I understand how there is so much clutter in my house—laundry breeds when you’re not looking, as do books and stray papers—but I do not know how we accumulate so much dust.

I could dust every day, and there would still be a fresh layer of visible dust on the furniture every morning. I mean, I don’t—but I could. It’s not even especially crevice-covered furniture. Shelves, Ikea cabinets, picture frames. That sort of thing.

Is the problem that there are a lot of us living in a relatively small space? Are we unusually sheddy dusty people? Or is the house itself crumbling to dust at an extraordinary pace? Are there dust-prevention methods I’m not aware of? Anything?

Mondays get away from me. Often. Like pretty much every single week.

Today I meant to wash a heck of a lot of laundry (did it), email my sister (didn’t), and… I forget what else was on my mental to-do list, so I probably didn’t do whatever it was.

I did, however, realize that I have never, not once ever, checked my @makingthingsup replies at twitter—which means if you’ve ever asked me a question over there, I wasn’t ignoring you, I’m just an idiot. Basically. From now on, I shall check replies obsessively, I promise.

I also made cinnamon rolls, which was definitely not on my to-do list, but they’re so cinnamon-sugary and the sky was so grey all day that it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. Notice how I use the run-on sentence there to distract from my guilt regarding the sugar food. Ahem.

And now I think I will stop trying to remember what else I was maybe supposed to do today and instead eat the cinnamon rolls. They’re best when they’re warm—right?—so really, it would be a waste to let them cool.

Audrey—who is three—spent a good ten minutes this afternoon teaching Sadie—who is about eighteen months old—the American Sign Language sign for no. Because being able to simultaneously say the word and shake her head was not enough to get across the essential message of toddlerhood. I guess.

So far I’ve been told no shoes, no play outside, and no milk. They find themselves to be quite hilarious. I might find them to be more hilarious if they weren’t refusing things they actually want. Or maybe that is the funny part.

Toddlers are strange creatures.

Do you know what happened at my house today? Eh, nothing. Reading and writing and playing in the backyard (until we noticed that the neighbor’s cat had pooped all over the grass, AGAIN) and watching the birds through the window (because they apparently do not care about the cat poop) and making felted wool beads and eating dinner and letting the kids all wear their goggles in the shower. That’s about it. Also one of the doors fell off the television cabinet, so now I have a view of half the television screen at all times, and I realized—unrelated to the television—that we have approximately equal amounts of clean laundry waiting to be put away, and dirty laundry waiting to be washed. We have a lot of both.

And now you’re all caught up on my day. Illuminating, no?

What, no? Okay, how about this: how about instead of me continuing to yammer on, I point you in the direction of a new (fictional!) story at Literary Mama, written by my friend Diana. Yay Diana! (It’s short, you have time to click over and read it. Did you? What did you think?)

Do you guys read more fiction, or nonfiction? I tend to read a lot of motherhood-related nonfiction (not so much parenting books, but memoir—Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, for example, or Catherine Newman’s Waiting for Birdy). I read less fiction, and my fiction reading tends to be less motherhood-focused. Anybody else? What do you read, when you find the time?

So. Today is day three of the first heat wave of the season. And we know how whiny I am about the heat. (93 degrees on the coast yesterday! Ridiculous! Who authorized this weather?) Today the high is only supposed to be 83 deg F, so perhaps I will feel less like I am melting into a puddle of goo by the middle of the afternoon. We shall see.

In more exciting news, we have a pair of birds at our backyard birdfeeder! House finches. Not the single most noteworthy bird variety, I know—it’s not like we’re attracting wild parrots or anything—but they are cheery, what with the red belly and the tweeting. (That would be actual tweeting, not Tweeting.) And they poop very little in the yard. Which is a plus.

So far we’ve only got the one pair, and they’re hardly eating anything, but maybe they’ll tell all their birdy friends and we’ll end up with a little bird party in our backyard. Maybe. The kids are pretty stoked to have any birds at all. What about you—are you guys bird people? Or do you have some other kind of backyard visitors—squirrels? lizards? bunnies? the occasional giraffe? Do tell.

We finally got wireless internet… um… yesterday. Not years ago like the rest of the world. Whatever. No one ever accused us of being cutting edge.

“If your friends bring their laptops when they come over, just have them do this and this and—they’re set!” said Dane.

“What do you think my friends and I do when they come over?” said I.

“I don’t know,” said Dane, “but if you made coffee and had free wifi, I bet they’d come over more often.”

Me: “… ?”

So far the whole wireless thing hasn’t impacted my social life any, but I did check my email from the kitchen counter while making breakfast this morning.

And now I’m trying to convince myself that typing with the laptop literally on my lap is really really fun and useful. Mostly I think I’m more productive when sitting at a desk.

I may officially be an old stick in the mud.

That Easter service? The one that involved witnessing the sun rising over hills of flowers? With four underslept children and two equally tired parents? Yeah, we did that.

So here’s how it went down. I think it was Wednesday morning that I started thinking about how we could make the whole sunrise service thing work. And then Wednesday night my body decided that health was for wimps, and I developed a horrible case of mastitis. Seriously, mastitis. The last time that happened, Abigail was two weeks old. Eight and a half years ago. Why now, why?

There was fever. There was pain. There was much sleeping through the day while Dane hung out with the kids instead of going to work. On the whole, not an experience I would recommend, though the part about Dane being home from work might have been nice if I had been awake and not in agony.

By Saturday I was mostly better-ish, and we decided we’d never know how a six a.m. Easter celebration would work unless we tried it, so we laid out layer upon layer of clothes, baked muffins to eat in the car on the way, and went to bed early.

Wait, no. The kids went to bed early (except for Sadie, who is squarely in the throes of a sleep regression). Dane and I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning in order to better prepare for getting up in the wee hours of the morning. Packing a diaper bag, baking the muffins, that sort of thing. I got about four hours of sleep. Dane got less.

In the morning we adults threw on our clothes and dressed Sadie in her sleep, then woke everyone else up with exactly enough time for them to pull on their clothes, go to the bathroom, and strap into their car seats. (Um, Sadie woke up too, but she didn’t have to do the getting dressed-going to the bathroom routine. She did have to get strapped into her car seat.)

The service was great: lots of singing, an attractively placed sunrise, a sermon of hope. Should you ever think of doing such a thing with your own children, you should be sure to make your boy child bring his hat and scarf, or at least make him wear yours when his ears start to freeze. (At the beginning, the pastor joked that people visiting from out of town should let us native Californians sit closest to the space heaters, as we are wimpy about the cold. It was something like 50 degrees out.)

Audrey and Sadie sat quietly for maybe the first three-quarters of the sermon, then ran around behind the rows of chairs for the last few minutes. And then we came home and peeled off our outer layers and went back to bed for another three hours. Oh yes we did.

The kids aren’t quite caught up on sleep yet, I’m nowhere near caught up on sleep yet, and Dane and I are eating jelly bellys for dinner. All in all, an interesting adventure. No one melted down, ran away, turned blue from cold, screamed or in any other way made inappropriate noise at any unfortunate moment. And really, that is more than I have any right to hope for, even on a plain old regular day.

Here’s hoping your holiday was abundantly joyful, if perhaps a little less early-starting.

Anyone have tips on bringing kids to an Easter sunrise service? We’ve never done that before, but we’re considering it this year. We don’t usually get going before eight o’clock in the morning around here, and we would have to be at “church” (or actually at a public place about twenty minutes away from our house, but let’s call it church to keep things simple) at something like 6:30am. It will be cold. It will be outdoors. There will be hundreds of people attending.

For the older kids, this is kind of an adventure (though it will require them to get up two hours early and miraculously not be cranky). For the younger two, I’m thinking it will mostly be confusing (and will require them to wake up two hours early and then maybe take a nap right after).

Thoughts? Should I have the kids sleep in their clothes? Can I scoop oatmeal into mugs the night before, then heat them up and bring them in the car for breakfast on the go? Shall I start praying now that no one will need to use a restroom in the middle of the service? What else am I not thinking of?

A list of random things, because a list is better than nothing, and nothing is what I have energy for:

-    Sadie has decided that sleep ought to take place with one’s head under a pillow. This disturbs me. (I let her burrow under and fall asleep, then take the thing away. Is this good parenting? I have no idea.)

-    I still want my 65 naps. I am still not about to get even one. I guess I should maybe think about getting over it.

-    Various keys on my laptop keyboard keep getting weirdly sticky. You’d be surprised how long it takes me to notice that I’ve typed six e’s instead of one.

-    My goal for today was to wash the dishes while the babes napped. I thought this was a pathetic goal. Then I only managed to finish half the dishes.

-    We went sandal shopping for the kids this evening. We found no sandals, but discovered a clean bathroom nearby the shoe shop. “That,” said my five-year-old, “was a pleasant surprise.” Indeed.

-    I’m already sick of spring, after three days of warm weather in a row. I feel like we have this weather ten months a year. I’m longing for severe weather alerts, the kind that would result in my husband coming home early from work, and all of us playing board games by torchlight in our (nonexistent) storm cellar. With (nonexistent) quilts wrapped around our shoulders. And mugs of hot chocolate in our hands. In my imagination, blizzards are crazy idyllic. The only weather-terror we get around here is fire, and that does not result in hot chocolate and cozy family time, let me tell you. How about you: what are you wishing for these days?