have quite the same ring. Except maybe Big Mac, I’ll lobby for that.

Second, that is a picture of a solid bowel movement. Evelyn’s, specifically, and it was sent to Sweet Baby Ray to celebrate its solid nature, after three straight days of the opposite. Ev got sick on Friday and between Friday and Monday I wiped her butt no less than 256 times. Which I guess is something I’ve mastered. I am an excellent butt wiper and can do it while nursing another child or reading to another child or doing pretty much anything else, and I hope that’s a fact Evelyn remembers 25 years from now on International Women’s Day when she’s posting about how inspirational her mother is.

That text message celebrates both the end of my wiping responsibilities as well as the official end of my having anything of actual interest to talk about.

The trouble is, in order to find interesting things to discuss I would need to be doing or reading about doing interesting things, and for that I would require time.

I used to excel in time management, but ever since Lottie, everything I do comes at the expense of something else. If I respond to texts and emails, the kitchen doesn’t get cleaned up. If I clean my floors, the laundry sits in the dryer for 48 hours and Sweet Baby Ray goes to work in “no iron” pants that no iron could smooth if it tried. I’m writing this blog post during the time I should be meal prepping dinner which means everyone’s getting peanut butter sandwiches and canned veggies tonight.

A few weeks go I painted the changing area between our closet and bathroom. When we moved in it looked like this:

We removed the wallpaper in the closet as well as the carpet, but both the trim and the walls still needed to be painted:

Someday I’ll get a different countertop on there, new light fixtures and some new switch plates, but this spruced it up for now. What it didn’t spruce up was my appearance or the state of my house. This project used up every minute of naptime and bedtime for three straight days, which meant by the end of it I hadn’t showered in 36 hours, had 9 loads of laundry and 3,000 emails in my inbox. About 2995 of them were promotions from various places I’ve online shopped in the past, but it’s still a number that makes me shut my computer immediately  upon opening it.

It’s been three full weeks since I finished, and yesterday I finally caught up on the all the tasks that I’d neglected to do this. Then in one of my prouder parenting moments, Alex ran full speed around the corner wielding a hammer, and  I realized the tools that I used to switch out the mirror and the drawer pulls are still sitting on our dresser where I left them.

They’re sitting next to the dry brush I bought and never use, because there’s barely ten minutes to shower in the morning much less an extra five to exfoliate.

Someday I’ll either get the hang of this, or my kids will grow up and move out without ever knowing a mother who can do both laundry and dishes in the same week, and I’m just going to have to be okay with either scenario.

I’m also going to have to be okay with the fact that anything I am going to accomplish will have to be accomplished while my kids are asleep, because when I try to do anything while they’re awake, I walk in to scenes like this:

When questioned, Evelyn said she was helping her baby get back to regular poop.

Alrighty.

Then said “Mommy aren’t you so glad I’m back to regular poop?”

You have no idea how glad, child. And also I’m glad I didn’t have to administer a shot to your groin to help you accomplish that.

Last week I had my postpartum appointment. I brought the three kids along with me, and just in case the doctor had any concern over whether or not I was fit to handle the third child she’d just delivered for me, I forgot shoes for Alex.

The doctor came in, introduced me to the med student who was shadowing her, and went about the exam. I hadn’t been in the room more than five minutes before she asked me what I wanted to do for birth control.

“Oh I’ve already got it figured out,” I said.

“Are you thinking IUD? Pill?” she asked.

“No, I actually just ordered some Bunion correctors off of Amazon, so I’m thinking that should take care of it.”

She blinked at me a few times. “No, seriously,” she said.

“Seriously,” I told her. “They’re second only to Crocs as the best form of birth control.”

The doctor went on to explain how actual birth control works, but I stopped her. “I’m not sure it makes sense for us right now, we’ll probably try for baby #4 this fall.”

At this, the med student noticeably gagged, and I guess I don’t blame her. Evelyn was jumping on the scale singing the Diarrhea song, Alex was in the stroller melting down because he couldn’t get unbuckled, or because his pants were grey, or because his hair was too hairy, I mean who knows. Lottie was definitely the best behaved at the moment but you could definitely smell the need for a diaper change.

The doctor chose this moment to ask if I’d filled out the Postpartum worksheet. Probably a good move on her part.

The next week at Lottie’s appointment the Pediatrician had a similar form for me to fill out.

I’m certainly not poking fun at postpartum issues — I know they are real and a terrible thing to have to endure — still some of the questions on these forms always make me laugh.

“I am able to cope as well as I always have” — Always, Sometimes, Hardly Ever, Never. There either needs to be room to write in an answer, or a fifth option of “Always, but with the help of more wine than I previously required.”

Or my favorite — “I am finding it difficult to sleep.” Always, Sometimes, Hardly Ever, Never.

Is that a trick question??

Another — “I am finding it difficult to stay on top of household tasks.”

Um…

I mean, the place has never looked better.

Also you can see Eric’s Crocs there front and center, so there’s that.

But picking up all those shoes would take a good ten minutes away from zoning out while binge watching Greys Anatomy, which is what I would have written in if question # 9 (“I am finding it hard to motivate myself”) had that option. Instead I just picked “Hardly Ever” and blamed the Netflix Binge on exhaustion.

There’s a lot I could blame on exhaustion these days … feeding my kids granola bars for several meals, wearing those Crocs on a whole day of errands without realizing it, spelling “whole” in the previous sentence “hole” and staring at it for five minutes before I could figure out what was wrong with it.

Oh well, c’est la vie. They’ll have me fill out the questionnaire again at Lottie’s 4 month appointment, and hopefully by then that pile of laundry will have been put away … but I make no promises.

So two parents get on a plane with a preschooler, a toddler and a newborn …

This sounds like the intro to a pretty good joke, but it will be our reality next week and I fear instead of a laugh it may end in divorce and/or a missing person’s (me) ad.

The thought of it makes me shudder, and combined with the task of packing those three kids and ourselves up for a week, it has me waxing nostalgic about vacations past. Way past.

Look at that spring chicken. She’s 29 years old. A baby. She’s on her honeymoon, which means she’s at a weight she’ll never see again. She’s seen the inside of a tanning bed for the last time. She looks relaxed, because she’s not worrying about things like button battery ingestion. She doesn’t look nauseous, because she hasn’t changed 7 blowouts in the last 24 hours. She looks put together, because she spent her spare ten minutes that morning applying makeup, not staring at a 3-year-old’s bare butt asking herself “pimple or staph infection?” I can’t remember what she and her husband were talking about before this picture was taken, but I know it wasn’t chapter three of Parenting with Love and Logic.

This picture was taken 4 years and 2 months ago. She’ll go on to spend 2 years and 3 months of that time pregnant, and the rest of it postpartum, which means she has only a month left of sleep that’s not being interrupted by trips to the bathroom or crying babies.

She hasn’t yet listened to “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas” 2971565 times. She doesn’t know it yet, but soon she’ll be able to add “Ability to recite ‘Little Blue Truck’ by heart” to her resume … a resume that is rapidly becoming irrelevant.

The day after this picture is taken she and her husband will drive 3 dangerous hours to raft down a river and then drive 3 dangerous hours back (dangerous due more to the driver than the terrain). But she won’t bat an eye, because she hasn’t yet turned into the kind of hypochondriac that thinks every headache is an aneurysm that’s about to leave her children motherless.

She is the most relaxed she will ever be again. Does she appreciate it? Of course not … because she doesn’t know it.

I look at the girl in that picture and remember the kind of things she was worried about, and want to say “tell me more about this magical world you live in, where you can leave the house whenever you want. Tell me about the pedicure you got before this trip … don’t leave out a single detail.

Tell me about the long runs you went on so you’d fit in these clothes.

Tell me what your packing list looks like, because I know for sure it doesn’t look like this:

That girl was dreaming of her future, but I doubt she was picturing a list that included things like “snot sucker” and breast pump.

I also want to ask her how it felt packing for her just herself and therefore not sleeping in a bedroom that looked like this:

Twenty-nine year old Melissa has white teeth and tan skin, because she has energy for tooth whitening and tanning. Thirty-three year old Melissa is so ready for bed by 8:15 that she can’t even muster up the energy to slather herself with some  Jergens Natural Glow or glob some whitening gel onto these teeth. As a result, my legs pass the “tissue test” while my teeth do not.

If I could go back in time and tell her to appreciate it – all the freedom she has – I would. But the best I can do for her is to appreciate now.

I spent my childhood dreaming of growing up, now I’m here and I dream about that care-free stage of life. I spend my current days dreaming about adult conversations and the ability to watch TV without having to mute it because Evelyn is scared of Arby’s commercials. But when they’re out of the house and grown, I’ll be yearning for these days.

I know for sure I will miss my son looking tiny while trying Daddy’s shoes in the morning before he leaves for work … 

… and forget that he spent the rest of the morning doing this while I tried to get the baby to sleep:

I’ll probably think back on having all the kids together at the doctor for Lottie’s one month appointment and remember that Evelyn held her hand to help her be brave, while conveniently forgetting how often I had to yell at Alex to get out of the medical supply cabinet …

Or to stop trying to hack into the doctor’s computer system:

But while I may miss how cute and mini they will look in their airplane seats, I do think I can say with confidence that I will not miss changing blowout #8 in the airplane bathroom.

Wish me luck.

Some questions, I want answers to. If you looked at my Google search history, you might find things like “What kind of disorder does my three-year-old have if she loses her mind when her ducky humidifier “Duck duck” isn’t turned on for one night?” or “what kind of disorder does my son have if he can’t eat a cookie without screaming for 45 minutes afterwards because I deny him a second one?” or “What kind of disorder do I have if during craft time with my daughter I made a countdown to wine-o-clock?”

She made coffee-filter-watercolor-pipe-cleaner butterflies.

I made this:

Then Evelyn made it into a sticker chart for me.

Pinterest that.

If it were possible to include images in Google searches, you might find in my history “What kind of disorder does my daughter have if she makes this face every time I tell her to smile?”

Thanks to Faith Photography, by the way, who can somehow make even a sneak peek of Lottie’s newborn pictures featuring that face on Evelyn adorable.

But seriously. All I can hear when I look at that is Monica Gellar’s voice saying “Chandler! What is the matter with your face!?”

These are things I’d like to get to the bottom of. Though I do get nervous as I search for answers to these questions and and wait for “Cancer, cancer, alcoholism, cancer” to appear, respectively.

Then there are threads I don’t want to pull at. Like the fact, for example, that Evelyn woke up with an accent on Tuesday morning.

Monday morning she went to bed just fine. Tuesday she woke up mispronouncing vowels that she’s had mastered for months. I can’t tell if it sounds more like she’s channeling her inner Scarlett O’Hara, her inner lifelong New Yorker, or if she’s been watching too many Mark Wahlberg movies. Whatever it is, she sounds ridiculous.

What you’re hearing here is “I dropped the cap.” What it sounds like is “I draaaaped the cap.”

Also worth noting about this video is that her hair hasn’t been brushed in two days, her (mismatched) clothes are completely covered in stickers that I WILL forget to remove before washing, there is a crack in the lens on my phone that makes it look like there’s a sunbeam in every single photo I take, and there are about 12 layers of artwork on the fridge because I can’t bring myself to throw anything away but have no organized place to store it.

Pinterest that.

Another thing I’ve stopped looking for an answer to is my children’s eating habits.

I fell in love with Eric about an hour and a half into our first date. An hour and forty five minutes in, I almost got up and walked out when he said “You know, I’m not a “live to eat” kind of person, I’m more an “eat to live” kind of person.”

As it turns out, not only are my kids also not “live to eat” people, they may not even be “eat to live” people.

I’ve always abided by the whole “They eat what we eat” rule, and I’m not about to replace food they’re not eating with food I know they will eat (which this week is a list of exactly four things — Ice cubes, ice chips, shaved ice, and Graham Crackers.) I figure if they’re hungry, they’ll eat what’s in front of them. Eventually. Right?

Here you have Evelyn’s dinner. It’s also her lunch, but since she didn’t touch it at lunch, she had it again for dinner. There’s a chicken and cheese sandwich, two cooked carrots, two crunchy carrots, two cherry tomatoes (which last week she couldn’t get enough of) a little bit of BBQ chicken salad, and a string cheese.

Not a single bite of this was eaten. Not one. Not for lunch or for dinner, which means she hasn’t eaten anything in over 12 hours.

Tonight’s Google search reads “Is it child abuse if my kid’s been on strike for 12 hours and I still haven’t caved and made her Mac and Cheese?”

What may not be obvious about this picture is that she’s three boogers deep in a meal of snot. I’ve given up trying to stop her from picking her nose, because a) it’s just impossible and b) I keep hearing booger-eaters are healthy.

Also there’s a spot at the bottom right corner of her mouth that she just cannot stop licking and as a result has gotten so chapped that it is cracked and bleeding and will. not. go. away.

Anyone have any tips for that? Because I’m scared to Google it.

The only person in my household who doesn’t have me searching for answers these days is Lottie, and that’s only because I’ve been through this twice before and there’s no projectile vomit or stool consistency she can throw at me that I haven’t seen already.

Or, maybe it’s because by the time she finally gets my undivided attention, the other two are in bed and it’s finally wine-o-clock and I’m a little more relaxed about everything.

Tomorrow during craft time I’ll be making a countdown to the weekend and therefore to an extra set of hands around here.

Maybe I’ll finally clean some artwork off the fridge, maybe Evelyn’s hair will finally get brushed, maybe Evelyn’s accent will disappear, maybe Evelyn’s smile will normalize … maybe Evelyn will give me a day without something to worry about.

If not, there’s always wine.

On New Years morning I woke up to a really embarrassing notification from Pandora — something like “You’ve listened to 8,423 hours of Enya Radio in the last 8,760 hours, keep the streak going in 2018!”

I have Enya Pandora on from the time I wake up to the time I fall into bed, for exactly two reasons.

One, without constant music coming from my phone I would never, ever, EVER be able to find it. Two, piping spa music into my house is my last line of defense between sanity and insanity.

A week and a half into life with three kids, and I can already tell I’m going to need something a little stronger.

Lottie is easy. She sleeps all the time and when she’s not sleeping she’s just looking around like she can’t figure out how she landed here, with these kids and that dog and that constant new-age noise coming from Mom’s phone. (I’m completely aware that now that I’ve said out loud how good she is, she’ll flip a switch and turn terrible. Probably tonight, and probably between 11 pm and 3 am.)

Everyone in our life has been so wonderful and helpful. My parents took the two older kids for two days while we were in the hospital having Lottie. My in-laws came down the day she was born and cleaned our house top to bottom so I didn’t have to worry about that when we got home. There are friends and family bringing us the most delicious meals. Evelyn’s preschool director walked her to my car last week so I didn’t have to unload the other two kids in the sub-zero temperatures. Her speech teacher is coming to the car to get her so I don’t have to unload the other two and schlep them inside (yet). A friend came to stay with Lottie so I could grocery shop and pick Evelyn up from school by myself.

It seems the only people that don’t seem to care about making things any easier for me are my two older children.

In fact, the hardest part of this adjustment answers to the name Alexander and is available for immediate home exchange.

When we brought Alex home from the hospital Evelyn was 18 months old, and while she was certainly no angel, she was a delight compared to what my darling son has turned into in recent weeks.

Every time I nursed Alex as a baby, Evelyn knew that “Feeding time is Reading time.” I had similar expectations this time. In my head, I’d be nursing the baby and something like this would be unfolding quietly next to me:

Instead, three minutes into feeding Lottie this morning I heard the ice-maker at work in the kitchen and walked in on this scene:

I realized then and there that something’s going to have to change, and that something is probably going to be me.

I like to run a pretty tight ship around here. I’m big on schedules, boundaries, enforcing consequences, etc. It keeps the order, and order is the only way I can get from sunup to sundown without eating my young. I mean there’s a very fine line between myself and Captain VonTrapp. You know, with the whistles for each kid.

But it turns out I may have to learn to relax a little bit while we adjust to this new one.

Exhibit A — the kids current favorite toy:

In Evelyn’s hands you’ll see the stick for our sliding door. Alex likes to push it around like a vacuum, Evelyn likes to swing it around like a sword, and I’m stuck on the couch with a one-week-old attached to me and no free hands to take it away from them or put them into time out if (when) they refuse to relinquish it.

Exhibit B — the toy room:

When Evelyn was a baby, I’d clean the toy room at nap time so it was pristine when she’d wake up. With Alex, I took to cleaning it at the end of the day only, knowing how trashed it would get all over again in the afternoon. With Lottie, I’ve yet to clean it.

I’ve started dry-heaving when I walk past it, but I left the energy to clean it up back at the hospital.

Exhibit C — My appearance:

Today was my second day in a row in this shirt. It was 3:00 before I noticed these stains. I have no idea what they are or how long they’ve been there. If I had to guess, it’s drippings from the cool whip I’ve been eating straight from the tub — which, by the way, you can eat in its entirety for only about 6 Weight Watchers points. Hypothetically.

Exhibit D — the pantry.

I have a strict “no helping yourself to food from the pantry rule” that Alex broke yesterday when he casually strolled up to the couch with his hand in a box of Pop Tarts I didn’t know he could reach.

Next time I looked, he was in there getting a treat for Pippa …

… which, after letting her lick profusely, he took back from her and took a bite of himself.

Whatever, kid. You do you, and if you want to eat dog treats, go nuts. They’re probably better for you than Pop Tarts, anyway.

If you need me, I’ll be over here drinking all the wine. And listening to all the Enya.