And lo, an angel of the Lord said "you are a bunch of damn fools." For the record, it was Jason's idea. He maintains it is still a very good idea, and claims he will "never get tired" of listening to the various levels and styles of racket our various children make, because he is all kinds of nurturing and just that good of a dad, and was basically put here on earth to make the rest of us look bad. Ezra has almost mastered the overhead 1! 2! 1 2 3 4! stick count (before launching into Animal-from-The-Muppets-style drum solos). Noah prefers to play actual rhythms and to play along with actual music. In this photo he is either jamming to Seven Nation Army, his new ParaNorman DVD, or maybe just some Yule Log channel carols. We had kind of a weird, long morning. Then there's this one, who can't yet reach the bass drum pedal but isn't going to let that stop him from being adorable in the noisiest way possible. We just purposely quadrupled the noise level in our house and I now probably have to promise our neighbors that yes, we'll move soon, don't worry, I'm... Read more →

(Greetings! This post is sponsored by pvBody.) I am not much of a work-outer. I've had my moments of fitness dedication, but that's all they usually end up being: Moments. Fleeting moments of Going! To! The Gym!...immediately followed by months and months of listlessly watching the membership fees auto-deduct from my bank account before working up the energy to cancel. (Usually by claiming that I was moving. Sometimes I would wait until I actually WAS moving, just to spare my squishy, out-of-shape self the trouble of coming up with a convincing lie.) One time I got obsessed with Couch to 5K and stuck with it for...I don't know. Maybe until the 3K mark. The weather got hot, then the weather got cold, then I got bored with my running mix music choices and then there was a lot of good TV on, or something. Yoga, pilates, kickboxing...all things I tried once or twice before losing interest. (Or, in the case of yoga, once or twice before managing to sprain an ass-cheek so hard I could barely walk for days, so like SCREW THAT, HIPPIES.) But it's obvious now that this pattern cannot continue. I've had three children. I'm turning 35... Read more →

UP: He's a brown belt now. Which (if you aren't up with the karate-belt-color progression, and don't worry, I only know because there's a cheat sheet on like, every wall of the dojo) is the highest belt for his current age group. He's determined to make it all the way to black belt. (Please note the Ezra Legbomb in the above picture. Sibling belt tests are exhaustifying, y'all.) DOWN: He had a panic attack when Jason emptied a new box of Cheerios into a space-saving plastic container. He screamed and cried and hurled his body around. It wasn't right, normal, regular. A tiny deviation from the constantly running script in his head and the world crashed down around him. I wrapped him up in blankets and talked about the time Baby Ike got into the Cheerios and dumped the entire container upside down the floor, which was just so silly, remember? Then I changed the subject completely. It's not like Noah could explain what was wrong anyway, and the last time I pressed him for answers in a situation like that he started talking about hating his "wrong brain" and my heart near ripped in two. The next day, he... Read more →

Heh. Heh heh. Look at that pack of disheveled little cheesebars. WHERE IS THEIR MOTHER AND WHY DOESN'T SHE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. So I really thought this year would be the year that ended our streak of having all the kids smiling while sitting on Santa's lap. (Well, more like two kids smiling, while the other one stares confusedly off into the horizon, like maaaan, I have no idea what's going on right now.) I actually predicted that Ike would probably cry. While the general amount of Photo Ham around our house is reaching Def Con 5, Deep-Fried Pork Belly With A Side Of CHEEEEEESE levels, Ike tends to get a little shy and reserved around strangers. Combined with some really bad timing on our part, it looked like we'd be depositing him on the giant fluffy red stranger's lap about a good hour past naptime. Now, SOME PARENTS (read: the non-asshole kind) might decide to just skip the santa photo this year, instead of deliberately setting their toddler up for tears. Or at least decide to try again a different day. Or at least make some attempt at coordinated holiday fashion beyond: Uh. Everybody Put On A Sweater,... Read more →

So. Hi. How is everybody? Do you need a hug? For the record, since I just now, five minutes ago, read the comments on Friday morning's post: That was posted (and titled) hours before I heard the awful, awful news from Connecticut. I mean, my God, OBVIOUSLY. I personally had no idea what had happened until 2:30 pm, when I finally got a break from work and settled down with lunch and the Internet and Twitter and...oh. Oh. OH NONONONONO. To be honest, my blog post (and its title) immediately became the very last thing on my mind. I seriously did not even think about it, or anything I had done that morning, in the Before Connecticut hours. In the Before Connecticut state of being, I guess. For anyone who was hurt or offended or made uneasy by the post title (or subject matter), however, I really sincerely apologize. It should have dawned on me to change it. I hope you can possibly understand why it didn't, though: I wanted my first grader home, I wanted the news to stop, to be wrong, to stop being WORSE every time I hit refresh on Google News. I closed the laptop on... Read more →

It's Friday, which means: Yikes. Did I ever half-ass things around these blog parts this week. In my defense, I have an excuse. But oh, my lands, it's the first-worldiest of first-world problems. Get ready to roll the fuck out of your eyeballs: Our nanny quit. It's a personal emergency crap-fest of a situation. No one is happy about it, there were many, many tears and hugs from both of us, and while I completely understand that shit happens and why she needs to leave us to go deal with said shit, GAH HOLY ASS FUCKBARS THIS SUCKS. I know you hear the word "nanny" and probably have an immediate reaction of ooooohhhh laaaa deeee daaaaa, it must be so niiiiiiiice to be rolllllllling in money and household staff*, like it's all Downton Abbey up in this bitch. *Random! One time, back in 2001, I was laid off from my job and went on a job interview that my former boss had kindly arranged. It was at this HUMUNGONORMOUS mansion and mostly involved a go-nowhere vanity project cooked up by the owner's (adult) child. I used the bathroom soon after I arrived and deposited a single tissue in the trash... Read more →

NEWISH RECENT HOTNESS: Family Homemade Pizza Nights. Okay, I'm perhaps overstating the "homemade" part. We use pre-made frozen dough from Whole Foods. We dump canned tomatoes in the food processor with a handful of bagged pre-peeled garlic and some olive oil for the sauce. Top with cheese, pepperoni and oregano. Bake on a cookie sheet at the highest temperature your pathetic electric oven can crank up and CLEARLY you will be immediately transported to a rustic pizzeria in Italy. Or maybe just to that pizza joint at the airport. Close enough. I am not, however, exaggerating the "family" part. We get pretty super into it. We may or may not have special outfits. Complete with accessories. Ezra is always nice enough to lend Ike one of his non-pizza-specific aprons. (What? Don't all four-year-olds own multiple aprons?) Family Homemade Pizza Night is strictly pants-optional, however. As for Noah... Once upon a time, getting him to touch something like raw pizza dough or pepperoni would have been unheard of. So was getting him to help in the kitchen, willingly. Pressure! Instructions! Expectations and blenders and all kinds of squishy things! It's all different now. Super different now. Not to mention we did... Read more →

First you spend nine neurotic months obsessing over your diet and kick counts and whether that weird twinge in your leg is a cramp or a symptom of Acute Doomed Pregnancitis. Then you give birth to your preshus snowflake treasur and realize that HO HO HO, your pregnancy fears were strictly bush league. Shit just got real, bitch, because the entire world is basically out to injure or murder your baby and you are completely powerless to do anything about it. Welcome to parenthood. IT ONLY LASTS FOREVER. But then, maybe, you start calming down a little, or at least pushing the most obsessive and irrational of your fears aside. Your hormones don't stay jacked up to 11, and you start to see that chilling the hell out is a necessary survival mechanism. You'd be miserable and anxious and completely insufferable otherwise. And then maybe you have another baby, and then another one, who are both also preshus irreplaceable snowflake treasurs too, but now you're simply too preoccupied with their whining about juice and boredom and who touched who to worry about much else. So you start letting them play outside with their friends, sans helicoptering parental supervision, and stop... Read more →

COMPULSIVELY WORDY & SLIGHTLY NEUROTIC DISCLAIMER: A lot of people have asked for another cloth diapering post. And I really do mean "a lot." And hardly any of them were sockpuppets or the voices in my head. (Who, incidentally, sound just like Cookie Monster and Tom Hanks narrating a war documentary.) But I kept not writing another cloth diapering post because I ALSO know that a lot of you could not be more bored by the cloth diapering posts. Bored! Boring boredom streaming out of your eye sockets! LINDSAY FEELS YOU, BRO. Anyway. Guess what! This is a post about cloth diapers. The bored portion of the class is hereby dismissed for the rest of the day. Go sneak smokes by the monkey bars or throw vodka bottles at each other for awhile. YOU KNOW, LIKE THE GLAMOUROUS PEOPLE. The rest of you, well...let's talk hippie butt rags. (Note: Amazon Affiliate links ahoy! I have no affiliation to any of the other sites/shops mentioned/linked, however; they're just the places where I like to be shoppin',) So when we last chatted in excruciating detail, Ike was still a very small, slightly chicken-legged baby. We were using a combination of newborn-sized prefolds... Read more →

Ommahgod. Okay. I think...yes. I think I can finally stop leading off every. goddamned. blog post. with an update on Look Who's Puking Now. We're all better now. Jason, that magnificent bearded bastard, was our last holdout and it looks like he's going to make it through completely uninfected. Unless I just jinxed him. Right then. I'd delete that sentence but 1) the universe KNOWS I typed it so the damage is probably already done, and 2) I've been waiting my entire life to type the words "magnificent bearded bastard" in reference to my husband, so whatever. SORRY, HONEY. In fact, I like calling him that so much I might — finally, after eight freaking years of this shitshow — give him an anonymous blog moniker and refer to him as MBB full-time now. Until he shaves, which he keeps threatening to do, until I pout. Anyway. I have lost my train of thought. It's okay, I didn't really have a point anyway. And now I have a conference call for my other life, the one that doesn't involve talking about vomit and boobs. Hold on. This'll only take an hour or so, since that's my maximum limit on pretending... Read more →