There is an essay I’ve been trying to write; I really should have finished it yesterday. I know what I want to say, but I can’t quite make the words happen. Because, you know, you don’t really think in language. You only THINK you do. (Yes, that’s clearly the reason! Or something.)

I’m very efficient about finding other Urgent Things To Do when I have something I don’t quite want to start: I’ve had dinner made early every night this week, I made a hot lunch yesterday, I’ve kept on top of the laundry and the dishes, I’ve worked on some other projects that didn’t really need my attention.

I’ve made several well-planned cups of tea (What time do I want to drink it? How strong do I want it to be? When, then, shall I begin brewing, taking into account the temperature at which I want to drink? How much honey? Shall I add the honey when the tea is hot and still brewing, or later, when it’s cooled?). Trader Joe’s white pomegranate tea is my new favorite, by the way; I had replaced my Tazo Envy with Stash green/white fusion (because Stash = waaay cheaper than Tazo, and the green-white combo is rather nice), but the pomegranate is so sweet and purple! And antioxidant-y, too, of course, though not especially caffeinated.

Wait, what was I talking about?… Oh yes, how I avoid doing what I need to do. Not tea. Right.

Usually it’s the house that waits while the projects get done. Apparently, if we want some semblance of a normally functioning household, I need more challenging projects to avoid. Feel free to recommend some. I’ve got floors that could use sweeping.

Dane brought home a watermelon the size of a small pony this weekend. Because what’s more fun than two kids and a baby? Two kids, a table, and a kitchen floor all coated in a sticky film of watermelon juice, that’s what. The baby stayed clean and dry. Oddly.

I have half a watermelon left in the fridge, but as the thing is still bigger than three-year-old Owen, I’m a little wary of taking a butcher knife to it. And Dane’s at work. I might remember to have him chop it all up when he gets home, but then again, I might not.

Twice we had Watermelon-Eating Time over the weekend. And twice we discovered Owen washing out his clothes in the bathroom sink after eating the melon. The second time, Dane walked in to find water sloshed from the sink up to the mirror and across the floor to the opposite wall, and felt this was a life-lesson sort of moment.

“Owen,” he said, “look at this water on the floor.”

I could hear the smile on Owen’s face. “It was just an ax-dee-dent, Daddy,” he explained in a we-can-fix-it kind of voice.

“Right. I see that,” Dane agreed, “But if we don’t wash our clothes in the bathroom sink, we won’t make this mess.”

Owen, still chipper: “Ax-dee-dents happen, Dad.” (Can you guess what I say eighty times a day?)

“Well, yes, they do, but we could prevent the accident if we—”

“We can fix it!” Owen proclaimed, grabbing a hand towel, which would have been slightly more helpful if it wasn’t already sopping.

“Yes, let’s fix it. And next time—”

“It was just an ax-dee-dent, Daddy. Ax-dee-dents happen. No big deal.”

We’ve had quite a number of ax-dee-dents around here lately. Like yesterday, when Abigail came running to show me the blood dripping down her chin.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Accidentally I bit Owen’s shirt,” she began. You what?

“Okay…”

“And then he ran away and I forgot to let go with my teeth and now my loose tooth is WAY looser and it’s BLEEEEEEEDING!”

“I can see that…” I said feebly. That was followed, after washing the blood away, with a little discussion about… not eating other people’s belongings? Not biting your brother’s shirt? Keeping your teeth to yourself? That last one seems most like a rule, I guess. It can be hard to determine how specific to be during these spontaneously-occurring Teachable Moments.

So, by way of public service announcement: next time your kid accidentally bites an inanimate object until her gums bleed, clean her up and gently remind her that We Keep Our Teeth To Ourselves. I have no rule for the water all over the bathroom thing. Sorry.

My parents have been out of town for the last week. They’re back now, don’t bother trying to track down their address to steal their priceless… um… baby toys and 13” TV set.

We’ve been stopping by to check on their cat, a weird animal that lives under their bed and NEVER comes out. I don’t think it ate the whole time they were gone. But it’s still alive—or at least it was yesterday, when we took the kids over to play.

And by “play,” I mean “watch one of the gazillion TiVo’d PBS shows on my parents’ television while Dane and I enjoy a rare 22 minutes of uninterrupted quiet.” We did try to interest them in the sandbox first, but no dice. The giant yellow canary proved unavoidable.

As I scrolled through the recorded programs (Sesame Street-Sesame Street-Sesame Street-Sesame Street-Sesame Street-Sesame Street), I discovered a hidden gem waaaaaaay at the end of the list: Reading Rainbow. I didn’t even know our PBS station was broadcasting Reading Rainbow. I knew it existed, I just didn’t know we had access to it; our local station seems to be all about the cartoons these days.

“Ooh, Abigail,” I said, in my best used-car-salesman voice, “Guess what I found!”

“What?” she asked, suspiciously.

“It’s a show Mommy and Daddy used to watch when we were little! We used to love this one! Both of us did!” Which may be sad, but is completely true. We were both reader kids in the 80’s.

“Okay,” she said slowly, “I’ll give it a try.”

I hit play, and there he was: Levar Burton. A few years older than I remembered, and talking about his dead grandmother. Wait, what? “And after she died, we…” he continued. Um.. um… He introduced the book of the day: Badger’s Parting Gifts. About Badger. Who is old, and knows he must die. Uh…

Did I just talk my kid into watching a show about death? Did I just convince her that her father and I loved to watch the show about death all through our childhoods? Is she going to understand that it’s a show about READING, or is the death aspect going to stick? Is there any way out of this now?

I do a quick calculation and determine that, no, there really isn’t; this is the only Reading Rainbow on the TiVo, I built it up too much, and while I would have preferred to start her off with a Reading Rainbow about nature or mechanics or music or anything not quite so weighty, I really don’t have a problem with her watching a twenty minute segment on death.

“I bet she loves it,” Dane whispered when I told him what she was watching.

Sure enough, 22 minutes later: “Mom! Dad! I watched Reading Rainbow! It was so exciting. It was about DEAD PEOPLE!”

She spent the rest of the day asking about the (very few) people she knows who have died. And she spent all of today creating a lovely little book called “The Book About People Who Are Dead.” So far it contains those words and a decorated cover.

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to ask my mom to record a few more episodes for us.

Read other answers to the Lovely Mrs. Davis’ query: “What television, music, movie, or book from your childhood are you excited about sharing with your own children?”

ME: (recovering from fit of laughter and clutching side of head, where red welt may or may not have been appearing) I’m too tired to write about that tonight, but I think I’ll get to it tomorrow.

HIM: Oh good, I’ll get a good night’s sleep before being arrested.

ME: You won’t get arrested.

HIM: I might.

ME: You didn’t do anything illegal.

HIM: Still.

ME: But it was funny! I would write it funny.

HIM: (raises one eyebrow)

ME: I could make it sound funny.

HIM: (again with the eyebrow thing)

ME: Oh, all right. I won’t blog about it.

So I can’t tell you about the minor injury I may or may not have sustained after the children went to bed last night.

There may or may not have been irresponsible use of cloth-covered bendy sticks that snap together in an ‘x’ over a blanket to make a baby gym. It is possible, though I cannot confirm, that when one or more adults in this household saw the sticks, unsnapped and flattened out, the obvious and immediate thought that sprang unbidden into the mind(s) of said adult(s) was, “Fencing!”

What happened after that, if any of this happened at all, explains why we have a “no sticks in the house” rule. Which the children all follow.

Abigail tried out a new game this week, and thoughtfully invited Owen to join in (read: strong-armed the little guy into following along).

It was called The Kitty Being Born Game, and consisted of the children (being kittens) hiding behind or beneath something (which they would pretend was the mama cat’s tummy), and eventually popping out and proclaiming themselves born. The hiding part had to last a verrrrrrry long time of course, because it takes a long time to grow a baby cat. And they had to be verrrrrrry quiet of course, because you can’t hear a baby kitten before it’s born.

Every once in a while I would check on them: “Guys? You still doing okay?”

They would whisper, “Mom! We can’t talk right now! We aren’t born yet! Shhh!”

And then I would Shhh, and also leave them alone a while longer.

It turns out that I like this game.

The internet ate my blog (Monday night? Sunday night? I think it was Monday). I hesitate to say “blogger ate my blog,” because blogger still hosts my blog, you know, and I wouldn’t want it to get eaten again on purpose.

But here’s what happened: I ran a link checker, found a broken link, and went in to fix it.

I find the link, I fix the link. Fabulous. I hit ‘save changes.’ Nothing happens. ‘Save changes.’ Nothing. ‘SAVE CHANGES.’ At this point I’m clicking rather savagely, and still nothing happens, and the little progress bar still says ‘Done!’ all cheerful-like. Whatever. I close the window and figure I’ll try again later. Oh, will I ever!

A few hours later I try to open the blog (I forget why; it’s kind of funny that I did, as usually I have no reason to look at my own blog except to make sure a post loaded properly). Ugly html splashed across the screen. Huh?

Reload.

More of the same.

No formatting, no posts, no pictures, no words. Okay, not so good. Breathe. I’m so techno-savvy that I’ll be able to figure this out in no time. (NO I’M NOT I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING HERE WE’RE LUCKY EVERY TIME MY WORDS APPEAR ON THE SCREEN WHAT AM I GOING TO DO I DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIX ANYTHING WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!)

I check out my template, and there’s nothing there. There are, like, six lines of code. None of which I am familiar with, mind you, but I know there used to be more than that. This can’t be right—at no time did I highlight most of my code then maybe-or-maybe-not hit ‘delete.’ That just never happened. I attempted to change ONE LINK and that didn’t even work. Maybe if I reload the blog again… Still no. Okay. Hmm.

And then I entered the seven stages of blog grief. Actually I’m not sure what the stages of grief are, and if I was going to grieve a blog, it would have to be one I stopped READING, not just one I’d misplaced. So I decided to condense my blog-grieving into just three stages.

First, denial: Clearly I did nothing to cause this problem; perhaps the individual responsible plans to come back and fix it sometime soon. So maybe if I just leave it alone a while… I’ll go eat dinner. Still screwy? Huh. Surely after I put the kids to bed all will be right with the world. No? Okay, I’ll take a shower. WHAT THE HECK IT’S NOT BETTER WHAT AM I GOING TO DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?

At this point, fear has replaced denial (and though denial didn’t help the blog much, it did get me fed and showered before midnight—always exciting). The blog is gone; how do I replace the blog? How, how, how? I understand that no one is lamenting the loss of my (six) brilliant words (ever), but I’m sort of enjoying the whole blogging thing and I WANT MY BLOG BACK. Please.

Can I… What if I… What do I… and suddenly fear gives way to action (which I don’t think is a real stage, but it’s better than acceptance of blog loss). Though really the slim tendrils of fear refused to release their grip on my heart until the adventure was entirely over—pathetic but true.

Once I realized that the blog fairy wasn’t coming to my aid after all, it was just a matter of reloading the blog template (but I’ll lose all my custom formatting! Wahhh! Wait, what custom formatting? It’s totally standard. I don’t even have a custom header. Nothing. Oh, alright, reload template). And then replacing the very few non-custom bits.

And, voila! Blog, healed and raised from the netherworlds of blogdom.

So what did we learn? We should keep a copy of our template somewhere far, far away from blogger. I dutifully saved the code elsewhere and breathed a sigh of relief. And opened the blog one more time to make sure it was still there (it was. Never was I happier to see fiesta pictures than at that moment).

And then I made some changes and didn’t save a copy. But at least I’ll know what to do next time the internet eats my blog. (Mmm, regurgitated blog. Disgusting.)

So we had a party over the weekend. I think I mentioned that. It wasn’t at our house, because I’m too lazy to clean before or after a party we have no backyard to speak of. I love throwing the kids’ birthday party every year. Wait, that should read: I love that I only have to throw the kids a birthday party once a year. Lucky for us, they were born in the same month, so we can pull that off. Of course, now there’s Audrey, born exactly six months apart from the others; either we’ll have to celebrate pitiful half birthdays for her, or I’ll have to tough it out and throw multiple birthday parties. Eh, I’ve got six months to come up with a plan.

This year’s party was a ¡fiesta! There were birthday cactus (cacti?)! (What? It is TOTALLY normal to give cactus as party favors. For small children. Oh, come on, it went with the theme.)

There were cupcakes. Yes, cocktail umbrellas are fiesta-ish. Okay, no, they have nothing to do with fiestas, my kids just like them.

If you think the cupcakes are fabulous: Thank you! I made them myself!

If you’re not so much a fan of the cupcakes: I baked them in the middle of the night. What did you expect, piped-on sombreros?

Here’s Owen in motion. Notice that he’s, ahem, not on the ground.

We had a piñata!

And I was such a thoughtful hostess—I kept a basket of spare piñata filler in case some poor kid got trampled and ended up with nothing except footprints on the back of his shirt.

But they all sat down and calmly filled their party bags with ONE THING AT A TIME. There was no grabbing. There was no shoving. There was no competition of any sort (who ARE these kids?!). After a while I set the basket of extra treats down near them and they thoughtfully perused its contents, each choosing an appropriate number of goodies.

Abigail’s bag was filled with pencils, erasers, stickers, maracas and bubbles.

Owen’s bag held a smattering of confetti.

And it’s over now! We suffered from birthday hangover all day today, and I expect we’ll wake up bright and chipper tomorrow morning! Well, bright and early, anyhow.

Before I begin, I thought you’d like to know that MS Word is urging me to change my “mommyblogger” (obviously a typo!) to “mommy logger” (so clearly an actual phrase! That anyone has used before! EVER!). How very helpful.

Yesterday, Dane suggested that I need to make a more concerted effort to tell all the real-life people we know about the blog (yes, this one). “You’re writing about our kids,” he said. “People like our kids.” I was a teensy bit horrified.

Because in my mind, the blog is about me (really in my mind everything is about me, but that’s a topic for some other day). Certainly the kids figure in. That tends to happen, especially when they’re little. Clearly the blog is public, being on the internet and all, and I’m cool with anyone who wants to read, reading.

But it feels a little silly to track down people who like to hang with our kids just to say, “Hey! Melissa blogs!” when I mean to be writing about mothering, not about the kids’ experience of being mothered. (Obviously if you’re still reading at this point, you probably do like me just fine. But if you’re holding out in hope of more about the kids, email me. I’ll get you set up with access to my flickr account instead. All kids, all the time! No pesky me to get in the way!)

When I explained all this, Dane just looked at me like I was nuts. Which I probably am. But in addition to being nuts, I thought I was pointing out a valid distinction.

Then the always-insightful Liz at Mom-101 posted her thoughts on “mommybloggings”—that is, on there being more than one type of mommyblogger. And my muddled thoughts were momentarily cleared.

Obviously there are as many ways to blog as a mother as there are ways to be a mother. Sure, okay. But Liz identifies two categories of mother-bloggers that sum up quite a bit of what’s out there: some are writers who also have kids and blogs (and tend to not so much love the ‘mommyblogger’ label), while others use blogs for community-building (and tend to embrace mommyblogdom).

Right. That all sounds good. But which kind of blog am I writing, really?

I would love to claim a space in the writerly group (and I think that’s what I was trying to explain to Dane with my horrified expression), but I don’t think I’m quite there yet. It’s not like everything is all diapers and breasts and do NOT eat your sister! around here. (Well, it is around HERE, where I live, but not around here, where I write.) Though there is a lot about laundry. And there are kid anecdotes. And I really do want to connect with people.

There’s hardly ever anything resembling theme, unless in some alternate universe “What I Did Today” qualifies as theme. Often when I have something to SAY, I sit down to write and look up again thousands of words later and realize, whoops! Not so much a blog post there! That’s probably meant to be an essay! Or a book chapter, for goodness sake (concision never was my strong suit). Instead of paring down, I just write something else; and so it is that posts actually appearing on the blog tend to be a bit lighter.

So what AM I doing here? Am I a mommyblogger, in the community- and family-oriented sense of the word? Or am I a mother who blogs? Maybe what I am isn’t quite yet all that I want to be. Maybe I’m willing to be the former, but am also striving to be the latter. Maybe it doesn’t matter much; clearly there is room for a plethora of voices falling along the continuum of mommybloggings, and there seem to be readers willing to tolerate my attempts along the way.

About those things, I am thankful. And not a bit horrified.

We are just home from Owen and Abigail’s birthday party. I feel like I got run over by a smallish Mack truck. Possibly that is related to the fact that I was up all night baking eight thousand cupcakes (or two dozen. It’s hard work, people. Hard).

I know writing odes to one’s children on their birthdays is really the Thing To Do these days, but let me tell you, we are so totally rockin’ the photo essay instead (and by “photo essay” I do mean “random jumble of pictures”).

At least we will if anyone emails me pictures of the party.

I forgot to bring a camera.

Today was one of those days when I looked at the clock and thought, All right! It’s four o’clock! Just… four more hours until Dane gets home! And then kind of panicked because there were still four more hours until Dane gets home, and I didn’t really have a dinner plan, and the big kids need to get out and run but the baby needs a nap, and, and, and… yikes. ‘Those days,’ in case you are wondering, are also known as ‘Wednesdays.’ And sometimes ‘Thursdays’ or ‘Fridays.’ Well, and occasionally ‘Mondays’ or ‘Tuesdays.’ But always Wednesdays.

At that point, even knowing I would not see another adult for the next four hours, I went and reapplied my makeup. Seriously. Dane noticed me doing the same thing—putting on makeup late in the afternoon—on a recent Saturday and, after confirming that I was in fact reapplying my makeup, and that we were neither about to leave the house nor expecting guests, asked, “WHO are you doing THAT for?”

Please tell me you know the answer.

ME! I’m doing it for me, of course. Because I’m not that big a fan of shiny cheekbones and purplish under-eye circles. I don’t need to be reminded every time I walk past a mirror that I look like a weird shiny vampire. And while 94 hours in a row of sleep might be a better fix, makeup’s quicker and more feasible. I’ve heard that some mothers consider exhaustion to be a badge of honor. Sort of a “See how I sacrifice even my own health for my children!” deal. But me? I think it just kind of sucks.