Chicka boom

I am SO being tried this week.

Day one, Danny drops my new bottle of nail-polish off the counter. I painted my nails from the puddles on the tile floor. My house smelled like acetone for two days.

Day two, I go to the prospective reunion site to take pictures of the beach and my flip flop kicks sand up behind me. The sand somehow manages to fall on the camera as it dangles from my wrist and the grains get trapped inside the lens retraction mechanism. I waited a year for that camera and broke it in less time than that.

Day three, Danny is back at work, and I have one of those marathon afternoons- make Melissa's birthday present, wake up Noemie at 4PM, rush to the condo association to renew our pool access cards (on the last day before we'd have to pay extra fees), pick up Dominic by 5 from his gymnastics camp 20 miles away, stop at Publix to grab foodstuffs (which, with three kids, is always an episode in itself), cook dinner while bathing the kids, feed kids and have them ready for bed before Danny gets home at 7:45.... except that Danny has to work overtime... so now it's 8:30, Danny's walking in the door and Noemie's crying doom and despair because she has to sleep in bed by herself. Serve dinner for Danny and myself though the pork tenderloin is lukewarm at best and I'm ready to fall over. Except that there's nowhere to put the served plates because our house is a mess and there's no room left on the pass-through.... So one of the dishes falls and now my dinner has gone from barely lukewarm to cold and wet, lying in a pool of water on top of the dirty dishes in the sink. Danny runs to my side and scoops it back onto the plate and says, "ta-da!", presumably so I won't have a panic attack.

Today was one of those days where about half of everything I've said has been in a tone of reprimand. I've been snapping at the kids all day, and with reason. This evening Dominic drops a drinking glass on the floor and it shatters into a billion shards....just as the meat begins to simmer on the frying pan and the baby decides to wake up with a raging hunger. Glass everywhere. Children everywhere. I left Cristovan screaming his head off as I carried the other two away and then proceeded to flip meat and sweep simultaneously. I was finally able to tend to the baby after fifteen minutes. After he was fed, he looked up at me with a huge smile, like he didn't remember his fifteen minutes of abandonment. I, meanwhile, was still writhing in anger and frustration at the other two, who were now sitting at the dinner table dropping spaghetti noodles slowly and dramatically into their mouths and down their shirts.

-"Dominic, cómete la comida."

- "Te ves muy linda."

-"Gracias. Te ves mentiroso."

- "Gracias"

I was reminded at the moment of Psalm 103: 8-12

The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

Being a stay-at-home mom is not easy. I think it's funny when feminists demean it, as if there's any job in the world that requires more patience, more creativity, more skills, or that matters more. I also think it's funny when babies remind me of Jesus.

Dominic did well in his gymnastics camp. Every morning I'd drop him off at 8:45 and pick him up at 4:45. He would come home every evening thoroughly exhausted. The last day I dropped him off, I was stopped in the foyer by another mom who told me that she thought it was cute how the kids got along with Dominic. (Dominic is the youngest). This was some relief to me. As I turned to walk out the front door, a hear a girl on the gym floor yell, "Dominic kicked me!" I turned around to watch through the french doors as a crowd of 8-year olds was standing around Dominic. Another girl said loudly, "Raise your hand if Dominic has hurt you this week!" Almost everyone raised their hand. And on that note, I ducked out.

I know that I don't include that many soundbites of Noemie and the reason is this: Dominic says funny things. Noemie just is funny. It's her personality and the way she perceives the world and the way that she says things. For example, she was watching ants climb up a tree this afternoon and I told her to be careful, that they would bite her. So she began to shake her finger at the ants and yell, "No me cómes, hormigas! Tu no me puedes comer porque eso es muy malo!" This went on for almost a minute.

Toby doesn't say anything yet but when he does, it's going to be awesome.

Taking Toby's passport picture was a bit difficult. He was so excited about the prospect of going to Venezuela for Danny's birthday that he couldn't stop dancing! Specifically, it was a jig. It's the Scottish in him coming out.

Noemie understood that jigging babies makes for blurry photos so she performed a take-down maneuver to solve the problem.

They are going to drive me CRAZY!

My sanity.

Get 'er done!

Air... must breathe...

I have locked myself up in our interrogation room-- our Batcave, our computer room, whatever you want to call it-- every day for the past 2 weeks that Danny has been home. I haven't checked facebook or email or answered the phone; I haven't written in my diary or scrapbooked or even cooked (I did however play my facebook Scrabble games with Katie Green). I would come out of this windowless, air-circulation-less closet to eat, feed the baby, bathe, feed the baby, sleep, feed the baby, and then start over again. My first deadline was two weeks ago. My revised Emergency Deadline was this past Friday. And today is literally my Now-or-Never deadline. And I'm excited to say, I think I might make this one- it's only 40 pages and the pages are taking more than 10 minutes each to upload. It may take seven hours... but if it doesn't print today, it won't make it on time. Now. Or never. And what a waste of my time "never" would have been.

I did come out of the cave to sing at church on Sunday. It had been forever since I last sang in an ensemble. I used to think singing in groups was such a brainless activity but it is not! My first rehearsal was an eye-opener- I forgot how to enunciate properly, I forgot to blend, I forgot how to read the rests, and I didn't have the lung capacity to hold a word for two measures! And I called a half note a quarter note!!! The shame! Everyone said it sounded great afterwards, but I don't trust anyone but Amy. The kind of sister that would look at your day-old child and tell you his hands look creepy is the kind of sister you can trust when you're not sure you were on pitch. I'm sure I sounded better than I smelled. I was wearing urine, spit-up, and way too much Chanel No. 5. I was practically choking on it. I'm a mom!

I've graduated to a new level of mom-hood today. I took Dominic to his first camp. For the next week he will be going everyday from 8-5 to gymnastics camp. He's lately taken to doing headstands by balancing himself on his head until he falls over. I'd prefer he not break his neck so I'm hoping they'll teach him to do it safely there. And also I'm hoping, though perhaps naively, that he'll stop flipping off my couch, hanging from the towel bars (we're running out of plaster), and body-slamming Noemie. It's not like Noemie can't take it... Noemie is in Sunday School with the three-year-olds because the two-year-olds aren't as interesting, apparently. She can frequently be found at the bottom of the boys' dogpiles with a big ol' smile on her face, throwing punches with the rest of them. She wont go anywhere without a purse and sunglasses but she's certainly not dainty.

Noemie, who experienced the greatest new-baby stress of all of us is finally finding her niche. She will occaisionally crawl into the baby carrier and pretend to be a baby, but more often than not she's playing the mama role-- wiping "Pooh poop" with baby wipes or pretending to breastfeed Buzz Lightyear. But she loves Toby and is always putting him in headlocks to give him kisses. Sweet and terrifying at the same time.

Work has been going well for Danny. The days pass quickly for him and he never knows what he's going to get. He was recently called out to attend to an elderly man who was scared half to death when a drawbridge started to lift while he was trying to cross. He was at the bottom of the bridge and the bridge rose perhaps 20 degrees before the young girl at the controls was alerted and the bridge was stopped. The man easily walked off the bridge and waited for police to arrive so that the incident could be properly documented. That evening Danny called me over to watch the evening news where that same man reported his near-death experience dangling from the top of the bridge by his cane. Danny's already-low estimation of channel 7 news sunk to a new depth.

Cristovan continues to be absolutely perfect. He loves to smile. I love to see him smile. It's a good match all around. Just today he started to suck his thumb. It was cute for about 3 seconds. I can't afford braces so we're going to get over that habit before the day is over, aren't we Toby? I love that child!

Gio leaves today on his "Vagrants & Vagabonds, Outlaws & Thieves" musical tour/hitchhiking-dumpster-diving adventure (or "hitchjacking" as my mother says.) Everything with Gio is an adventure.

Apparently Dominic's sound bites are a popular feature-- this may be my favorite yet but, I warn you, it's kinda gross.

(Dominic on the potty:)

"El poopoo mío esta sticky y yo le dije, 'Dale! Ve al hueco!' y tenía que empujar duro, duro, duro, duro (he's counting on his fingers...) duro, duro, duro... y bajó!"

Garcias. Thank goodness I didn't develop

their trademark feature. It's not like they hear any better...