Mama Mama Quite Contrary

My girls spend a lot of time together.  Jude and Elie are inseparable for all the reasons associated with young twins and, apart from when she is in school, Vivi is home with them.  Vivi will often try to engage her sisters in her games which generally consist of bossing J&E around in the name of playing "school" or "dance class" or "summer camp." The problem is that Jude and Elie drive Vivi crazy.  They don't listen.  They don't follow her directions and even worse, they are full of their own ideas.  Oh, and sometimes they just. won't. stop. touching. her. stuff.  The few harmonious moments of sibling love quickly spiral into a three-way battle for control. I've tried to talk with Vivi about some of the ways that she can deal with her sisters.  Her first step is what we have called the counter-offensive.  She put this sign on her door: JUDE OR ELIYA CAN'T COME IN!!!!! This is Aviva's room.  Onle [only] mom and dad c...

I have decided that I need a goal. Something really meaningful.  Something I think I can achieve.  Not the usual lets see if I can get all 12 loads of laundry done today  nonsense. My goal is to blog every day this month and, unlike the laundry, I am actually looking forward to it! Soooo, with that being said, do you want to know what yours truly got for her 36th birthday? Here it is: A pretty awesome "birthday sculpture" made from the recycle bin. My favorite vanilla cake from my favorite bakery. Too many birthday snuggles to count. Oh yeah, and head lice. And let me tell you folks, that is the gift that keeps on giving. The girls were all in the tub and I was doing my usual bathroom ritual which involves searching my head for gray hairs and promptly plucking them.  (Hey, it takes work to look this good.  Hardee har har...)  Anyway, while perusing my scalp what to my wondering eyes should appear?  A bug. ...

We are!  Jude and Elie turned 3 on March 6th and it was a much anticipated event.  We had cake. We had hats. We had a little party at the Y with all their favorite grown-up friends.  (Let's face it.  These kids don't have friends their age.) Because there was not one thing these kids wanted other than strawberries and blueberries, it was easy to make them happy.  Vivi gave them a bucket and bubbles and I made photo books for each of them.  My little narcissists loved them.  (We'll just keep the fact that I couldn't tell who was who in some of the baby pictures our little secret.)  Of course, you can't turn three and NOT have something fancy to wear.  So Aunt Katie came to the rescue by sending these new swim suits. Mother Nature also celebrated our survival of three years with three kids by sending some beautiful weather our way. So we made like The Brady Bunch and "fixed" our bikes. Hard work isn't really Jude's thing and this is how...

Am I the only one who thinks the holidays come and go in one big blur?  It seems like it was just the beginning of December and we were all worked up about choosing our tree.   My husband had the brilliant idea that we should tag a tree after Thanksgiving before all the good ones are scooped up.  (Apparently our Charlie Brown trees of yore were haunting my poor Jewish spouse.)  Well, he and the girls did a good job this year.  Take a look: I also spent a fair amount of time at the sewing machine this December.  I made those big cushions on the left hand side of the tree-- complete with piping.  (That's unchartered territory for me!)  Jude and Elie love them and, as I suspected, they work beautifully for story time or as implements of destruction. Speaking of Jude and Elie, they had quite an accidental meeting with "Santa Claus" in the YMCA parking lot a few weeks ago.  There is an older man who works out when I do.  He has long white...

I don't have an official advent calendar because I refuse to pay good money for something I could make myself.  The problem is I never seem to remember to make one before December 1. A few years ago, I sewed 25 tiny little Christmas bags but that was as far as I got.  Last year, I put the chocolate and stickers in the little bags but there was no official calendar. So, this year-- five and a half years after I had my first child, I created a calendar.  Well, actually, an advent tree. I took some twigs from the yard and spray painted them red with paint I had on hand.  Then I scrounged up 25 clothespins and numbered them.  I cut up little squares of card stock and wrote my daily idea on each one.  Then I put the cards in the bags, hung them from the branches, and voila: Our Advent Tree!  It's not the fanciest thing but it does the trick. Since today is December 1, the girls opened their first card and we made real hot chocolate on the stove.  ...

I love the month of December.  I love the preparation for the holidays.  There's the excitement of picking out a Christmas tree and decorating it.  The joy of lighting the menorah for Hanukkah and seeing my girls marvel at how beautifully the light reflects in our windows.  I love baking cookies, making presents for my children, and being with our little family.  We also try hard to remind ourselves and our children how lucky we are. I had all this in mind when I came up with my advent calendar for this year.  Last year, I filled each day with stickers or chocolate but I wanted something a bit more meaningful.  So instead of treats, every day has a card and they say: -Decorate the Christmas tree -Walk around the neighborhood and look at the lights -Interview your family and videotape it -Send a Christmas card to a friend you don't see -Make hot chocolate -Do something nice for your sisters -Have a camp out in front of the Christmas tree -Hav...

My husband and I took a twenty-four hour vacation.  This was a real vacation-- not like the ones I always take in my head.  We packed up the car and drove a little over an hour to a seaside community in Connecticut.  We hung out by the pool. We read books and magazines without interruption. We went out to lunch and to dinner and to breakfast.  I didn't even make the bed.  It was glorious. We did all this WITHOUT our children.  Really.  Did I mention it was glorious? My sister who lives in North Carolina very kindly and without any obvious reservation  volunteered to stay with the young contrarians.  There was no arm-twisting, no desperate pleas, and no cries on either end.  The kiddos had a blast and my husband and I got ten solid hours of sleep. Ten!   And get this:  My sister even  volunteered  to stay with them again!  It appears that she loves my rascal spawn and thankfully doesn't see them enough to get ...

Internet, I'm not about the catchy title today.  I wish that I had some exciting story about poop or an adorable twin anecdote to share with you.  I wish I had a good reason to explain my cyber-absence. I don't. Very early Sunday morning, we were robbed.  They took my laptop, my husband's old laptop, and every single item of jewelry except my wedding band (which I happened to be wearing.)  They did not take my children and for once I am truly grateful for that. We know a few things.  We know that they were watching us and while we are almost always home early Sunday morning, we left en masse this particular day.  My husband took the kids out for a mommy-free adventure and I headed to the Y.  I returned less than 45 minutes later while they were in the house.  Miraculously, I did something I never do which is sit in the car for several minutes before I went inside.  (I figured I didn't have to rush and I was riveted by the YMCA class sched...

Thanks bloggy friends for all your kind words about my parenting.  Maybe if I knew all of you in person, you might be not so quick with your comments.  I'm trying to look at the positive here.  At least I only yell at my own children. Anyway, I mentioned in my beleaguered post that I'm waging a one-woman battle against THE MARKERS .  (Yes, I've confiscated them on numerous occasions but Vivi is a self-proclaimed "artiste" and she always earns them back.) Seriously though, I hate them and this is why: Uh oh.  Mom's giving me the look . "Mama, I got pritty legs." Just when I was thinking, "Well, at least it was only one turtle."  Look who shows up: As if the outfit wasn't eye-catching enough... Linking up to Simply Modern Mom 's Glimpse Into Motherhood.

For the most part, I think I am a good mother.  I feed, clothe, and clean my children.  I tell them I love them.  I give them independence and encouragement.  I read to them and play games with them and drive them places.  I try to utilize positive reinforcement. Except when I don't.  There are times when I lose it.  When I throw a (plastic) plate across the kitchen because it is 8:00 at night and I told you it was bed time and not snack time.  When the whining is so insufferable that all I can do is shout "STOP IT NOW!!!!!!" at the top of my lungs so that I stun you into silence.  When I have to ask you for the tenth time to put the god-damned markers away because I am fed-up with scrubbing ink off the walls and floors.  When I tell you, "You know what?  I don't actually like that drawing." because I'm feeling spiteful that that you called dinner "disgusting." I've done all those things.  Some of them I've done more than on...

Sometimes I feel bad for Vivi.   I get what is means to be a daughter.  I also understand what it is like to be the first-born and a big sister.  Like most people in the world, however, I have no idea what it means to be a sibling to "the twins."  For Vivi, I think it must really suck sometimes. This morning Vivi was complaining of a stomach ache and said she didn't want to go to camp.  I knew she was probably feeling anxious and, after a long weekend of fun activities, it made sense to me that she would want to stay home.  She still managed to get dressed and fully-accessorized but as she was lying on the floor complaining about camp, Jude came over and dumped a cup of water all over her.  It drenched Vivi's "best favorite ever ruffly shirt" that she was wearing and she burst into tears. I jumped up from the table, grabbed the cup from Jude, and yelled, "Why would you do that?" Jude burst into tears.  Then in some kind-of strange twin symbiosi...

Hey, guess what my husband brought home from work today? When he asked me to take a look inside the bag he was carrying, I thought he had picked me up a treat at the bakery.  Umm... no.  What I found was a ziploc bag containing his  kidney stone and a plastic spoon which he apparently used to fish it out of the toilet.  Like a giddy kid who just made a cool discovery, he announced that he was going to send it off to the lab. I suppose the lab will tell him exactly what he wants to hear, "Congratulations Dr. B!  You just harvested your own kidney stone."

It's never a good sign when your husband wakes you up at 4:45 in the morning and asks you to go fill a prescription for Dilaudid .  It is even more disturbing when said husband has been up since 2 a.m. popping Percocet at double the rate of what is generally considered a standard dosage. Before I continue with the story of my husband and powerful opiates, let me tell you that he is a runner.  Actually, let's make that a RUNNER .  He has a very high pain threshold, eats ridiculously well, and is very well-versed in all sorts of ways to live a healthy lifestyle.  He is also a physician who has turned his traditional psychiatry practice into one where he relies on homeopathy and other energetic healing methods.  He is not a pill popper. So when he woke me up, I knew exactly what it was-- a kidney stone.  When I returned with the prescription an hour or so after he woke me, he was crawling on the floor, unable to speak, and was shaking uncontrollably.  H...

Hello Internet!  I am back from the abyss of home improvement, rainy days, my cleanse, various outings and disasters, as well as Vivi's last day of nursery school.  I survived it all and now we have this fancy thing on which I can relax: Of course, I am not the only one who uses our new deck.  How could you not spend a lot of time out there when you have a twin sister and conjoined adirondack chairs? And snacks.  Must not forget the snacks. It wasn't long after the deck was finished and the rain broke, that my husband decided we needed a little family outing.  So we drove to southern Rhode Island, slapped some numbers on our kids, enticed them with Pirate's Booty (or "Judy Moody" as Ellie calls it), and told them to run their little hearts out.   Which they did for a half mile.  Well, Jude and Vivi did.  Ellie stayed at the starting line with her snacks.  Are you sensing a theme here? "I'm taking you down, Mama."   Vivi did gr...

In a couple of weeks, my husband will be heading down to New York City to attend his 25-year medical school reunion.  As part of the event materials, graduates had to send little biographies of themselves as well as photographs which would be included in an alumni directory.  Simple right? Well, we got the directory in the mail the other day.  Everyone sent in photos that looked like this: Source Everyone... except my husband.  This is his photo: He and I had a good laugh over this and hopefully the folks at Columbia will too.

So, what is a girl and her family to do when it is snowing like crazy? Well, the first thought was to get everyone dressed up and outside.  I mean, really, who doesn't love a toboggan ride in a snow storm? Well, apparently, Ellie doesn't. Because the thrill of the snow was lost on Ellie, we headed back inside.  That's when the girls discovered the joy of the recycling bin: And since the house was already torn apart and I was feeling crafty, I busted out my sewing machine.  I needed some color on this gray day so this what I came up with: A tote bag because I clearly do not have enough vessels for carrying my children's crap. Today is the day after the blizzard.  School has been canceled again and we are trying to entertain ourselves.  So do you want to wear a manilla envelope on your head and come over and dance? We'd love to have you!