A missed day and now a short one.

Cram it, Mommy.

Yup, I missed a day. And to add to my shortcomings, I'm going to keep this brief and easy and businesslike by reporting on some twinly stats.

The girls had their 18 month pediatrician appointment on Friday. This trip included a hepatitis innoculation shot thing. These shots tend to have random, unpredicatable side-effects on the kids. On Friday night, Lily woke up abruptly at 10:30 and stayed up for an hour. At 12:30, she woke up once more and stayed awake until 3. Her mood was chipper, she simply was not tired.

Here are some facts n' figures from the doctor's:

Lily:
- 25 pounds, 7 oz. (66th percentile)
- 32 1/4 inches long (again, 66th. So consistent)
- 48.4 cm head circumference (91th percentile. I've always had a huge head)

Abby:
- 17 pounds 6 ox (.03rd percentile. point zero three, in case that didn't compute for you)
- 27 3/4 inches long (.12nd % Getting better.)
- 45.8 cm head (28th percentile. Yay head size!)

That's the long and short and heavy and light.

Day one hundred and eighty eight.

Mommy and Abs.

Jen took this shot, and I kinda like it, but I look 49 years old.

I almost blinded myself getting this shot, when a bit of wind moved the flower as I was looking through the viewfinder.

It would be a much more dramatic picture if it was just the one sunflower without the stuff in the foreground, but that would have required an assistant. Oh well.

Play dates are fun, until the drive home

I usually bring Abby up for nap-time and then go back downstairs to get Lily. Every day, without fail, Abby stands up and waits for Lily to arrive. Then she smiles and giggles. It melts my heart every day, without fail.

I brought the girls to Maple Grove today for a play date with my friends Jodi and Jen and their kids. The girls had lots of fun going through someone else's stuff and messing up someone else's house (thanks Jodi). And I had lots of fun talking to adults--that's the hardest part about staying at home with the kids, I miss conversations with grownups. Unfortunately, by the time Dave gets home each night, I'm too wiped out to do much talking. I can't really complain though, I only have a couple weeks left at home with the kids--it's gone by so fast.

So we had a good morning, followed by a tough afternoon (for me at least). The kids fell asleep on the way home. I had anticipated this would happen (it being nap-time and all), but I knew that they would sleep for about 25-30 minutes only--leaving me plenty of opportunity to put them back down right when we got home. However, traffic was frustrating beyond belief and it took an hour to get home. I pulled up and saw two sleeping kids. I put the car in park and saw two awake kids. Drats!

As any desperate mother would do, I attempted to put them back down. This proved to be a bad idea. Not able to stand the crying for more than two minutes, I got them back up and fed them. It is at this point that I need to extend an apology to my mother. She had the unfortunate luck of calling me at this moment, and being tired and hungry, I was quite cranky. Sorry mom, I ate something and was fine just ten minutes later.

So the kids had a very short nap today and their mother got no break. Both of these factors showed when poor daddy got home from work. By 6:30, the girls were prone to breaking down at the slightest bit of perceived unfairness or injustice. And yet, they were still adorably cute and funny. How do they do that? I couldn't wait for them to go to bed all day, and now that I'm thinking back to the day, I miss them and want to wake them up. I'm going to fight that urge, for the sake of my sanity tomorrow.

Day one hundred and eighty six.

Lily had to touch everything at Jodi's house.

This is the only shot I could get of all five kids at the same time (Makayla, Gavin (with some support from his mommy), Lily, Abby, and Alli). Notice that not a one of them is looking at the camera--I don't think I have a future as a professional photographer).

This tornado loves you.

Punk.

Chump.

Interesting. Not every day a tornado comes 6 blocks from your house.

I didn't quite realize how close it'd come until I was driving home, heard Mary Lucia was talking about it, and heard her say that 42nd and Portland was a badly hit spot. What's funny is that I specifically went home on Cedar so I could see what I could see. I ambled over to Chicago on 44th, eager to witness something interesting, and there wasn't a leaf out of place. I headed north, still nothing. Finally at 38th St. there was a cop directing traffic. "Finally!" I exhaled. "Some carnage."

That was a bit of a letdown too, though. I looked west on 38th, and it certainly looked like complete bedlam from a traffic perspective, and I saw lots of fire trucks and a couple trees knocked down, but nothing Michael Bay would get out of bed for. The rest of the drive, not a creature was stirring. So then I look at the photos on the Star Tribune website to find that most of the worst damage took place at 36th and 5th Ave/Portland. How crazy is that? It's crazy. Our address is 3616 11th Ave, in case that helps deepen the utter craziness of it all.

Despite the proximity of this crazy bit of nature, our neighbor's staghorn sumacs, which bend to the ground when I so much as walk past them, did not even bat a staghorny eyelash.

Even crazier still (I know! If the craziness of this is too much, just close your browser now, take a deep breath, and watch some CSI Miami reruns) is that Jen was indeed at home with the kids. Luckily, the government's tornado sirens worked as promised, belting out 100+ decibels of pure warning over the wet rooftops. These life-saving klaxons went lost on Jen, who, due to an unfortunate trick of timing, figured they were just the test sirens since it was around 1 pm on a Wednesday. So, the family went about its merry day while a twister tore through the city less than 2000 yards away. On the plus side: their nap went uninterrupted.

Maybe they could set them up to play "La Cucaracha" just on Wednesdays, to clear up the confusion.

In Jen's defense, word has it that my brother made the very same assumption today.

On a slightly different note: in the past month, we've had roughly 4 thunderstorms that bore some teeth-rattling thunderousness. Of these, 4 happened after the girls' bedtime. Of these, 0 managed to wake them up. I have no idea how they do it, but they've slept like trolls through every storm. And since we haven't had a good daytime thunderstorm yet, the girls still have not seen lightning nor heard thunder. You know what that is?? You know....it's crazy. Crazy!!

Day one hundred and eighty five.

ps. these are all old pictures, sorry if they're repeats.

Family.

A little heart to heart.

The mystery of a good night.

Abby doing her impersonation of the little girl at the end of "Poltergeist". Too obscure a reference?

Lily the easily distracted faith healer.

I did a little stretch of the night with the kids a la mode (no Jen). The best moment came at the end, when Lily was becoming increasingly more whiny and insufferable. She kept moping around, whimpering forlornly. Finally I pulled her into my lap and held her, and she latched her legs around my chest and buried her head in my neck and started to doze.

The worst moment came when the girls kept calling me "Mommy" during dinner.

By that, you can easily ascertain that tonight was a better night than last by an enormous margin.

Now to sit and figure out exactly what variable caused it. More milk? More sleep? Less bee-bo? We'll never know.

Day one hundred and eighty four.

Checking out the hood. Playing with some corn.

I'm not sure if she has an acorn in her right cheek or what.

Anger management - Part 1 in a 1,302 part series.

Day one hundred and eighty three.

It's been one half a year, give or take a couple days that I might have miscounted. It's the girlses' half birthday (or it was on Saturday...I'm not good with calendars). As for the blog, we're halfway. Halftime. Top of the arc. 1/2. The return trip. One more to go. Cresting the hill. Gleaming the cube. Starching the shirts.

Considering the special occasion du jour, I'd love to spend the night's post gushing boorishly on the fine daughters that we've raised these past six months. Trust me...I'd love nothing more.

Tonight's slice of life didn't quite roll out like that. After bath time, I brought the kids downstairs for some light entertainment while Jen did some drawer reorganizing in their room. Here's a rough breakdown of those 45 minutes:

- Abby cried almost non-stop. She's been doing this whine/cry thing for a month or so now, and it drives us up the wall. We have no plausible hypothesis on what is causing it, which drives us to fear that most default of fears: that it's possibly mental and not physical.
- While trying to soothe Abby, Lily managed to pull an entire tub of cut up watermelon onto the rug.
- Lily proceeded to snatch up a couple pieces of said watermelon and cram them in a disastrously inaccurate way into her face. Most of it ended up in her hair, ears, shirt, toes, etc. Remember this happened during that uber-clean stretch of post-bath, pre-bed time. I love that "There's a good bath wasted" feeling.
- Abby continued crying.
- We brushed our teeth. Lily did okay, but Abby was bawling because she wanted both toothbrushes and I wouldn't let her. She did get happy when she brushed my teeth, but this morphed quickly into a hideous exercise in "stab Daddy in the gums" for both of them. Yay.!!....OW!..mother of god, that hurts.....
- Lily closed the front door twice. Our front door is a quality piece and weighs just this side of 12 tons. Lily is strong enough to get it seriously moving and slam it pretty hard. If Abby or any part of Abby or even a hint of dog or cat are loitering about the threshold at this inopportune moment, there will be a seriously rushed visit to the doctor or veterinarian, as appropriate. I'm obviously more worried about Abby, but only because the animals are smart enough and fast enough to be scarce. They tend to keep a wide berth of Lily in general these days...clever housepets.
- I have to continue about the door thing, because it is really bad, and I worry to the core (the kind of worry that breeds incessant visualizations of "the worst") that Lily will close that thing on Abby. It would crush her little ribs. I need to find a way to neutralize the door, but in the meantime I've been giving Lily some ineffectual timeouts and telling her both gently and firmly that the door is not to be touched. I'm wasting my breath, and when she did it tonight, I was furious. Furious enough to know not to even react.
- Abby finally managed to get both toothbrushes. I saw them both in her hands and mouth, about 4 minutes after I witnessed Lily chuck hers into a particularly pet-hair-ridden corner of the living room. Meh.
- I tried to keep them occupied with a quick bit of crayons and paper. Simple. They hated every damn minute of it. Squirmed. Whined. Thrashed. Ate the crayon. Disastrous.
- During a moment of either preoccupation or poor parenting (I'll let you guess which!), Lily managed to move her chair to the tall table on which we store snacks. She got up on the chair, tiptoed herself to where she could just barely reach her grubby digits in the bin, and pulled out a box of teddy grahams. I found her a few minutes later, sitting on the floor, elbow deep in the box, munching away without a worry.
- I took the box away and calmly told her that this just would not do. She reacted exactly as you'd expect. It got pretty ugly for a long bit.
- Since they were obviously hungry (committing grand larceny to get some crackers and all), I fed them a lot. Still hungry, I cut up a banana. Abby devoured it, but whined the whole time since I kept the plate well out of her grubby little reach (again, this is post-bath time).
- Jen came back down right around then. I think I blacked out for a while.

These kids. They drive me nuts. And of course, I miss them right now...damn them!

6 more months of blog!

Grrr....

Aaaaaaacchhht.

Lily can yell like a champ.

Invertedness highlights her hair.

We got a lot of very nice messages for our announcement yesterday, so a big thanks to all of you. A few people did write to postulate that we may be on the south side of sanity. To those people, I admit that it does look like we're quite mad. In truth, our plan all along - from our tender first meeting in '95 - was to have as many kids as possible at the worst possible financial time. This was a great first date discussion. We'd also resolved around that time to buy our first house 39 seconds before the housing bubble burst. 2 for 2.

I'd like to also take the time to say thanks for all the responses people wrote regarding the Abby post from a few days ago. It was truly a hard thing to write, but satisfying. I'm not sure in what capacity I'll continue to write specifically about her condition, because dammit I just don't feel like it sometimes, so if you are curious or want to ask anything about her, don't be shy, ask away.

The weekend went. Stuff happened. I spent most of the time outside trying to bend the forces of nature to do my bidding. I managed to learn something Saturday: If you let a corner of your yard go feral, it turns gross. You'd think it would revert to some natural midwestern prairie-type patch, weed-infested but natural seeming. In fact, it turns into something disgusting and kinda putrid. I can't describe really how or why a bunch of weeds are gross, but the were. Most of them were taller than I am (and I'm 6' 10"), there were lots of flies and hornets, and it was miserable.

Today my brother donated his entire day to helping move the deck project along. Progress was made, which felt nice. The benches are 96% done; please stop by anytime and have a sit if the mood strikes you.

Kids were good. We took them to Nokomis today to swim for what turned out to be the chilliest hour of the last 2 weeks. Remember: we are pros at terrible timing. Despite some chattering baby teeth, they had a good time. Lily was not fond of leaving, and kinda screamed at us the whole way home. It wasn't crying, it was something much more adult and nefarious. She just belted forth in pure unhappiness. An ugly portent of future hysterics. On the plus, those kids are little waterbugs. By that I mean they love the water; they don't walk across the water's surface using surface tension....that would be silly. But awesome.

This post might be longer, if it weren't for the fact that this laptop is heating my crotch to a phenomenally warm temperature. Perfect reason to stop.

Day one hundred and eighty two.

How happy are we that another kid is coming? Yaaaaaay!

In the wild, most babies pick the bugs off their mother's heads.

All attitude.