Hi. So. Day two of Nablopomo, introductory expositional post out of the way. Now the real writing begins.*

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m going to try blogging every day this month. This is because I do like to write. I like to smash words together and type them out with my fingers. I like the feel of my fingers flying over a keyboard. I like that one time in a million when my monkey-typing manages to make someone laugh. And since I spend a large portion of my days feeling fraught and thwarted and wrung-out, I thought it would be nice to do something for myself that wasn’t running away to Toronto.

*Ha ha, I said “real writing” up there. Sorry to have misled you.

Anyway, so my theme this month is Why I Can’t Write. I thought about posting thirty pictures of Molly in a row, but that seemed kind of unfair and a little like cheating.

So here’s just one, because jesus is she cute.

Baby fish face!!

Parenting her is a full-time job. It’s like forty full-time jobs, especially after parenting a compliant baby like Owen and a snuggly one like Mac.

She is so completely herself, so smart and beautiful and chubby and cute and determined. But she is like no baby I have ever known. To come at it from the side, these are the books on my bookshelf right now: The Fussy Baby, The Strong-Willed Child, and Easy Home Repair. Girl is TOUGH. Do you know the Honey Badger? Molly is The Baby Badger. She does not give a shit.

She doesn’t brook any shit, either. She only naps for about an hour, maybe an hour and a half total each day. The rest of the time she is screaming and running and thrashing and tearing things apart and shrieking and smearing her boogie nose on things and flinging food on the floor and crying and tugging on my pantsleg and pushing her brother in the face and so on. She will not do cosleeping, she will not do snuggles. She will only stay in your arms if you stand up and let her use you like a mule to get to difficult-to-reach places. These characteristics make it somewhat (OK, unbelievably) difficult to enjoy any of the hobbies I once worked into my life of caring for babies. Even pulling out my phone to tap nonsense into Twitter means locking myself into the bathroom with her screaming on the other side of the door. My hands are full and my attention is split in a hundred directions from the time I get up until the time I go to work.

But I also know (when I am rested enough to take the longview) that this girl is going to kick the whole world’s ass when she grows older, because she is amazing, and it’s not her fault she came along when her mother was ill-prepared to parent such a spitfire. It has been said: “You are not managing an inconvenience, you are raising a human being.” I am an incredibly selfish and shortsighted person who values peace, quiet and copious free time, so when I read that I was chastened.

So what if I can’t indulge my hobbies? I’m raising three awesome little humans. My malformed knitting and incoherent monkey-babble can wait until they are teenagers and I have nothing better to do. As the old ladies at the grocery store remind me, that day will come sooner than I expect. And then I’ll be hobbling around Giant Eagle, looking for other babies to poke, and I might as well enjoy my own baby while she’s here and pokable.

So bring on the shrieking and the power struggles, because they are also accompanied by the wobbly steps and the fish faces and the big, smiling, slobbery kisses. Bring on all of it, and let this sweet and spunky little girl teach me to let go and just enjoy my crazy life, already.

Dawn til dusk, daily, I’m taking care of the kids, but they make it so worthwhile. Owen is reading comic books like they’re all going to be burned tomorrow; Cormac is enjoying a rekindled love of dressing up in old Halloween costumes, and Molly is *thisclose* to fully crawling.

Every day I think to myself, “I can’t believe I have three kids. I can’t believe I have three kids.”

They are all still so little and beautiful and cuddly and delicious. Nerve-wracking and crazy-making and attention-demanding goes with the territory, I suppose, so no need to mention it here. I enjoy life so much more when I ignore the filth we live in and focus on how happy they make me. Some days require more of an effort than others, but I do manage it, every day. You can see that they make it easy:

Or maybe you can’t. Maybe you had to be there; maybe you just have to be their mother, to see the great feats of courage and compassion and love and humor and forgiveness they manage, every day. You don’t know love until you’ve been loved by, forgiven by, and occasionally held at swordpoint by my children.

I hope that as they grow up — when they grow up — they know, somewhere deep in their all-grown-up hearts, how much I love their little child selves, and how lucky I feel, deep inside where life’s Serious Emotions are kept, to be their mother. Maybe I don’t say it enough; maybe my sighs are a little too audible when I’m cleaning baby barf off my favorite sweater. (Maybe I’m … imperfect.) But I hope they know and love and forgive me for it anyway. They’re pretty amazing like that, and I’m not just saying that because they’ve got me at swordpoint.

So there was much new-mom wringing of hands, and weeping at tiny lead aprons, and wondering what I did wrong, that my chubby six-month old looked so skinny at two years old.

Fast forward two years, and the same pediatrician was calmly telling me that Cormac was about to fall off the growth charts. He was in the fifth percentile for weight and height. He was (and is) a slender, slim little bugger. But before she could say “pediatric endocrinologist,” we had moved from Baltimore to Pennsylvania.

During his first checkup in our new town, I fearfully broached the subject of his “inadequate” growth. Will he need shots? What are we going to do? The doctor looked me up and down. “What are you, about five-three? five-four? Looks like he got your genes. HE’S FINE.”

Fast forward three years, and Molly is getting her two-month well-child checkup. She weighs twelve pounds, two ounces, and she is 24 and a half inches long — meaning she’s put on about two pounds and two inches in two months. She’s in the 95th percentile for height and weight.

95TH percentile. Granted, she’s only two months old, but it just feels weird to have a baby on the other end of the scale. Mac, I could just drop into my kangaroo sling and barely notice he was there. Molly, well, lifting her is like lifting an adorable, floppy bowling ball. She’s reassuringly, refreshingly fat. And she still might slim down alarmingly around age two, but at least I’ll know to expect it.

Genetics is funny, isn’t it? The same two people, the same diet, the same pregnancies, can lead to such different results. Kinda makes you think that we don’t have as much control over this stuff as we thought.

And they’re fine, too, the kids, which is so hard to remember when you get caught up in the numbers. Healthy. Growing the way their DNA wants them to. For example, Owen finally got his growth spurt, at age five. His father’s genetic contribution is now evident, as his legs practically doubled in length overnight. He totters around on his stilt-like stems much like a giraffe, albeit one with an unrelenting Lego obsession. He’s still shorter than his best friend, and probably a lot of other kids in his class (sorry, tyke) but there’s no doubt whose child he is. All leg and no torso, whereas I think Mac will end up like me — all torso and no legs. Again, sorry, tyke.

Anyway, Molly is two months old, growing into her own person. She seems very mellow and sweet to me. Except when she’s trying to fall asleep, when she screams and flails one arm like she’s trying to start an invisible lawn mower that’s on fire. She sleeps in her own crib, swaddled within an inch of her life in a Miracle Blanket, which could very well lead me to a religious conversion. She still has dark blue eyes and dark hair and perfectly smooth cheeks and adorable Spock ears. I love her little face. She smiles and coos now and chews her hands and seems to enjoy the toys dangling in front of her on her bouncy seat. I have to physically restrain the boys from kissing her forehead 100 million times an hour.

And today we’re bringing her, and her skinny, protective older brothers, to Ohio for Thanksgiving, for a little fattening up, seeing as I have the long weekend off from work*. I hope you all have a terrific Thanksgiving, unless you are Canadian, in which case I missed the ball on that benediction, sorry.

*Going back to work has been a complete non-issue. She’s still sleeping at night, I haven’t fallen face-first into my keyboard yet, and we’ll still be able to make that dratted minivan payment. Victory is mine!

I hope you’ll forgive the delay in announcing her arrival (I’ve been a little busy):

Please welcome to the planet Molly Margaret, who was born at 1:14 p.m. on September 20, weighing ten pounds and one ounce, and measuring 22 inches long.

We are all so psyched she’s here.

If you’re into birth stories (and if you’re anything like me you can’t pass one up), click for more:

I went in last Monday morning for what my OB calls a “P-gel,” a hormone application intended to jumpstart labor in women who are already damn close and pacing the streets. I had the same procedure done the Thursday previous to no avail, and had little hope that this one would take. Frankly, I was convinced Miss Fetus was in situ for the long haul, and wouldn’t arrive until she was dragged out kicking and screaming via an induction, which was scheduled for Friday.

Well! Wouldn’t you know. I was already having contractions 15 minutes apart when they hooked me up to the monitors, and after the doc applied the gel, they jumped to every 5 minutes. So by 9 a.m. Monday morning, we knew it was the real thing. I was admitted to the hospital, got my bracelet, made a few calls, and tried to wrap my head around the fact that the baby, while six days “late,” was still coming earlier than I had planned.

I ruminated on this for about 15 minutes, until Iain arrived, breathless, having sped over from work. Soon after that I politely requested the epidural, having already reached 5 cm and not wanting to get too much farther down the road without one. I knew beforehand that I was going to have to be hooked up to an IV antibiotic for the baby’s sake, so I was planning on graciously accepting most interventions, of which the epidural was one.

The epidural was inserted, and I felt much better from the waist down. But between my waist and my ribs I felt the top half of every single contraction. I’ve heard of back labor, but this felt like “rib labor.” Every contraction felt like it was about to crack my ribs on the left side. I kept trying to push everything down because it hurt. I found out later why that was.

The nurses did a few checks between 9 and, say, 12:30, when my parents arrived. My dad waited outside and my mother in the labor room with Iain and I. Every time the nurses checked me and reported my progress, I got more and more excited, because I knew this eons-long pregnancy was almost over. By the time the nurse finally marked me at a 10, the baby was dropping pretty quickly. They paged the doctor and told me to push. I pushed. The nurse looked over and said, “Oh, there’s the head. Stop pushing! Stop pushing!”

We waited until the doctor suited up and then I was allowed to push again. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Pushing with the other two babies was nothing compared to the work I had to do to get this one out. But it only took two pushes (two very long, very difficult pushes) — one for her head, and the other for her linebacker shoulders. I smiled the whole way. It hurt, and I was exhausted, but that moment when you’re pushing it’s like Christmas Eve.

The doctor caught her and exclaimed. I don’t remember what she said specifically, but it was definitely a word of surprise — she had to use two hands to hold the baby up.

My mom cut the cord, Iain held my hand, they showed me my beautiful baby girl, and I couldn’t stop smiling. Then they put her on the scale and called over to me: “Ten pounds, one ounce.”

TEN POUNDS.

I busted out laughing. TEN POUNDS. I just pushed out a ten pound baby. I had been carrying around a ten pound baby. Ten pounds plus! No wonder I was so miserable! No wonder I had rib labor! No wonder I had to work so hard for those shoulders!

And I finally got to hold her, and she was perfect, and we finally got to say her name: Molly Margaret.

She’s a week old today, and really just the world’s most agreeable baby. Her brothers are constantly talking to Baby Molly, and hearing baby talk come out of the mouths of Darth Vader and Captain Hook is really something you should experience for yourself sometime.

I am recovering better than should be expected (TEN POUNDS ONE OUNCE!) and celebrated my 31st birthday yesterday with my three healthy children and my awesome husband and a big yellow cake with chocolate frosting.

Things are pretty good these days.

He’s in afternoon kindergarten. The bus is supposed to arrive at 12:14. Last night we packed his school bag and hung it up by the front door. By 10:30 a.m. today he had dressed himself (handsomely, I might say), with his name-tag lanyard already around his neck. by 11:15 a.m. he was eating a well-balanced lunch and by 11:54 a.m. he was brushing his teeth.  Plenty of time! My plans are working!

But then (as always in my house) one minute before we were going leave, there was a clothing mishap, and he had to change. Then I noticed his handsome shirt had a hole in it. And his new socks looked ridiculous with the shorts he had to change into. So we had to come up with a brand-new First Day of School outfit, and I should have bought him new clothes, and nothing matched, and it’s 92 degrees outside and all his summer clothes have been through a summer of playing and camping and marshmallows, and I can’t send you to school in that! And why don’t these socks fit? and why didn’t I think to buy you a new outfit and then forbid you to wear it until 12:01 p.m.? You’ll have to wear this. Hurry! Shoot, those socks won’t work either (“But mom, I really don’t think we have time to change.”). Where are your shoes! COME ON LET’S GO!

Run out the door, hoping for enough time to snap some photos before meeting the bus at the end of the block, forgetting a crucial element: Mackie. And he needs his shoes on to come with us down the street. And he can’t find them. Tear through the basket of shoes by the door until I find something that will fit his feet. OK COME ON LET’S GO. Snap a picture in front of the house; it’s blurry. RRRRRUMBLE. What’s that noise? The BUS? Already? 10 minutes early? Shoot. WAIT WHERE IS IT GOING? HEY! BUS! We’re still a block away and the bus isn’t stopping. Isn’t it supposed to stop? RUN RUN RUN. By God my kid is not missing the bus on the first day of school. As God is my witness! Et cetera. Yelling at Mackie over my shoulder to wait right there on the sidewalk, I’m just going to get Owen across the street to catch the bus. Not a good idea. Mackie is crying, Owen is maybe freaking out a little but still running faster than his 9.5 -months pregnant mom, we jay-walk (jay-run) across the street to the corner, the bus keeps driving forward — did the driver even see us? STOP DRIVING, YOU STUPID DRIVER. We reach the bus and Owen runs right up the steps and disappears. The bus sits. And sits. And sits. What the rock? The bus sits. I at least try to find the top of Owen’s head through the windows, and my heart is pounding, and the baby is protesting this little sprint. My neighbor reaches my side, having escorted Mackie across the street to stand with us, because she’s an angel (and what was I thinking, leaving him on the other side of the road?!) and he’s crying, because his mother and brother just ran off without him to catch a bus, and baby, I’d cry too.

The bus sits. WHAT THE HELL. Why did I run? If I had known the bus was just going to SIT THERE, across the street, stressing me out; if I had known it would be 10 minutes early, I could have planned everything 10 minutes earlier. We still would have had a last-minute emergency, but at least I still could have, would have, taken my sweet time and kissed my big boy goodbye, taken a picture with my cell phone to send to my mother, soaked up the importance of such a big day — the first day of school! Leaving me, on a bus! Doing his own thing! — instead of trying to catch his eye through the window, consoling my youngest, feeling like this is not the way the first day of kindergarten is supposed to happen. Instead of standing here, panting, heart racing, cursing my own inability to be safely early to anything.

Realizing that my boy, if left to his own devices, would have been calmly standing at the bus stop, 15 minutes early, in mis-matched socks and a clean (albeit holey) shirt.

“… um. Eggs are for cooking. What do you want an egg for?”

“Well, ninjas in the old days used to take an egg and poke holes in it with needles and blow out the insides and then fill it with broken glass to use for a weapon.”

“…”

“I PROMISE I wouldn’t throw it at any PEOPLE!”

So we bought a minivan last week. Ay! It’s two years old, a trade-in from the Jaguar/Volvo/Land Rover dealership, which makes me laugh because that is the first and last time I will ever have cause to be on the grounds of a freaking Jaguar dealership. When we test-drove it it hadn’t even been detailed yet, and when I tell you this vehicle was owned by a multiple-child family, trust me, I’ve seen the evidence. (And my future. And my future is covered in mysterious brown stains.)

It’s a used Sienna, it’s silver, it will seat all of my children and their car seats and their friends. And the diaper bag. And the groceries. And when I go to the thrift store I know I’ll be able to haul my finds home. (That could be a good thing or a bad thing.) But it is weird to walk out to a parking lot and cast around for a little sedan and realize the vehicle you’re looking for has SOCCER MOM stamped all over it. It does require a small change in one’s self-regard.

I’m about 45 minutes away from selling the Cav. Cross your fingers for me. I’m selling it to a former law enforcement bigwig who will then fix it up and give it to his niece for college. It will be a far better end than Ruth, my ‘88 K-car wagon, got, which was to explode in a heap of smoke in Lot 6 on the campus of BGSU.

The new van doesn’t have a name yet, so I’m taking suggestions! You all did such a gnice job gnaming my gnome (“Gnathan”), I thought I’d give you another shot.

Luckily for me, when he wasn’t yelling he slept very sweetly.

And I mean sweetly.

As he grew, his hair did too. I miss those baby curls.

Though maybe I let it get a little out of control.

When we cut it, I admit I did cry. But as different as he looked to me at the time, this is Mackie as we know him and love him now.

So grown up, but still all Boy.

Some of you may be acquainted with Mackie. If so, you know he definitely has Opinions. Many of them have to do with being photographed. I don’t let it stop me.

Anyway, he’s cute when he’s mad.

Over the last year he’s grown so much. His vocabulary is endlessly amazing; his costume changes purely inspired; and his view on the world makes my day brighter (though sometimes louder).

He loves Batman, pirates, legos, cars, and trains. He adores his big brother. He longs piningly for baby birds and the neighbor’s cat, Charlie — Mackie begs me for a pet twice a week — though consistently turns down Iain’s offer of a pet snake (good boy!). He likes to make up stories. He potty trained himself seemingly overnight a few months ago, and I have to say, it makes me laugh to bump into him in the bathroom in the middle of the night, both of us squinty eyed in the light and hopping on one foot.

He is as slender as ever, just like the day he was born, and his blue eyes regularly arrest old ladies at the supermarket. He is by turns charming and devilish, like a good little Gemini. One minute he’s curled on your lap stroking your hair, and the next he’s got a sword, an eyepatch and a license to kill.

He’s one-of-a-kind and I’m so glad he’s mine.

Happy Three to you, Cormac Louis Macaroon Looney Roon Toon Tooney. I love you. More than you can guess. More than you will ever know.

Actually, no, not breaking news. I think I broke this on Facebook. Or you could say it broke when I told my mother and my neighbor.

BUT life wouldn’t be right if I didn’t make a big fancy deal on my Actual Blog: We’re having a GIRL!

A GIRL.

WE ARE HAVING A GIRL. CAPSLOCK.

You may have noticed that I only have boy children. I have a house full of Legos and trains and cars and trucks; bins full of jeans with holes in the knees, walls reverberating with BAM BAM BAM PEW PEW YOU’RE DEAD! I have been informed not only of the The Pink, but of Disney Princesses, and lo, I am scared.

But frankly, I’m majorly psyched, too. Hair to braid! Dresses to sew! A new nursery to decorate (though I think it’s staying blue, which only suits because Owen started his life with us in a pink bedroom). Maybe she’ll be the quiet booky kind, and we can quietly read books together. Or I’ll teach her to knit, since my boys won’t hold still long enough. Or she’ll hate knitting, too, but look so cute in overalls and a ballcap when her dad teaches her how to fish.

Twenty-five years from now, I’ll have a shopping partner, someone to call me on the phone over coffee at 10 a.m. I’ll be her someone to vent to when she’s 20 weeks pregnant and feeling as big as a house.

Honestly? I thought this one was a boy. I had visions of My Three Sons, of my troop of blue-eyed guys, wrestling and mowing the lawn and disappearing in a blur of dust and mud, like Pig Pen with six legs. Three brothers, like my cousins; three brothers, like my dad with my two uncles. I was mentally prepared for three to a room, bunk beds, being outnumbered.

Now I have to readjust that vision. Well, maybe I don’t have to; I suppose I need to see what kind of person she is before I start assigning her dollies and Mary Janes and dance recitals. She just might be into dirt and mud and tagging along with her brothers. Or maybe she’ll be into both dirt and dollies, and it’ll be my job just to be the open arms (with the washcloth in the back pocket) at the end of the day when all three of my kids troop home.

Meanwhile, Mackie, age 3 minus six weeks, is enmeshed in a love-hate relationship with insects and all creepy crawly things. He can no longer eat lunch outside because the hymenoptera which are currently buzzing around the yard absolutely terrorize him. Just this morning he encountered an ant in the kitchen and screamed like Cujo was two feet away and licking his chops. And yet? While we were digging in the garden yesterday, he dug up a grub as big as my finger. He clutched it close to him, befriended it, brought it round to show everybody. (He also maybe hugged it too hard, because I heard a chorus of “ewwww”s from the rest of the family and something about “guts.”) The next day, he realized he must have misplaced his dear friend Grub, because he was suddenly inconsolable about his absence and insistent on digging up the (freshly mulched) flower bed to find him. I was loathe to explain that the most we would find would be Grub’s rapidly decomposing remains. I think the take-away here is that as long as it doesn’t have a stinger, he’s willing to love it, study it, and bring it way too close to my face.