The twins were sick last week, too. They had snotty noses and nasty hack-up-a-lung coughs. Both of which kept waking them up at night. Which meant I was waking up at night.

One night – they all sort of run together after a while, you know? – Ben was up at ten, at midnight, at two, and again at four. If I’d needed to take medication every two hours, this would have been a quite useful schedule, but alas, I was only allowed two Tylenol every six hours. (I was also told to get lots of rest. Clearly the people who advise such things do not live with young children.)

At four a.m., I dragged myself out of bed – again – and into the kids’ room, where Ben was lying in his crib coughing and crying. It was really quite pitiful, and if I hadn’t been up twice already I might have looked upon him with compassion. As it was, I was feeling just a smidge annoyed with him.

Still, I’m his mom. So I shoved my irritation down, picked him up, and offered him some water. He spit it all down his front – and mine. Okay, so obviously he didn’t want water.

I sat in the rocking chair, held him close, and rocked. Maybe we could both fall asleep this way. He shrieked. He tried to climb my head. He pulled my hair. Apparently this was not going to work out the way I’d hoped.

I stood, bounced him in my arms, sang to him softly (well, as softly as one can sing through gritted teeth). He kept crying, kept grabbing my hair and pulling it. I kept bouncing him and singing. He slowly quieted. When he was almost asleep, I put him back in his crib and covered him with a blanket, patted his bum a time or two.

He woke up and started wailing. My bum patting turned quickly to bum whacking. Thump thump thump. Go to sleep, Ben. Please. For the love of God, just go to sleep. He cried harder. I whacked his bum harder, faster, hoping it would get him to sleep sooner.

It didn’t. He cried harder, louder. Shut up! For the love of God, just SHUT! UP! Pretty soon I was thumping his bum so hard and so fast that Doug heard it. Or maybe he just heard the wailing baby. Or maybe I was starting to sob, too. It’s possible. Whatever the reason, he came into the kids’ room at a near run.

“Hey,” he said, “I’m here. I’ve got it. Go on back to bed.”

I crept back to our bedroom, crawled under the covers, and pulled the pillow over my face. That helped drown out the sound of Ben’s wailing, but it couldn’t help shut out the dueling voices in my head.

Voice 1: I suck. I’m a terrible mother.

Voice 2: Oh please. It’s not like you were beating him.

Voice 1: But love is patient and kind. A truly loving mother wouldn’t whack her son’s bum like that, wouldn’t scream at him in her head.

Voice 2: Remember when Jack was a baby, how you used to drop f-bombs at the top of your lungs when he wouldn’t sleep? I’d say screaming in your head shows a lot of restraint, growth even.

Voice 1: I should get up and go apologize to him.

Voice 2: Are you insane? He’s a baby. And you’re exhausted. Get over it and go to sleep.

After a few rounds of this useful internal debate, Doug was back.

I pulled my head out from under the pillow. “That was fast,” I said. “Is he asleep?”

“Yep.” He slipped into bed beside me.

“What did you do?”

He grinned, his teeth a flash of white in the dark. “I used the tranq gun.”

I fell asleep dreaming about the millions we’ll make on Doug’s patented No-Harm Baby Tranquilizer Gun. Every mom in America will buy one, and we can finally move to a larger house, one with a children’s wing where Ben can cry every two hours and I won’t hear him.

But it wasn’t.

You see, it took both my in-laws and Luke’s godfather just to get the twins fed, diapered, and dressed for bed. Forget dinner or dishes or anything not baby-related.

When I got home at 6:15, dinner was half-finished, the table was half-set, and both babies were still awake. My father-in-law was rocking Ben who was, and I quote, “completely wired.” My mother-in-law was patting Luke’s bum as he lay wailing in his crib.

It took me about half an hour to calm the boys down and get them to sleep (with bum-patting assistance from my father-in-law; it’s much harder to simultaneously bum-pat now that the boys are in separate cribs). Meanwhile, Doug and his mom finished dinner, Jack set the table, and Jane and Uncle Sprague played in the urban wilderness behind our house.

At dinner, Sprague said, “I have a whole new level of respect for you, Kimberlee. It took two of us just to get Ben’s pajamas on him.”

My mother-in-law seconded. “I don’t know how you get them to bed and get dinner when you’re here by yourself.”

To be fair, I’m never here by myself. Jack often helps with dinner and always sets the table. Jane sings to the babies and holds toys over them while I’m dressing them, which keeps them happy and on their backs so I don’t have to wrestle Ben to the bed.

And I’ve been doing this every day for nearly nine months now. It’s a lot easier when you have a routine, when you’re used to it.

Still, it was nice to hear their words of affirmation. It was better than nice. It made me feel like a rock star, like a full on domestic goddess. Just call me Vesta.

*****

I invite you to come back later this week for some off-schedule posts: Thursday through Sunday I’ll have short reflections on the Triduum. Among the holiest of days in the Christian year, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday each deserve their own post. As, of course, does Easter. I hope you’ll join me.

Last week, we moved them out of our room and into the kids’ room. It might be the best parenting decision we’ve ever made. All of a sudden, they started sleeping eight or nine hours a night.

Which means I’m sleeping eight or nine hours a night. (Oh joy, oh bliss, oh night divine.) Several people, upon hearing this marvelous news, have asked if I feel like a new woman.

Actually, not so much. I feel like a very, very tired woman. After three consecutive nights of good sleep, I’m more exhausted than I’ve been since I started living better through chemistry.

My doctor says it takes about two weeks of good sleep to feel immediate relief and two to three months of good sleep to fully recover. If this new turn of events continues (knock on wood), that means I’ll be feeling like that new woman by the ides of March and be fully rested by the time we go on vacation in May.

That’s the hope, anyway.

In addition to these three nights of blessed sleep, I’m also grateful for (in no particular order, except the order in which I wrote them in my journal):

My red hoodie.

Moleskine journals and datebooks.

An article I wrote last year got accepted for publication – and they’re paying me for it!

Those little blue pills.

Morning hugs from Jane.

Jack’s laugh.

Baby skin, so soft.

Paperwhites in bloom.

Sunshine!

An email from my friend in New Zealand.

Ephesians memory work.

My dishwasher.

Did I mention sunshine?!?

Hot tea soothing my sore throat.

12 pairs of baby socks from my mother-in-law, who pitied the poor twinfants: they were down to one pair each.

New-to-us books from the library.

Michaela is done with her year of intensive chemo.

The Jesus Prayer.

My rocking chair.

Doug, always.

Psalm 148.

Ben has had a cough for nearly a month now, and Luke is a little mucus factory with snot slugs trailing from his nose into his mouth. I can’t wipe it away fast enough. At least it’s not green.

But the snot isn’t the worst part. I change a dozen diapers a day, half of them filled with poo, so bodily excretions just don’t faze me the way they used to.

No, the worst part is the sleep, or rather, the lack of sleep. They are up and up and up at night, poor things, coughing and crying, and Doug and I are wearing out. We thought we were nearing the point when we would be able to sleep seven or even (oh bliss) eight hours on a consistent basis. And then, this, their worst colds yet, and we’re back to sleeping in snatches.

Even though I’m exhausted, I am also grateful because I am only exhausted. Always in the past, lack of sleep equaled anxiety. But thanks to my happy pills, the sleep-debt isn’t causing my anxiety to resurface. I’m dragging and a bit spacey, but I’m not a huddled mass of weepy mama jelly in the middle of the floor.

That is cause for great rejoicing.

Still, I’d like to get some sleep.

I can hardly believe it’s already been six months. I can hardly believe it’s only been six months.

They’re sleeping better at night. They’re more interactive during the day – smiling, laughing, reaching for my hair and holding onto it for dear life. They’ve started solid food (and boy do they have the poops to prove it. Pee-yew.).

They’ve begun acknowledging each other’s existence, which is a relief. For awhile there, I wondered if they were even aware that there were two of them. Last night, they were holding hands while I breastfed them. It was pretty darn sweet, sort of made up for the fact that I had two babies lying on my chest sucking the life out of me.

Last week I met a dad of twins (and two singletons, just like us) at a birthday party. He appeared normal and healthy. He smiled. He laughed. I watched him and thought, that is my future. I talked to him and he said having four children was a blast. And, like so many other parents of twins, he told me the first six months are the hardest. Glory be! We’re through the worst of it.

Of course, he also said the second six months are the next hardest. So maybe we’re not through the worst quite yet.

Still, I try to console myself that we’re halfway through the hardest year. I try to believe that it will only get better from here.

I try to remember that I now have whole hours in the course of a given day when I think that maybe I haven’t ruined my life after all. Maybe that dad was right and having four children will be a blast. Maybe I’ll figure out how to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour. Maybe that will even happen before Jack leaves for college.

There are other hours in the day, though, and those aren’t always quite so upbeat, hours in which I wonder if the best years of my life are behind me, or if this is as good as it gets, or if there is meaning to life. Luckily, those hours pass, and then I am more or less okay again.

Of course, okay is a relative term. My margins still feel really thin, like the least little thing could set me over the edge into not-okay.

Today, for instance, I cried two different times, for reasons I can no longer remember. My mom is here, visiting for two weeks, and all I could think was, How have I done this without her? How will I do this without her?

But I have, somehow. And I will again.

After all, I’ve made it through the hardest months. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

I assured her it wasn’t the little blue pills that were keeping me awake. It was the babies. They’d been up and up and up like newborns all week, wanting to eat every couple hours.

“Stop feeding them!” she said. “They’re almost six months old. They can get through the night without food.”

So we stopped feeding them. Thursday night they cried for three and a half hours. Finally, at five a.m., I gave in and fed them, just to get them to shut up. After all that noise for so long, the silence was deafening.

Friday night was much, much better. They were only up a couple times each for about 20 minutes or so. Hooray for sleep training! This was going to be easier than we thought. We began to dream of actually sleeping at night, all night. Oh bliss.

Or not. Saturday night, Luke cried for an hour.

Sunday night, he cried for an hour and a half. I think he’s defective. This is not the first time I’ve thought that. I can’t decide if I want to send him back for a better model or just cut my losses and put him out on the curb with a free sign around his neck. (Doug informs me that this is illegal and that I would go to jail. Jail? Hm. Would I have my own room?)

Ben, on the other hand, is a dream baby. The past two nights, when he’s woken up, he’s whimpered, maybe wailed once or twice, and then gone back to sleep. This morning I told him, out loud, in front of his brother, that he had achieved favored baby status.

Neither he nor Luke seemed to care. They were too busy sucking on their hands.

Now, if only they would suck on their hands when they wake up at night, we’d all be a lot happier.

I had twins in July.

Five months into this adventure, I am very, very tired. I feel like I am wandering around in a fog; there’s a sort of haze around my brain that makes me feel like it’s wrapped in gauze.

I am waiting—eagerly longing—for the day when the twins sleep through the night. Or, more accurately, for the day when I sleep through the night. I am hoping that a couple weeks of good sleep will remove the gauze from the inside of my skull.

Sometimes I get so caught up in my longing for this future day that I miss the good stuff that’s happening in my life right now. Sometimes I forget to give thanks for the goodness of my life as it is. Sometimes I get frustrated, even angry, that I am so tired. Sometimes I think the tiredness will never end.

Sometimes I get tired of waiting.

To read the rest of today’s post, click here.

I did not. I woke up puking at one a.m. The only night in six months that I could have slept a normal, healthy amount, and I missed it. That’s just cruel.

About a week ago, my feet started tingling. Sometimes my hands tingle, too. My doc says I’m likely compressing a nerve or two from sitting in the same position for hours on end to breastfeed. Rationally, this make sense.

But I am too tired to be rational. I think I am dying. The tingling is the onset of some heretofore undocumented disease that leads quickly and inexorably to death. Every time I notice my feet tingling, I have a panic attack.

So much for not being afraid, eh?

The past few days the anxiety and fear have been debilitating. I had to call for reinforcements, friends to come talk me down and help me care for my children. I feel like a total dork, because I’m just healthy enough to realize I’m being irrational but not healthy enough to stop being irrational.

Last night I came to the astonishing realization that I am sleep deprived. Okay, so I knew that. But I’d never made the connection between the sleep (or lack thereof) and these insanely high levels of anxiety over what ordinarily would be nothing.

I read this on Wikipedia and laughed:

The link between sleep deprivation and psychosis was further documented in 2007 through a study at Harvard Medical School and the University of California at Berkeley. The study revealed, using MRI scans, that lack of sleep causes the brain to become incapable of putting an emotional event into the proper perspective and incapable of making a controlled, suitable response to the event.

Hm. That sounds strangely familiar, though the term “psychotic” is a little harsh, don’t you think? Makes it sound like I shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an axe or a chainsaw.

Psychosis notwithstanding, I feel much better knowing this. Really. Because it means there’s a solution to the whole inability-to-be-rational-when-one’s-feet-tingle thing. It’s called sleep.

Now, if I could just get me some of that.

In the meantime, I’m counting God’s mercies and clinging hard to His grace. Sometimes I actually do this out loud. I sound like Sonny fricking-what’s-his-name from The Apostle as I rant in the car or the kitchen, thanking God for His promises and reminding Him that He needs to flipping do something about them. Like get my babies sleeping.

(If I sound like I’m on speed, it’s because I am. Sleep deprivation causes manic behavior and attention deficit disor – ooh, look at that! It’s shiny! Let’s chase it!)

Anyhoo, here are a few more of what Ann Voscamp calls the endless gifts:

#1176. Snuggling with my daughter.

#1177. Ben’s big grins that light up his whole face. Heck, they light up the whole room.

#1178. Luke’s jerky happy kicks. He does the same jerky motions with his arms, but I don’t know what to call them – punches, perhaps?

#1179. A quiet moment outside after dark, with the wind in my face, and my face toward the sky, and the sky partly cloudy, partly lit by stars and the waning gibbous moon.

#1180. Treetops with only a few leaves dancing in sharply silhouetted relief against the dusky sky.

#1181. My in-laws come every Monday to help me with the kids.

#1182. And every Monday my mother-in-law sweeps my always dirty floors.

#1183. A walk through the neighborhood with just Jack.

#1184. Scuffling through fallen leaves on the sidewalk.

#1185. My husband makes breakfast every morning, so I can get an extra half hour of sleep.

I had grand plans to go down to the basement yesterday morning and drag up the boxes of Advent and Christmas books and decorations.

But at 9:30, I was still in my pajamas, hadn’t had a chance to make my bed, and hadn’t yet taken a shower. When I managed to get both babies to sleep at the same time, I decided I’d better use what few minutes I had to get clean. Getting out the decorations could wait.

I told Jack and Jane to please come get me if the babies started crying, and then I jumped in the shower. When I turned off the water 15 minutes later, I heard not just crying but wailing. I grabbed my towel, wrapped it around me, and as I walked, dripping, to the bedroom, I asked Jack and Jane why they hadn’t come gotten me like I’d asked them to.

Sweet things, they’d tried to pat Luke’s bum and get him back to sleep so they wouldn’t have to interrupt my shower. Sweet, but no cigar.

I picked Luke up and popped him in the swing in the hope that he’d calm down long enough for me to dry off. He didn’t calm down.

Then Ben started crying.

That’s when I realized that the cats had yakked all over my bed.

I stood in the bedroom in my towel, my hair dripping down my back, with a baby yelling in the crib, another one yelling in the next room, and kitty vomit all over my sheets.

Some days are like that.

Needless to say, I still haven’t gotten the boxes of books and decorations out of the basement, but I will. Maybe tomorrow?

In the meantime, here are two lovely Advent resources for those of you who’d like to get past the kitty puke and embrace this season more deeply:

My friend Susan has created a joy-full Advent calendar with a simple activity for each day of Celtic Advent (which started back on November 15).

And over on her blog, Ann Voscamp has Jesse Tree Devotionals available for download.

And I am not talking about the fact that I change two babies’ smelly poopy diapers multiple times a day. No, I’m talking about a whole different pile of poo. Four of them, actually.

Last week, when I took my kids for a walk to the park, I was busily admiring the fall foliage when I rolled the stroller through a pile of doggie doo. A bit later, as I held my daughter’s hand while also steering the stroller across a street, I stepped in a different pile of doggie doo. A little after that, Jack, to avoid running into us, rode his bike into the grass – and through a third pile of doggie doo.

Um, hello? Anyone? There’s a city ordinance that requires you to pick up your doggie’s doo whenever the animal defecates on any property that isn’t yours. That includes the planting strip in front of your house, the sidewalk by the church, and the public park. (It’s called “public” for a reason – because it doesn’t belong to you.) And it’s not just illegal to leave Fido’s poop lying on the ground, it’s also unsanitary and just plain rude. Some poor mother of twins could step in it. Or roll her stroller through it. Or both.

But wait. This story’s not over.

When we got to the park, Jack and I needed to clean off his bike tire because he wanted to ride the bike through the play area, and I didn’t want him trailing dog poop where little kids might put it in their mouths. (I’m pretty low key about what my kids stick in their mouths, but I draw the line at fecal matter. Oh, and cigarette butts. I figure other parents probably have even firmer boundaries.)

We tried using sticks to get the poo out of the tire treads, with only marginal success. Then I had a brain wave: diaper wipes! I put the diaper bag on a nearby picnic table and pulled out our changing pad, where we keep the wipes. We used most of them to wipe the tire off, but I saved a few just in case I needed to change a poopy diaper before we got home. After Jack and I sanitized our hands with the alcohol gel I keep with the wipes, I rolled the changing pad up.

Unbeknownst to me, there was doggie doo on my changing pad. Some of it got on my thumb as I rolled up the pad.

No, I had not set the changing pad on the ground.

That’s right. Someone had put their little drop-kick Pekinese or Yorkie up on that table, let the blasted animal poop, and then not bothered to clean it up.

And now it was on my changing pad. And on my hand.

Lucky for me, I still had enough diaper wipes left to clean the dookie off my changing pad, my hand, and even the table.

Lucky for the dog-owners of Seattle, both the boys kept their poop to themselves till we got home. Otherwise I might have had to leave it on the ground.

Or maybe a table.