My computer and I are not seeing eye to eye today, and only partly because it has no eyes.

ME: Is the Internet crazy-slow today, or do you need to restart?
COMPUTER: None of your business.
ME: It’s you, isn’t it?
COMPUTER: I can neither confirm nor deny…
ME: Restart.
COMPUTER: Did you say something?
ME: Restart.
COMPUTER: I can’t hear you.
ME: Restart.
COMPUTER: [silence.]
ME: Ctrl-Alt-Del.
COMPUTER: Ahem. ERROR. A program is not responding.
ME: What program? There are no programs running.
COMPUTER: The “shut down noise” is not responding. If you quit now, you will not hear the shut down noise.
ME: Wha—? RE.START. NOW.
COMPUTER: If you restart now, you will lose any unsaved data in “shut down noise.”
ME: Dude. Restart now or you gonna make a whole other shut down noise.
COMPUTER: Suit yourself.
COMPUTER: *dinging shut down noise.*
ME: [banging head on desk.]

We had another day like this today.

We rearranged the furniture yesterday. I do that maybe once a month or so, and it always results in a two- or three-day burst of sustained pretend play. I guess turning the play kitchen to face left instead of right reignites the imaginative possibility of the space? I don’t really understand it, but I accept it, and I rearrange the furniture accordingly.

There was a time when I felt strongly about keeping the living room free of permanent kid stuff, but until we have way the heck more space, I have given up on that notion. I have also, it seems, given up on ever using the room for hanging out with grown-ups, so that works out just fine. (Oh, people come over to hang out in our living room all the time, they just also bring their kids. And those kids are no longer all babies. They expect to play with stuff.)

Anyhow, all the play today wore the older kids out. They were restaurateurs! They were naturalists, and needed to hunt for spiders to study! They were detectives, taking notes in spiral-bound notebooks! They were a mommy and a daddy and had to take care of baby Audrey and Sadie! (Somehow they never play anything that involves putting away laundry.) They both crashed early.

And then we spent three hours getting the little girls to sleep. Apparently play is only exhausting if you’re over the age of three. Otherwise it keeps you up until ten o’clock at night.

Also important to note: if the tired-but-not-sleeping toddler demands a goat—as in: I want mine goat! Mine own goat!—do not run all over the house trying to figure out which toy is a goat. She wants her quilt.

That’s probably only important for me to note, but I figured I’d throw it out there just in case.

I realized this week that lately I have about three toddler-free hours per day. Not all uninterrupted-like, mind you, but bits and pieces over the course of the day that add up to about three hours.

This would be fine if I didn’t have about nine hours of toddler-unfriendly things to do every day.

Loading dishwasher: she climbs in. Getting clothes out of dryer: she climbs in. Folding laundry out of baskets: she climbs in.

Sewing: she grabs the needle (pain for her), she pushes the pedal when I’m threading the needle (pain for me), she grabs the spool of thread while I’m sewing (pain for garment).

Blogging: she types! Writing: see previous!

And then there are things that I’ve been putting off and never coming back to. Such as: we have maybe six tons of old paperwork sitting around waiting to be shredded. Do you know how much space we could free up by doing that? And do you know how long it would take? And how much I’m not going to do it with a toddler “helping”? Yeah.

Last night Dane and I watched The Visitor (yes, I could have been shredding paper but instead I watched a movie—no need to point out my poor judgment there), and there’s a scene where one character walks into a room where another character is washing windows.

“Can you even imagine having time to clean?” I asked.

“I know!” Dane said. “And not just shoveling kid things off the floor—she’s really cleaning! Stuff like windows! Have we ever cleaned our windows?”

“I clean them occasionally.”

“Really? Go you.”

“Maybe a couple of times a year.”

Except as soon as I said that, I realized I haven’t cleaned them even once since Sadie was born. (Though I did clean them the day before, when I also cleaned a bunch of other stuff! But only because of this! Which was a year and a half ago! Go me, indeed!)

On the other hand, she did spend all of today singing “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” over and over at full volume, so there is at least noise and cuteness to distract from everything else. But the sheer imbalance of time is making me a little antsy.

Alternately titled: Why I am never on time to anything, ever, no matter what, even though I set out clothes and pack diaper bags the night before trying to go anywhere.

When it is time to get out the door, every single time:

There will be sudden dire need of diaper change. You want me to take care of this before I come to hang out with you, whether at your house or in public. Yes you do.

Either a) someone will have to go to the bathroom, which requires that we all wait a minute, or b) everyone will have to go to the bathroom, which requires not only that we wait, but that we take turns—involving the negotiating of turn-taking as well as the actual taking of turns. And possibly at least one change of clothes, by the time the negotiating is through.

My keys will be missing. My wallet will be missing. My diaper bag and/or baby sling and/or stroller will be missing.

Someone’s clothes will be suddenly and inexplicably wet, oatmealy, or otherwise disgusting. Someone or other will think changing is necessary.

Snacks will be requested (if I haven’t packed any) or vetoed (when what I’ve packed is unpalatable to everyone but the nonexistent family dog) or renegotiated (in those rare instances when I’ve packed something, but something better is available somewhere in the house).

My keys will still be missing.

One or both toddlers will have removed their shoes for the 18,476th time since getting dressed. The shoes will probably not be anywhere in sight. No other shoes will be findable either. Do toddlers really need shoes?

I will realize that I haven’t eaten anything yet today, even if it is three o’clock in the afternoon. I’m always surprised when that happens. Three times a week or so.

Seriously, where the frick are my keys?

Someone will get hurt opening the front door, opening the screen door, or trying to elbow their way past their siblings out the door.

It will be naptime. Or bedtime. Or the next day already, it’s taken us so long to get out the door. Can we reschedule? Like, for when the kids have all gone off to college? Or at least have learned to drive themselves?

Note to self:

When you are frantically searching through laundry basket of clean towels, but can’t find any hand towels to put in the bathroom? And there aren’t THAT many in the dirty laundry? Next time that happens, you might choose not spend all day drying your hands on your jeans before looking IN THE LINEN CUPBOARD. You know, that usually-empty place where folded towels are supposed to go. Even if you can’t remember the last time you put anything in there. Because if they’re not in the dirty pile, and they’re not in the clean pile, either there is a rip in the space-time continuum in your laundry room sucking all your towels to Mars, circa 1211, or else maybe your husband put the towels away.

End of note.

Don’t you love when a delivery person shows up with an unscheduled delivery, and you have to just let them into your crazy messy house and quickly try to shove enough stuff out of the way for them to set down the big heavy thing they’re delivering?

Especially when you’ve been gone all day, having left breakfast dishes in the sink and pajamas on the floor and books everywhere, because you were running late when you went out the door that morning?

And then after the delivery person leaves, you charge through the house straightening things and wiping things and collecting other things (which you would have done anyway) (well, probably) (okay, maybe not everything, but you surely would have tidied something) and an hour later your house is approaching presentable, and you think with satisfaction: ha! deliver something now—UPS, USPS, anyone!—I’m ready for anything! Even though you aren’t expecting any other deliveries, even though the day is over, even though the delivery person surely forgot about your cluttered living room the instant your front door shut?

Yeah, me too.

Unfortunate combination of 1.) regularly-scheduled Sunday School lesson and 2.) hallmark holiday, results in 3.) best Mother’s Day card ever—

On top:

Love Your Enemies

Below:

Happy Mother’s Day!

Best. Mother’s Day card. Ever.

Or the most inadvertently hilarious, at the very least.

My sister is coming home from college this weekend—and by “home” I mean to our parents’ house, which is not terribly far from my own house. My parents have been cleaning out their garage to make space for the large quantity of art pieces that are coming home with her. (She’s a Fine Arts major at an art school. There’s apparently a bit of art-making involved in that.)

Said Dane: But why are they cleaning out their garage? We have blank walls! We could store her artwork on our walls!

Said I: It’s mostly nudes.

Him: Oh! It’s… that’s… uh… [Eyes dart around the room, clearly making note of just how much empty wall space we have. We could probably fit four or five smaller canvases in the living room, two in the dining room, a larger one over the kitchen sink, three more down the hallway, at least one in the bathroom…] … Well! Um! That would certainly give the house a different feel, wouldn’t it?

Me: Wouldn’t it, though?

I don’t think he has mentioned the idea to anyone else yet.

Today I cleaned the single most disgusting thing in my house, and it wasn’t even in a bathroom. It was the inside of the cabinet where we keep our kitchen trash. I didn’t touch anything in there, I just used the wet mop to clean all possible surfaces. It is now shiny and not nasty, hurrah.

Why would I do such a thing, given that general cleanliness ranks low on my current priority list? Why, funny you should ask—there was a reason! One of my overzealous climbing children thought he could maybe balance on the cabinet handle while washing his hands in the kitchen sink. And he could. Except that the cabinet door disapproved of his plan, and ripped its hinges right out of the wall. We now have a gaping, exposed trash cupboard where the door used to be.

Even that might not have been enough to get me to thoroughly clean the cabinet—wipe it down a little, yes; clean it, probably not—but I had to call our contractor to come fix it, and I happen to know from experience that he does not notice things like disgusting trash mess. He just puts his head/hands/tools right in there anyway, and I figured I had better not be the one to send him home with bits of banana peel stuck to his hair.

At any rate. I’m glad that the trash cupboard is sparkling and smell-free. But it does occur to me that—since I got rid of the old most-disgusting thing in the house—something else, by definition, must now be the new most disgusting thing in my house, which hardly seems fair.

I think the moral of that story is: don’t bother with the really nasty jobs, or else the less-nasty ones will want to be taken care of. Or: if you wait long enough, eventually you’ll find a good enough reason to do the things you avoid. Or maybe just: convince your children not to climb. One of those, probably.

Sometimes one or more of my children has a very good reason for not sleeping: illness, teething, the occasional bad dream, a sister who kicked you in her sleep. I understand this.

I would like to point out that their having a good reason, does not make me any less tired the next day.

That is all.