Polly heads down the sidewalk with a little one on either side, their hands slipped confidently into hers. Shoulders a little rounded: all the reading, the computer games, the growth spurt. Old plaid skirt an inch or two above the knee now, about the length she’d wear it if she went to Catholic school. Yesterday a stranger asked her if she liked being homeschooled and she lit up, answered Oh yes with shining eyes. He works with students her age, this man does, and I could see him comparing—favorably; it was lovely, the way she grinned at her daddy’s jokes and nodded so vigorously when I talked about how much fun we have. Mary did some mild eye-rolling; she finds plenty to complain about, but I know that would be the case if she went to school too. Some temperaments have to wrestle and push, I think. It took me a long time to understand that what she needs is for me to be an angel for her to wrestle with. I wish I were better at it. She is so very strong.

Polly would rather lose an arm than wrestle with me. What she wants is not a sturdy angel but a song of praise, a warm glance, a shared joke.

When she brought the little ones back from their walk this evening, Jack had lost his band-aid. She put him on the counter and hunted for a new one. He took a pinch of air from her cheek and pretended to eat her. That laugh rippled out, and she threw her arms around him and said, “I just love you!” He grinned and bobbed and took another bite.

“Sometimes he just melts me, Mom,” she said.

Oh honey, don’t I know the feeling.

Reinventing this poor old blog again. Need a place to write about what we’re watching (Mr. David Copperfield and I), what I’m reading, whatever.

We’re watching Alias. About halfway through season 2, I think? Via Netflix. Never saw it when it was airing. Love Jennifer Garner, love spyfulness, so this was inevitable viewing for us sooner or later. Am really enjoying it, despite certain eye-rolling flaws. For one thing: it’s so tee-vee. I’m seeing that TV drama has come a long way since the early part of this decade—actually I’m seeing techniques mature quite a bit over the course of these first two seasons. Fewer wide-eyed, gape-mouthed closeups before commercial breaks. I really do love Jennifer Garner, and I like the vulnerability she brings to her badass secret agent awesomeness, but she does do a lot more Shocked Face than I’d think Sydney Bristow really has time for. How can she simultaneously be a superb actress undercover and have a terrible poker face when something catches her by surprise?

I don’t like how the show takes torture so lightly. Characters are brutally tortured and bounce right back. Marshall, Will? (Ha—all we need is a Holly.) Where’s the post-traumatic stress syndrome? The jumpiness, the nightmares, the fearfulness? I have to wonder if this show is part of what dulled society to the horrors of torture (along with 24, oft criticized on this point) in a way that made things like Gitmo and Abu Ghraib easier to ignore. We did ignore them, on the whole.

I’m supposed to be taking a nap right now, but I’m not. It was a Sunday afternoon present from Mr. David Copperfield. He is sweet that way.

I asked the kids to have the laundry put away by the time I came out of my room. It had all been folded and was stacked in neat piles on the sewing table, and I have this crazy notion that I might actually sew something this afternoon. Or next month, whenever.

Just now someone slipped a note under my door. (And it’s a good thing I wasn’t trying to nap because you just KNOW the little shooshing sound of paper sliding on a hardwood floor would have roused me just at that delicious moment when I was sinking into slumber)

All the laundry on the table is YOURS, the note says. Proclaims, one might say. Firmly. Not quite belligerently. Sternly, perhaps. You have assigned us two contradictory objectives, is the subtext. Your instructions cancel each other out, Mother. There is no way we can leave you alone for a little while so you can get some rest AND put away *all* the laundry. It is physically and even metaphysically impossible for us to do everything we are supposed to do at this point in time.

To which I say: Welcome to my world.

It cannot possibly be mid-September already. Before yesterday, the last time I posted to this blog was in August. Of 2007. I don’t understand how that happened. I think it’s possible I still owe thank-you notes for some presents from Christmas ’06.

I had to take my blogroll down because half the links were outdated. I hadn’t noticed before because I do all my blog-reading on Google Reader now. Boy, people sure did move their blogs around a lot this year. Sometimes I wonder if one of the reasons so many stay-at-home moms have blogs now is because of the easy makeoverability. Painting my bedroom is way too overwhelming a project to contemplate. All those books to move, and I’d have to face the herd of dust buffalo under the bed and the dead fly in the corner of the windowsill. I have been avoiding that fly for three months, sort of hoping in the back of my mind that he’ll just, I don’t know, decompose into oblivion or something.

I guess he’ll be there until I delete him. Just like this blog.

Her Royal Highness comes to me with her hand upraised, fingers curled around something that isn’t there.

“Dis my um-rella,” she informs me gravely.

“Oh! That’s your umbrella?” I echo, because that is what mothers are supposed to do for their two-year-olds; that is what the two-year-old expects and, indeed, demands.

But this two-year-old is looking at me like I have an umbrella where my head should be.

“No,” she says in tones of exasperation and bewilderment—how could I be so silly?—”Dis my fish.”

“Who’s the love of my life?” he whispers, snuggling closer, nuzzling my neck.

I arch my eyebrows and glance pointedly at the sleeping toddler on the other side of the bed, her hair tousled and sweaty, her mouth pursed in a little o. He adores her almost past sanity, and we both know it.

“No, she’s the joy of my life,” he says. There’s a pause, while we fill in the words so deeply understood there’s no need to speak them aloud. She’s his joy, I’m his love.

“And she’ll leave me someday,” he says. “For some jackass who doesn’t deserve her.”

I smile, stroke his hair. I hadn’t noticed how much gray there was in it.

“I hate him,” he mutters. He looks like he might bite me, but it wouldn’t be me he was biting. It would be the future.

His face is buried in my hair. “But I love you,” he says. “You are the love of my life.”

I’m not sure if he said it out loud. But I heard it.

The six-year-old, explaining to me why she would have to bite her sister in retaliation, if her sister bit her first: “Daddy said! He said, ‘Do unto others as they do unto you.’ “

Overheard: Child watching a cartoon mouse attempt to cook and eat the Pink Panther.

“That bloodthirsty little lech!”

In fact, I think I will just stop folding them altogether. I mean, our family devotes an entire laundry basket to unmatched socks anyway. Why not just have that be the permanent home for ALL socks? The kids can go fishing every morning. I don’t even care whether they match. My girls go around looking like Punky Brewster half the time anyway.

(Speaking of what not to wear.)

And speaking of speaking of, speaking of Punky Brewster—oh, wait, never mind. I’m getting my former child stars confused. I was going to write about how cool it is that Soleil Moon Frye (aka Punky B) has a blog now, but the person I’m really thinking of is Quinn Cummings. She blogs at The QC Report and has a line of (I love her for this) baby carriers.

It’s a bit stupid of me to confuse them; they’re a decade apart. Quinn is about a year older than I am. I wonder if we had babies around the same time. I tried a bunch of different baby carriers with my first child…a Guatemalan rebozo, a Baby Bjorn, a hip-carrier thingie with plastic buckles and a strap that cut deep into my shoulder the one and only time I ventured out with it. Unfortunately I was seven subway stops from home before my cruelly strained shoulder muscles began to scream. They screamed so loud the rats were running off the train, not that any of my fellow (human) subway riders noticed, enshrined as they were in their protective New Yorker force fields.

Then I tried a homemade contraption called a “Baby Bundler,” which turned out to be the most idiotic concept in the history of textiles. You take several yards of fabric—I think I recall it was supposed to be something with a bit of stretch to it, but natural fibers only, of course—and cut them into wide strips and sew them together into one very very long wide strip which you then wrap around yourself in a specific and complicated manner, like if you were trussing a turkey with flannel stockings instead of twine. The baby gets wrapped up in the middle of this procedure, a little Cornish game hen strapped to the turkey. She is positioned facing out, her back against your front, all snug and comfy and subconsciously absorbing contentment vibes through the warmth of your body and the beating of your heart.

Then you take a step, and you discover that the baby’s itty bitty widdle tootsies are perfectly positioned in front of your thighs so as to jiggle and thunk against them when you walk.

Before you reach the end of the block, you will have matches bruises on those thighs. Turns out those widdle bitty snookie-wookie baby heels are made of LEAD.

When you hobble back home, you will spend ten minutes trying to untruss yourself from the infant with the brass knuckles in her booties. Thus your first encounter with the Baby Bundler shall be your last. Make sure you are very fond of the fabric you choose when making this nightmarish contraption, because you’ll wind up turning it into throw pillows and baby blankets and sarongs and dinner napkins and Lord knows what else.

After that fiasco, I finally found my way to a plain old baby sling, the kind with padding and an adustable plastic ring on the shoulder, otherwise known as my BFF. Together we have toted five babies all over the doggone country. My sling knows I would never betray it, so that is why I am comfortable saying that IF I had occasion to need a new baby-carrier (which I DON’T, my darling), I would totally give Quinn Cummings’s version a shot. I mean, come on, it comes in toile.

But I don’t need one. I’m good to go. As soon as I go dig some socks out of the laundry basket and put on my trendy jacket made from recycled Baby Bundler.

I’ve been reading the Baby Shower posts for Liz, Christina, and Tammie, and cracking up over the collections of stupid parenting advice people are posting in honor of the event. This made me think of some of the dumbest advice I’ve ever heard, which I witnessed the other night when I watched an episode of What Not to Wear. In my defense, I was trapped on the couch with a wakeful baby. All 347 other channels in our cable package were airing either sports highlights, infomercials, or infomercials for sports-highlight DVDs. What Not to Wear was, I thought, the only reasonable option for keeping myself awake while getting the baby to sleep.

So I watched this show with the two snarky hip New Yorker hosts sniping their fashion expertise at the supposedly ugly duckling they’d lured into their Room of Humiliation with the promise of a Whole New and Very Fashionable Wardrobe. And at first I thought it might prove mildly informative, because this week’s guest sucker was a thirty-something mom like me. I’m the first to admit I could use a clothing makeover. My wardrobe pretty much amounts to a uniform these days: Eddie Bauer V-neck tee over jeans or capris. Naturalizer Mules coming apart at the seams. Sometimes (forgive me) a cardigan because I run to the chilly.

A fashionista I ain’t.

But this show, it made me want to scream. First we had to listen to twenty minutes of Stacy and Argyle (I cannot for the life of me remember the male host’s first name, but it doesn’t matter because his whole identity is expressed by his sleeveless-sweater-over-short-sleeved-button-down anyway) brutally mock their makeover subject for her bulky sweatshirts, nondescript jeans, and basically for being such a dumb cluck as to have ever allowed children to affect her waistline, her budget, or her daily schedule.

“You’re more than just a mom,” they kept telling her, the condescension dripping like blood off their pointy, bleached, metrosexual teeth.

It was clear Stacy and Argyle have swallowed some Mommy Wars line about all the poor women who’ve “lost their identities” through having children. They were on a mission to do more than de-frump; they quivered with sarcastic zeal to rescue the club-hopping twenty-two-year-old they seemed certain was trapped inside a prison made of minivans, Christmas sweaters, and diaper bags.

And all the time I’m watching this attractive, intelligent, good-humored woman talk animatedly and happily about her life, which involves both raising her children and serving as spokeswoman for the American Heart Association, and it is perfectly obvious she has no identity angst at all; she’s very happy with her life and basically just needed a hot outfit for an AHA event where she was going to make a speech.

“Here’s the real you,” Stacy and Argyle informed her, decking her out in an “everyday” outfit consisting of $200 pair of jeans, a smart blazer, and high-heeled boots that probably cost more than a year’s worth of Huggies.

I saw the “more than just a mom” suppress a smile, which was a charitable response in the face of such idiocy. Stacy, honey, if you think a thousand-dollar outfit is necessary for personal fulfillment, I weep for you. Twenty-five bucks at Target and a baby smeared with cracker crumbs will fill your heart with more mushy happiness than the most fab pair of boots ever ripped off a cow’s back.

Look, I like to look good. In fact, I feel somewhat obliged to make an attempt at looking, if not on the cutting edge of fashion, reasonably well put together and attractive. I like to bust stereotypes, you know? It is possible to have five kids and still be hot. In fact, the fact that I have been impregnated numerous times probably attests to my hotness.

But Stacy, Argyle, DUDES. Guess what. I am more than just a MILF. I am also the owner of this thing called a BRAIN. It is so highly advanced that it can, you know, reason. And do math. Like this equation: $1000 outfit + 2T (where T represents number of toddlers under same roof) = complete waste of money.