Too busy meal planning, list-making, grocery-shopping.

Too busy chopping Monday’s roast chicken for tonight’s black bean casserole (aka Mexican Lasagna) and making three different lunches.

I voted today. What, is that not enough for you people? Jeez.

Too busy making Parker house rolls and roasting a chicken and washing two loads of laundry. And then I have a sexy sexy Fill Out Flexible Spending Account Forms date with my spouse after dinner.

I was too busy waiting for the Steelers game to finish so I could put our paper to bed.

So. Let’s recap: Iain had arm surgery on Mackie’s birthday. Both events turned out fine. Iain now has a badass scar on the crook of his elbow and Mackie doesn’t appear to be scarred at all.

While Iain recovered, I spent the next week cleaning, packing and preparing for our weeklong family vacation to Vermont, where my brother and his beautiful fiance were getting married. We stuffed the minivan to the gills, buckled everyone in, and instructed Sue Ellen Magellan (our dour GPS system) to beam us up.

Two days of travel, 600 miles, countless restaurant meals with a nine-month-old baby who, bless her independent little chubby-cheeked heart, WILL NOT BE CONTAINED, and we arrived in the Green Mountain State, which was so beautiful that I immediately applied for citizenship. Vermont citizenship. Doesn’t exist, so we got a hotel instead.

Hotel air conditioning, bouncy beds, indoor pool, free coffee, no discernible bed bugs. THANK YOU, VISA. I AM NEVER LEAVING. Somebody even comes around to make your bed for you.

Let’s see. My sister-in-law, Zoe, and her family invited us over to their verdant artist compound for dinner one night; we visited a state park; we chatted with lots of family we never get to see; more swiming; the rehearsal (my boys were ring bearers/bell ringers), a rehearsal dinner; amazing Vermont food.

For two nights we stayed with my siblings in the home of a family friend, whose home was so inspiring that I could write a three-page essay on the way it made me feel and the changes I wanted to make to our lives. We saw my brother, Matt, marry Zoe in a glorious, sunshine-filled outdoor ceremony of love. Glad I was wearing waterproof mascara. Parenting three kids at a wedding reception was not easy, but facilitated muchly by the existence of an adjoining field in which to run and holler and the selfless help of people who were willing to hold a squirming Molly. There was dancing. Cake. Fireworks. More dancing. Some wine intervention, which made for a funny but not-suitable-for-print story. Then packing, brunch, and 600 miles home.

Immediately upon our return, we set about making a mess of our kitchen.The essay-worthy house we stayed in was the biggest impetus, although the bare, drywall-mudded ceiling we’d been living with for months (since the pipes above leaked this spring) was also, obviously, a factor. We tore out the laughably-dated brown vinyl floor, pulled up the plywood piece by jagged piece, and scraped off the undoubtedly lead-riddled and crumbling adhesive mysteriously coating the original hardwood underneath. We painted the floor and polyurethaned it, which kept us out of the kitchen for like three straight days, which was two and a half longer than expected. We painted the walls and hung a shelf and I scrubbed everything to a dull gleam and suddenly it was Monday again, a whole week of vacation up in dust.

Last week Iain went back to work at some summer institue thing, Owen began attending day camp, I went back to work, and it was like the long, arduous school year never ended. Cooking, cleaning, shuttling, wrangling, feeding, laundry, deadlines, start times, pickups, naps — It’s July today, and I’d really, really like to get more than five hours of sleep and spend a lazy day enjoying either A.) my delighful family or B.) a day without my delightful family.

I wrote this post while Molly was taking a 45-minute nap and the boys were getting their hair cut, and Molly just woke up and the boys just got home with their lollipops, and so none of my 87 camera-card pictures are going to grace this post, and I hope you understand.

Viva “summer”!

He’ll go under the knife about noon. Before he goes in, we’ll celebrate Mackie’s birthday with breakfast cupcakes and presents and grandparents.

Mackie will turn four at 3:10 p.m., four years after being induced and coaxed gently into the world following a tidy eight hours (even!) of labor.

I am glad to live in the modern era, where tendons can be reattached willy-nilly and overdue babies are firmly but kindly drawn forth.

Mostly I am glad to have these two guys in my life.

To what end, I may candidly ask myself. I don’t know. I guess just to pop in here to tell you how good it feels to take a day off from housework to sit on the porch swing with the baby monitor and my Kindle for an hour. Veddy, veddy nice.

I also found a post on mom101’s blog that cheered me up a bit. Something about “doing it all” and then everyone in comments confessing what they dont do. I’ll update that with a link soon.

Update: here is the link.

Ok. Time for coffee. More later.

Today I did a load of laundry, cooked, cleaned, yadda blah blah. In the scant hour and a half between Molly’s bottle and her next nap, I took her to Target with me, because Iain can’t really manage her with one arm, because she is crazy. She is a crazy baby. She is constantly crawling, wiggling, jibbling, punching, slapping, chewing, drooling, grabbing, standing, pulling, insert disruptive verb here. So if I wanted to go to Target, she needed to come with me, so come she did.

I was there to try on dresses. My brother is getting married soon and I needed some things to wear to brunches and suchlike that aren’t cutoff jeans or yoga pants or pinstriped trousers or a bathrobe, which are basically the only things I wear ever, I mean like with a shirt, because I do wear shirts. I don’t know why I only listed pants. If you can’t tell by now this is what English majors call a stream-of-consciousness piece of writing. So. I am trying on dresses which in itself is a cruel endeavor because not only have I had three children but one of them was a ten-pound baby and my body is nothing if not utterly wrecked. But I still have to appear in public wearing, as mentioned, something other than a bathrobe, so — dresses! Revolting. First of all, as hypnotic as Target’s influence is on suburban mothers such as myself, the quality of their sartorial selections is on par with, say, business envelopes, which is to say both a Target dress and a business envelope will melt in the rain though technically both can be used to cover one’s nakedness, supposing you had enough business envelopes.

Every dress I tried looked awful on me, so with Molly screaming and beating her chest and chewing on my keys and calling out loudly to see if there might be other similarly discontented babies in the vicinity I managed to choose the three least eye-gougingly revolting ones before she finally melted into a Molly Patented Stage Three Tantrum at the cash register and home we went, trailing fumes of exasperation.

Then, for a change, I cooked and cleaned some more, did the weekly grocery shop (we’re having pork chops on Tuesday! Stay tuned!), ate dinner with my darling family, pouted at my husband like a little kid, rode my bike down River Road to feel the wind in my hair, panted back up River Road like the out-of-shape blob that I am, supervised my children’s bicycling for a few minutes, bathed Molly, fed her a bottle, and bathed the boys.

And then Owen read me a book. SkippyJon Jones In The Doghouse. He did the Spanish accents and everything and sometimes you just have to sit there and watch your kid be amazing for fifteen minutes in order for you petulant mood to disappear. Also Iain said I looked nice in dress No. 3, so that helped.

And here we are, blogging and eating hummus on tortilla chips before bed. Thanks for humoring me thus far, Supa Friends. Or Friend. It’s OK if you want to bow out of reading this for the next few weeks because honestly I can’t promise it’s going to be any more interesting than this. Good to write, pointless to read. Although I will update you on Ol’ One-Arm on Tuesday (pork chop night! Send recipes!)

G’night.