"The third engineer promised to show me the propeller shaft!" *

I keep dreaming about being on the beach with my children, and watching a rogue wave coming towards us on shore, looming ever closer and ever larger. I watch it begin to crest, craning my neck upward to see the foam at the top. I know it is bigger than any wave I have ever seen before, and I know I cannot possibly run fast enough with my children – or even by myself, for that matter – to outrun it. And yet I try, I MUST try. Every single time, I try, and every single time, I wake up before the wave breaks, before we are all engulfed, just at the moment when I KNOW there is no hope.

Yeah, I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me what this dream means.

I can’t recall my life ever being this crazy before.
And it’s not like it’s glamour-crazy, jet-setting and polo matches and charity galas and evening gowns.
It’s not like I am running for VP.
It’s not like I am singlehandedly running a Fortune 500 company or engineering buyouts.

I don’t know what it is.
I find it difficult to believe that only one small baby, despite being the fourth, suddenly created this tsunami of activity. Or one eight-year-old and one six-year-old with friends to see and sports to play. Or one small three-year-old who cheerfully goes along for the ride, no matter what the event.

I know this:

I take the boys to school and pick them up from school. I take them to piano lessons. I take them to hockey practices and games, or stay home and watch the younger guys while H takes the older boys to these things. I take all 4 boys to the eldest’s soccer practices and games. I take them to the dentist and the pediatrician. I drop them off at their friends’ houses or pick up their friends to come to our house. I take the little ones to playdates or the toy lending library or the zoo. I go to the library and the post office and the pet store and the pharmacy and the dry cleaners and the office supply store. I call the plumber and the handyman and the pediatrician and the babysitter and the other babysitter and my mother-in-law and the school.

I construct approximately 20 pb&j sandwiches a week and pack ten lunches and fix real food for dinners (that no one eats anyway) and nurse the baby and change a dozen diapers a day and swab down bathrooms and pack away summer clothes and unpack winter clothes (and vice versa) and supervise homework and distribute snacks and grocery shop and give the little guys baths and supervise the older guys’ showers. I clip toenails and clean ears and trim hair. I read Pokemon books and Goodnight Moon and Dr Seuss, each night, every night, at bedtime.

I buy them new underwear and new socks and new backpacks and new sneakers and new gloves and new notebooks, and more socks and more notebooks. I buy H new jeans and new sneakers and new underwear.

I buy storage containers for their dress clothes and new markers to replace dried out ones and Playdoh and more Playdoh and power cords for the computer and lampshades for the new lamps and new running shoes. I buy Christmas and birthday presents and stash them away. I fill Easter baskets and make or buy cupcakes and treats for school parties.

I run the dishwasher and unload the dishwasher and load it up and run it again.

I sort the clean laundry and put it away and gather up all the dirty clothes into another mountain of laundry. I start my day by putting wet laundry in the dryer and another load of dirty clothes into the washer, and I end the day the same way.

I ask Terzo roughly twenty times a day if he needs to pee or poop in the potty. I supervise these attempts and then change his clothes and bathe him when he waits too long and has an accident.

I wipe down the kitchen counters and table and wipe them down again when the boys spill juice on them or smear peanut butter or jam on them. I open yogurts and peel bananas and apples and grill cheese and butter bread.

I wipe out lunchboxes and then pack today’s lunch into them.

On days when I have my babysitter, I edit other people’s papers and format their references and check their spelling and then I invoice them and keep track of who has paid what invoice and whose paper is due when.

I do know that I feel like I never have a moment of unaccounted for time.
I am rarely alone.
And when I am, I should probably be sleeping.
I am not complaining.
I am truly just trying to figure out, where does my time go?
Am I mismanaging my time?
Should I punt the fifteen minutes of yoga every morning, to get more done of...what?
To shower every day instead of the every other day I am averaging now?
I need four hours a week to run, and am not managing to carve that out.
I desperately need a haircut.

H got a promotion that we have been waiting on for a while; I am very pleased and proud of him, but his work hours just got longer. He went from 8- to 9-hour days to 12- to 13-hour days. He leaves even earlier so he can get to the gym to swim. He routinely works Sundays now. This won’t be the case forever, but for the foreseeable future, it is.

He has told me, We have more money coming in now. We will get you help. But I don’t even know where to start. What sort of help do I need? A housecleaner? A gym membership with daycare? A regular babysitter? Swimming lessons and a life preserver?
I have never been in this situation before, and I don’t know what would be most useful and most thrifty.
Suggestions, comments, input?
Help?

*************
*Robin Shelby, "The Poseiden Adventure"

"Excuse me, but what's an Easter?"

When did Easter become the new Christmas? When I was a kid, we got an Easter basket full of drugstore chocolate, and jelly beans, and these really cool caramel popcorn bunnies. Each kid got a 1-pound chocolate egg, with filling of choice (mine was always coconut cream), from a little candy store in my town called Duffy’s. And we were allowed to EAT all this crap.

Since we (oh so modern parents) limit the sweets my kids eat, a basket full of chocolate would just be taunting them. I would probably find chocolate-smeared wrappers jammed under the couch cushions (like I used to find Twizzler plastic stuffed down the laundry chute before I wised up and hid the Twizzler box).

Honestly, I wouldn’t even have begun this crazy Easter basket tradition, but my next door neighbor’s kids went on and on about their Easter baskets to my wide-eyed boys, so one Saturday-before-Easter night a few years ago, I made emergency baskets for my (then only) two children – fruit snacks, and Teddy grahams, and some stickers.

This year, hockey cards, and stickers, and new socks (yeah, that’s the way I roll, dudes – but seriously, what do these kids do, gnaw on their socks with their razor-sharp teeth?), and some jelly beans and a few pyramids of Toblerone, and some gel pens and mini notebooks (what did we do before the dollar bins at Target?). And so the ridiculous tradition is upheld.

I don’t mind dyeing eggs – especially since we go to our church to do it. Everyone shows up with their hardboiled eggs, and a few parents deal with dye and stickers and crayons and whatever hot new egg-decorating trend, and at the end of the afternoon, everyone goes home with some eggs and leaves some eggs to be hidden for tomorrow’s egg hunt after the service. With any luck, when a child (and it’s ALWAYS one of mine) overturns a dye pot, it’s onto the linoleum floor and easily mopped up. It’s perfect. (We will be leaving all of our eggs as I am the only one round these parts who will eat hard-boiled eggs. And even I won’t touch the ones that have been sitting outside under the bushes and tucked in tree hollows and manhandled by dozens of snotty-nosed toddlers. Hence, my purchase of four dozen medium size cheap (read: NOT free-range organic) eggs.)

As for Easter finery, *I* will be wearing whatever I can jam my fat ass into. Which probably means the same A-line skirt I wore last year, topped with the same green blouse. Or maybe, my new linen camp shirt from Old Navy (why can’t this shirt come in some other decent colors, like black or dark green?)

As for my kids – my children look like homeless people on the best of days. I doubt we will be trimming their overgrown, rockstar hair this evening. I will be happy if I can get them into decent, collared shirts, and their “nice” shoes (read: fashionable sneaker-y type dress shoes) with a minimum of screaming and tantrums.

And even happier if I can get them to keep those clothes on to go to Grandma’s for Easter dinner.

For which I am making a lemon pound cake.

And taking my knitting along. (I am making this. In purple and lime green and turquoise. For a college friend’s first baby.)

Because the only thing more boring than the “12 Days of Christmas” sing-along we are required to participate in on Christmas Eve? The plastic egg hunt for the kids at Easter dinner.

So, happy Easter to all of you who celebrate it.

Happy Passover to the appropriate people (although, really? Happy? What with the plagues and whatnot, happy is not necessarily the greeting I would choose. IS it Happy? Ah, my friend D to the rescue: Hag Sameyach.)

And as I have decided to begin my own Easter tradition, here: have some David Sedaris: Jesus Shaves.

“The virgin birth, the resurrection, and the countless miracles - my heart expanded to encompass all the wonders and possibilities of the universe.
A bell, though, that's fucked up.”