Hitting the ground running, almost literally.

I say almost literally because overuse of the term literally is something that annoys me and yet I am guilty of it as well.

These days--they fly by. Another week gone and I can usually barely remember it.

Yesterday I was awake at 4:15 am and running outside, headlamp strapped around my waist, by 4:31. So that I could be back by 5:15 in time to get a shower and get myself semi-ready/presentable by 6 am, when the hubs would leave for work and the babes would be awake and our day would begin. This morning I was running by 5:15, which felt late!

I don't do this often. I usually run at 7 pm, headlamp strapped around my waist, in the dark, right after they lay down for bed. Which means eating at 8:30 pm.

Yesterday after my run I fed them breakfast, then loaded them up for our weekly grocery store trip, list in hand, recipes and meals for the upcoming week planned. While they had their morning "rest"-->we don't do morning naps anymore but they still get to watch one Baby Einstein for 30 minutes in the morning whilst drinking delicious whole milk from a sippy cup--I cooked two meals that are currently in the freezer and we will eat this week. We eat each of them twice--thank God for a husband who doesn't mind a repeat--so I do not have to cook during the week. Then I let them in the kitchen to play with various kitchen utensils while I cleaned and scrubbed my destroyed kitchen.

Then we had playtime together. Oh the playtime! They are both walking/toddling and just delight in themselves when they take steps all around the room. It is a thrill to see.
During their nap it was housecleaning--dusting, toilets, vanities, showers, sweeping, baseboards. This morning it was vacuuming and steammopping to get ready for a playdate; I have to do that when the hubs is here because the kiddos are scared of the vacuum cleaner. Our daughter was a crankypants during the playdate and it had to be cut short, but it is what it is.

Oh yes, because I miss baking I decided to make homemade peanut butter cups yesterday (they're giant, though you can't tell in the picture) and last night I made homemade truffles for a friend's sister's wedding shower.

Work days aren't any less busier--up at 5:15, play with the babies from 6 to 6:30, out the door by 6:35, work at a frantic pace seeing patients all day with only a 30 minute lunch so I can leave 30 minutes earlier to get home to play with the babies some more (and who am I kidding--I never get a real lunch at work anyway because the patients, they just.keep.calling), make their dinner, clean up, get them ready for bed, read to them, rock them, put them to sleep, go running, get cleaned up, iron my clothes for the next day and then thankfully--THANKFULLY--there is food already made and we watch TV like two zombies while stuffing our pieholes.
I am not trying to say I am busier than anyone else, I know I'm not. But sheesh, sometimes the pace feels ridiculous. I do go to bed by 9:30 every night or else I would never make it. I don't run every day but at least four to five days per week. I don't always bake but I do enjoy it so I try to fit it in as part of my own personal therapy. We try to see friends but we rarely do, need to work on that. We're signed up to be back at the homeless shelter soon and that's a refreshingly good thing. We're back to going to church, our absence because of their morning nap and my fear of our son biting another child now ended, another refreshingly good thing.

It's no wonder the weeks just zip by.

So right now this very second I am going to just sit here. Maybe read, maybe just stare out the window at the lake (did I mention our neighbors cut down a tree and now from our enomormous front windows we are rewarded with a beautiful view of the lake we never knew we didn't have?) Close this post, click publish and just rest. Because they are still sleeping (have to love that longer afternoon nap) and as soon as they wake up, it all sort of starts up again.

But at least I've already run, because if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to enjoy these.

I'm taking suggestions...plus photos

I'm not sure what to write here anymore.
I don't know if I should still be blogging at all.
I do love to write, I know that. But I know I don't make the time for it or give it its due.
I wrote this post about zero population growth but realized it might offend anyone with more than two kids. Scratch that because that wasn't the intent. The intent was to show the irony of me, the girl who fought so hard to pass on her piddly genetics, to procreate, to make more babies when--to borrow a brilliant line from Paul Simon--the planet groans every time it registers another birth, and who finally relented to the voice inside of her that had been telling her so long to go a different route, that there is no such thing as better, only different, and now I've just written a ridiculously long sentence that encapsulates the heart of that post and I'm not sure where I was going anyway.

Oh yeah, to blog anymore or not? I'm not really an adoption blogger, I'm definitely not an infertility blogger, I'm not really a Mom-blogger, and I don't know how to be just a regular blogger. I'm not one of those adorable blogger who posts adorable iPhone photos every few days of her perfect life in pictures.

Oh wait. I do have some adorable iPhone pictures to share, those will come. I can say they're adorable because they're of the babies, not me. Hello.

I could be a sort of manic depressive Mom blogger...meaning, some days I have these higher than high type posts that I write in my head where I'm on top of the world and everyone is napping and pleasant and happy and eating well and my house is clean and I'm baking and I'm working and I'm not tired and I'm exercising and then it will all vanish--POOF!--in a flash when someone throws me for a loop and I realize I'm at best, a marginal parent, who is short on patience and suddenly I'm tired and I'm too fat and I'm not cooking enough and I'm not volunteering and I'm not balancing anything and then I'm lowest of lows and I write that post in my sad little brain. Does that sound interesting?

I will say this: I am currently in love with my Nanny. I would like for her to move in and live with us like Alice on the Brady Bunch. Seriously. The three days a week she is here are wonderful. The babies probably miss her when it's four days with Yours Truly, ha.

Of course she's amazing with the babies, that's the priority. But she also sweeps, swiffers, wipes down counters, leaves the high chairs cleaner than I'd seen them in recent months, and most importantly, doesn't get into my stuff. Yeah, I realize that's pretty basic--that last one about my stuff--and I won't go into details here, but our first nanny had a wee bit of a Single White Female kind of thing happening and I grew tired of coming home to realize she'd been in my closet or my drawers in my bathroom. Gives me the shivers just typing that.

Back to the good nanny--she is also doing things I hadn't thought of. I am not too proud to admit I am not an expert in child development and while I do a fair amount of reading I am always hitting others up for their opinions and advice. The good nanny helped us transition from two naps to one in a way I hadn't considered which--knock wood--seems to be working and the other day I came home to find two brilliant works of art created by H&H with finger paints. Finger paints with a 13 and 14 month old? I would have never ventured there.

And there was no mess to speak of. Ahhhhhhh. No mess.

I am not sure how this post evolved into a nanny post but it did, and I love her. She's also an amateur photographer and here are the shots she texted me yesterday while I was at work that brought tears to my eyes.

Can you stand it?

Just playing in our backyard.





So I don't know what to do. Write here. Not write here. Post adoralbe iPhone photos or not post adorable iPhone photos. Rant, not rant, manic depressively write about my experiences as a parent...I just don't know. One time I opened my old blog up to a Q&A and that was pretty interesting, I guess I'm open to that again if there's anyone interested enough to ask a question.

Bueller?

Anyone?

Thoughts?

My life is a Hallmark Movie

On New Year's Day we were at our big grocery store at 7:15 am.
Because that is how we roll around here. We drove to my hometown and back the day before to have a belated family Christmas with my Mom's large extended family. It was a good time introducing the babies to everyone. I got to see my Dad--more on that in another post. We pulled out of my Mom's driveway at 6:45 pm and the babies--exhausted from the festivities--both fell asleep by 6:47. They slept the whole way, all 175 miles. Until the last mile. I kid you not, a police offier pulled us over.

DH went mini-ballistic. I was not speeding! I am not drunk! It's 10:15 pm on New Year's Eve, why is he pulling us over and we have two sleeping babies in the back and we're almost home and we are both so damn tired and we just want to get home and people PUHLEEZE.

Here's a question for the masses: when police officers ask if they know why they are pulling you over do they expect an honest answer?

At any rate, apparently the little tiny light bulb that lights our license plate has burned out and that was reason to pull us over, on the worst night for drunk driving, when there were likely multiple other drivers out at that very moment committing real driving offenses.

When he shined his massive flashlight into the back seat illuminating my sleeping babies I half-hoped/willed that they would wake up and start wailing uncontrollably just to show him. Except. It wouldn't have shown him anything. What did he care? I would have been the one to then have to deal with their wailing, snotty nosed selves. So I quickly thanked God that they remained asleep.

But none of this has to do with the blog post title. Because if that were the Hallmark Movie, well, let's just say it wouldn't be a ratings killer.

Back to the the story of why we were at the grocery store so early. Because we didn't go out for New Year's. I could get all reflective on 2011 but if you're a reader you know it was a good year--ultimately, after some serious lows and scares--, a year that there really aren't words to describe, but it was definitely a year worth celebrating for us. I'll leave it at that.

Ahem. Back to the grocery store.
It's empty at 7:15 am which is why we like it. DH goes with me. Each baby gets their own shopping cart and they honestly act like they are king and queen of said carts--really, king and queen of the whole store. If there are other shoppers or workers around they laugh and flirt and engage them, they point at the lights, they point at the food, they babble constantly as they direct their grocery store kingdom.

I was steering my cart back towards the soup aisle, having forgotten some vegetarian broth when I saw an employee, a handsome young man, standing in the middle of the aisle, smiling broadly at me and my daughter. He kept staring, engaging us the whole time, and I thought it a bit odd, and anticipated him asking if he could help me find something.

"Hello!" he said and gave me a look like: hello, it's ME!

And then it hit me and my eyes welled up with tears and I nearly leapt at him to give him a hug.

Because it was R.

Our little brother. The one we mentored for seven years through the Big Brothers/Big Sisters Program and loved with our whole hearts and then watched as he accumulated a child, a criminal record, and dropped out of high school. Watched helplessly as we failed miserably as his mentors.

I haven't seen him in years, though we were just talking about him on the drive to my hometown, wondering what he was doing, wondering what had become of him. The last we knew he was living about an hour away, still married, with two babies of his own.
I will not go into details here, but suffice is to say that our relationship ended on a less than pleasant note and it was painful for me and the mister. And then our own lives became so much more complicated and we felt that our seven year mentoring relationship with R would just have to stand on its own, it was what it was, we did the best we could.

And there he was, bright and early in 2012, standing right in front of me, somehow in our grocery store in our little neck of the woods, returning my hug with such a force.

Note: the next parts are going to sound like I'm tooting our horn. I am not. I just want to repeat what he said, for the sake of my Hallmark Movie.

He told us he had seen us shopping a few times before but hadn't wanted to to talk to us because he was embarrassed. Embarrassed that we would be so upset with him and for all he had put us through.

I didn't want you to think your time with me was wasted. It wasn't. It meant so much to me. My life is hard and I'm just realizing how I need to do the stuff we used to talk about--go back to school, do something more. But you guys meant so much to me and I know I screwed up. Probably, if you hadn't done what you did for me, I would have been in a lot worse place. A lot worse. So thank you for all you did for me.


Or something along those lines. My head was spinning as I took him in with my eyes. All 21 years of him. He is handsome--always was.

We talked some more, hugged some more, introduced our babies to him, and exchanged numbers.

I floated out of that store.
We both instantly started talking about how we could have him back in our lives.

He's like our original kid, and he's back.

To be continued....