AND ANOTHER THING

Enough with the socks, can we now discuss the approximate eleventy metric tons of food my children now consume during any given week?

It's just too ho-ho-ho-ironical for words, after spending most of my 27 (non-consecutive) months of pregnancy worried about my diet and calorie-intake-to-vomiting ratio, and then even more months of worried about their diets and how much milk they were getting and how many ounces they were gaining, and then obsessively coaxing hundreds of tiny wee spoonfuls of baby food into their mouths and wondering if they were eating enough and peeing enough and pooping enough...that now I'm surrounded by a pack of giant strapping boy-children who NEVER STOP EATING.

Someone is ALWAYS hungry. (And conversely, someone else ALWAYS seems to be pooping. It's the circle of life groceries!) One granola bar is no longer an acceptable snack, unless it's immediately followed by ANOTHER granola bar and a side of Goldfish crackers and maybe a bowl of pistachios. Fifteen minutes after that, the bellies are back, skulking around the kitchen for graham crackers.

We go through two giant boxes of Cheerios a week, and close to four gallons of milk. Two loaves of bread, minimum. I am perpetually out of eggs (and I should point out that only Ezra and Ike actually eat the eggs, but together manage to do a great deal of damage, what with their two-scrambled-eggs-a-day habits). (EACH!) We're officially in the Family Size range for anything packaged or boxed and the answer to the question "Hey are we almost out of peanut butter and jelly?" is yes. ALWAYS, ALWAYS YES. The other day I heard Noah refer to bananas as a "beginning of the week" food, since they're usually gone by Wednesday or Thursday. 

This weekend, while we were putting away the groceries, Ezra happened to find a pint of raspberries in one of the bags. A pint of raspberries that I thought would last us a week, or at least a few days. He ate the entire damn thing in one sitting.

For breakfast, Ike eats a pancake or waffle, a handful of Cheerios, two eggs, a banana and/or some berries (NOT THIS WEEK, THOUGH, THANKS ZAH), two cups of milk and sometimes a container of yogurt.

Two hours later, he has second breakfast of a cheese stick, more Cheerios and more fruit. Maybe any leftover yogurt.

You know, something LIGHT, especially since he eats lunch only an hour after that. And don't even try to talk to him after his nap until I get him back in the high chair for his after-nap pre-dinner supper-snack. 

Seriously. I think I maybe gave birth to a hobbit. 

And Noah, who once lived for two full years on peanut-butter crackers and Cheerio dust, is now a giant solid body of BIG KID who will eat just about anything if he's hungry enough. And he's almost always hungry enough. He wants seconds and thirds. He gets a late-afternoon snack at school and still gets off the bus talking about what he wants to eat when he gets home. (Answer: ALL OF THE THINGS) He has been known to start whining about being hungry while STILL CHEWING. 

We tried keeping a designated Snack Drawer in the fridge for them — mostly because I just really, REALLY wanted to sit down every once in awhile without hearing "Mom, I'm hungry" 30 seconds later. I positively filled the bottom vegetable crisper with a ton of healthy, carefully portioned-out snack options: milk boxes, water bottles, cheese, containers of nuts and granola and fruits (fresh AND dried), carrot sticks, yogurt, etc. I told them that they were welcome to help themselves to anything in the snack drawer whenever they wanted. 

They managed to strip that drawer bare in less than 24 hours. The Snack Drawer concept was officially retired less than a week later, when I discovered that Ezra was apparently helping himself to midnight snacks of yogurt-in-a-tube, of which he would eat half and save the rest for later...under his pillow.

Don't get me wrong. It's all awesome. They're all healthy and fit and full of energy for swimming and karate and tree-climbing mayhem. It's not like they're binging on soda and candy here — Ezra's favorite snack in the world is a sliced-up avocado, for God's sake. (I buy half a dozen avocados a week, yet cannot remember the last time I had any on hand for guacamole.) They're just...growing boys, I know. 

It's still a bit bonkers to witness, though. And pay for. And to imagine what it's going to be like in a few more years, when I have a pack of teenagers. 

Forget the college savings plan, people, I think I'm going to set up a trust fund just to keep us in groceries through high school.

 

 

Let's Talk About Socks, Baby*

*Ugh. Yes. With each passing year I am growing ever more aware that the bulk of my pop cultural references/puns are growing ever more outdated. I'm a walking Onion article. From 2003. Which is also suspiciously the last time I made a joke that could be considered "current" or "with-it" or "a far-out-happening-fun-time gag."

ANYWAY. We need to discuss the above pile of socks. After letting my children's laundry pile up to embarassing levels over winter break — to the point where one or more of them were wandering into my bedroom every morning to mournfully inform me that they had no pants/underwear/socks/long-sleeve shirts, while I muttered fitfully from under the covers to just GET SOMETHING OUT OF THE HAMPER, Y'ALL GOTS NO PLACE TO BE TODAY ANYWAY -- I finally had to cave and run eleventy different loads of wash, one right after another. 

At one point, three complete wardrobes were arranged in teetering piles around my living room as I folded and folded and sorted and stacked. There were size 6s and 3Ts and 24 months to set aside, as everyone is solidly in 7s and 4Ts and 2Ts and I KNOW, it's like there's this whole mythical clothing code that only makes sense to parents of very young children, but only kind of, because how has my 19-month-old outgrown the 24-month clothing, and why do the 3T pants show off Ezra's ankles while the 4Ts puddle around his toes and tackle him to the floor on a regular basis, and DEAR LORD IN HEAVEN I JUST BOUGHT NOAH SIZE 6 PANTS, HOW ARE THEY TOO SMALL ON HIM ALREADY? 

ALSO WHAT: Do you children just wander around leaving a trail of mismatched mittens behind you at all times like breadcrumbs? Because Jesus.

But the socks. The socks were the worst. They covered the entire coffee table and Jason and I very literally spent several hours sorting through them, trying to pair them up and guess whose foot they currently fit, since we rarely splurge on the "fancy" socks anymore, the kind with the sizes printed on the bottom, like them fancy movie stars wear. 

And also what, you know, the fuck:

Did the sock on the left shrink? Or did we (foolishly! like foolish fools!) buy Noah and Ezra identical packs of socks in different sizes? And good Christ, seriously? We managed to lose the same sock twice, basically? For double the uselessness but quadruple the "oh look I found a match oh wait shit nevermind" annoyance?

And speaking of poor purchasing decisions:

These three little orphans came from the same jumbo-sized value pack (VALUPAK!) of socks, and I'm guessing we already lost most of the over fourteen slightly-different color/stripe variations. 

Now, I'm aware that different stripe colors should not matter in the slightest, when you're talking about 1) BOYS, and 2) stripes that go on the BOTTOM OF THE FOOT, but somehow I managed to birth not one, but two boy children who care — DEEPLY — about the exact matching status of their socks. They will routinely put their underwear on backwards and their shirts on inside-out and will fail to notice that hey, buddy, I think that shirt is actually one of the baby's unsnapped onesies.

And yet if I were to hand them any two of the above socks and say something like, "It doesn't matter, just put your shoes on and no one will ever know,"...well. Look. I tried it once. It did not go over well. Ezra spent the entire day trying to hide from us so he could remove his shoes and socks in peace, and eventually succeeded and I found the socks in his coat pockets, when I was looking for his mittens.

The mittens were never found, and on second thought I think those socks might be Noah's, anyway, so maybe they were annoying him for size reasons as well. But NOAH'S sock issues go just as deep — if not deeper, as we once got into an argument over a pair of gray socks because gray socks are not real socks. Only white socks are real, Mom. 

...

(Needless to say, Noah has a wonderful supply of pristine and fully paired-up gray socks up in his room. One day they shall pass down to Ezra and we shall promply lose 79.3892% of them within a week.)

(Rubs temples, pulls sock lint out of forehead wrinkles)

There are 35 different socks in that top picture. THIRTY. FIVE. None of which have a match anymore, thanks to (I assume) our sock-eating washing machine and/or the sock-eating space behind our washing machine or some other sock-eating vortex I am not aware of. How did my children even come to OWN that many pairs of socks? Doesn't that seem...excessive, especially considering the several dozen intact pairs I managed to put together? 

Anyway, I cannot believe I just ranted for that many paragraphs about socks. (AND WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH AIRLINE PEANUTS?) They've just been sitting there in front of me for two days now, taunting me in their own little socky pile way. Throw us out! They say. We dare you! You'll find our mate 10 seconds later and will regret it forever! Turn us into (disgusting, pilly) mini sock puppets or (gross, greyish-brown) lavender sachets so we may better haunt you for years!

In other words, parenting. You will spend all of your money on socks. You will spend all of your time sorting and folding and cursing at socks. You will then promptly lose all the socks. Then one day when you are old you will find this in between the couch cushions and cry yourself to sleep, because WOOKIT THE WITTLE SOCK GAH OH GOD SUNRISE SUNSET. 

 

15 Things I Love About This, The Greatest Gift of All

Thing #1: Why yes! I do love this so much I might marry it. Thank you!

Thing #2: He's inherited my favorite writerly colloquialisms.

Dear Mom and Dad,

I hop yall (ed. note: YA'LL! YES.) like this book. Yall proble be so prod of me (ed. note: DAMN SKIPPY). I love you.

From Noah

Thing #3: Seriously, though, he wrote us a book.

Thing #4: All farms still have red barns, even when they actually don't.

It's nice to see that life has not shaken his belief in the big red barn.

Thing #5: This picture of our timbering tree.

Thing #6: VIOLENCE.

Thing #7: Trees on top of cars. 

TREES ON TOP OF CARS. No big deal, Mom. 

Thing #8: No detail is worth leaving out.

You are learning well, young blogger-san.

Thing #9: When your narrative drags, go with some hyperbolic exaggeration. 

(We did not drive over a river. It was more like a slightly dramatic puddle.)

Thing #10: I...I did?

 

I think Dad might nitpick this version of events, as Mom is a useless asshole. 

Thing #11: Seriously, I am coming off SO WELL here.

He left out the part where I got all annoyed at my children's useless decorating abilities and wanton ornament destruction and finally did the dramatic "JUST LET ME DO IT MYSELF" parenting win of the year move. 

Thing #12: NERRRRRRRRD.

"My favorite ornament on the tree is the Frodo ornament."

Thing #13: Everything about this illustration.

The clasped stick arms! The dreamy dream bubble! The image of Santa delivering presents while possibly strapped to the electric chair!

Thing #14: "About the Author." 

ZOMG.

Thing #15: The secret bonus material on the back page.

"The alien zombies from the Black Lagoon showed up and stole all the presents. The end."