My husband took the boys to church tonight and I sat in the $2.00-from-a-garage sale lawn chair in my backyard and watched Babygirl wander the back yard with the hose turned on medium-low.

It would have been perfect, except for the following things:

1) I was cold. The sky was clear, but the sun was weak and I was in the shade.
2) The lawn is spotty at best. Our former dog tore up the lawn pretty badly. Babygirl likes to make mud puddles in the bare spots.
3) Babygirl’s hair is thinning. She needs Baby Rogaine. I have started to fret that she has “trichotillomania, the chronic psychiatric disorder in which patients pull, twist, pluck and otherwise remove their own hair” because really, why not worry that your 20 month old has mental issues? She pulls on her hair while I nurse her and then shows me the strands in her hand and says “hair.” She has little hair anyways. I was a baldish baby myself and now I have enough hair for three grown women (at least I do for now–when the grays start to come in, I may develop trichotillomia myself). Babygirl probably inherited her sparse toddler hairstyle from me.

Come to think of it, those moments were perfection, despite the chill and the bald spots, both human and horticultural. Sun, water and a babe–who could ask for more?

Is it a crime to wish that the boys wouldn’t come home from school today? I would like the quiet afternoon to stretch into the evening without the noise and mess of boys.

Well, they are home.

TwinBoyB: “Mom, what does the word constipated mean?”

Oh please, someone, save me. Or whisk me away to Moorea to snorkel in the South Pacific sea.

TwinBoyA: “Mom, he just took the entire box of Cheez-Its!”

I wish I could lay in the weak sun all afternoon and drift to sleep. I wish someone else would iron my husband’s khakis tonight. I wish my fingers and toes weren’t so cold.

I wish TwinBoyB would not make random, loud, mouth noises. I wish he wouldn’t ask every day, six times a day, “What’s for dinner?” and then respond with “Ewww, that’s nasty.”

I wish I could sleep in until noon and then spend the rest of the day puttering around in the closets, sorting, purging, organizing.

I wish I had unlimited wishes and a fairy-godmother to grant them all.

I went to school with the following people:

A girl named Peppi.
A girl named April Wren.
A girl named Kiki.
A girl named Bobbi Jack.

I went to college with a girl who changed her name while she was a teenager to W i l m a j o y Regina HopeAnn K. She had a plainer name before that, but she and her mother fiddled with her name and came up with that tongue-twister. The funniest thing was that years after college, I located her email address and exchanged a few emails. She and her husband (formerly “Simeon S.”) had changed their names to Joy and John S. Apparently, their previous names were too difficult for people to remember.

It’s 5:45 p.m., that odd time of day when sometimes we pause. My husband’s gone to a meeting–he’s on a Rescue Mission board and he won’t be home until after the kids’ bedtime. The boys are in the backyard wandering around with sticks and having an imaginary adventure. The sun shines, still and it’s warm. I think it reached 80 degrees today, but our backyard always has a nice breeze and shade in the afternoons.

Babygirl was laying on the floor, watching Teletubbies. Lately, she has to have all the “bee-bees” (the blankets) on her at once. That means three afghans and three fuzzy pink blankets. But her bladder distracted her and she wanted to sit on the “pobby” (the potty), so she insisted that I strip her clothes off (which reminds me of George Costanza–fans of Seinfeld know what I’m talking about). Today, she shocked me–and herself–by managing to make her first “deposit” (if you know what I mean) in her little potty. We greeted it with great acclaim and carried it with deep respect and love to the regular toilet where we bid it adieu. “Bye-bye poopy!”

When my twins were her age and older, they always denied that they had a dirty diaper. They had no interest in using the toilet–despite our repeated viewings of “It’s Potty Time!”, a hilarious video which includes the song we still sing today (and by “we”, I mean my husband and me): “He is a super duper pooper! He can potty with the best! No more diapers to get in his way! We are very impressed!”

Anyway.

Only two hours until bedtime and then the debate: Do laundry? Straighten up the house? Vacuum? Work on VBS project for church? Exercise? Or just sprawl in the recliner and watch Fear Factor and eat fat-free Kettle Korn?

I checked out my curly hair in the mirror this afternoon and saw an errant, weirdly textured hair on the top of my head . . . I plucked it out for examination.

It was gray.

That was my first one. I really am getting old.

Being a stay-at-home mom is not what I am. It’s what I do.

YoungestBoy loves pets. Unfortunately, he has lost three pets in his short six years.

Millie the Cat was dispatched to Kitty Heaven shortly after Babygirl’s birth. Millie the Cat developed some kind of neurological condition which required Kitty Antidepressants. I’d shove the pills down her throat and she would vomit them up and then scratch herself until she bled. We agreed that sending her to Kitty Heaven was the most compassionate thing we could do for her since there was no cure for her mental illness. None of the boys noticed that Millie the Cat was missing for about three months.

Greta the Dog was a furry, sweet Newfoundland. We raised her for two years. Then she nipped at TwinBoyB and a week later, nipped at YoungestBoy, drawing blood on both of their faces. She was returned to the breeder and placed in a new home. We just couldn’t take the chance of having 100-pound Greta nip at a baby.

Fred the Snail was captured on our driveway in May 2002. He lived a happy, uneventful life in a vented pet box, hidden under the long drapes in the dining room. Then over a year later, he was moved to an upstairs window and the afternoon sun boiled him in his shell.

YoungestBoy cried hard when he lost each pet. We replaced Millie the Cat with Shadow the Cat. Greta was replaced with a giant stuffed animal. But snails are hard to find around here.

And then, a miracle! After dinner yesterday, we were hanging out in the backyard. Babygirl was riding her trike over the grass, TwinBoyB was using a giant magnifying glass to turn a slug “inside out” and YoungestBoy was hunting for more slugs. He came running around the corner shouting, “Mom! I found a snail!”

Clutched in his chubby hand was a snail half the size of my pinkie-fingernail. Its shell was translucent. While we watched, the tiny head stretched out of the shell. I couldn’t believe it! In my 39 years of life, this is the second snail I’ve seen in the Pacific Northwest. (Other than snails that live in the water, of course.) What a lucky boy!

I said, “What are you going to name him?”

YoungestBoy thought for just a moment and said, “Replacement Fred.” He went inside, got a Mason jar and put a few tasty leaves in the jar for Replacement Fred.

Awhile later, YoungestBoy says, “Oh no! I dropped my snail!”

“Where?” I ask.

“In the grass somewhere. I was running and holding him in my hand.”

Sigh. Then we squatted on the grass and tried–in vain–to locate tiny Replacement Fred. YoungestBoy cried. I said, helpfully, “Well, maybe you can find another one.”

YoungestBoy said, “Mom, that was just a lucky stroke. I will never find another snail.”

We looked under the rocks where YoungestBoy found Replacement Fred, hoping Replacement Fred had a brother or a sister. Nope. Replacement Fred must have been an orphan or a runaway. YoungestBoy spent a great deal of time in the backyard before lunch, hunting. He found a bunch of potato bugs (he calls them roly-poly-olies). One even hung upside down from a stick, wrapping its teeny little legs around it.

But it’s not Replacement Fred.

Replacement Fred! Come back! We promise not to forget you in a sunny windowsill!

Mr. Know-It-All-TwinBoyB and his twin, Mr. Know-It-All-TwinBoyA

My twin boys have reached that magical age where they know everything. I figure this stage probably lasts until they are well into their college years. As a reasonably intelligent 39-year old woman, I regard their superior knowledge with great hilarity.

Last night at the dinner table, they explained to me that God created two eggs and that’s how we got chickens. He didn’t create just one egg, or two male eggs, or two female eggs, but a male and a female eggs so chickens would result. Always playing the Devil’s Advocate, I said, “Well, maybe God created the chicken and the chicken laid the eggs?” They dismissed my folly without even a pause. Their knowledge was unshaken.

A couple of weeks ago, they were explaining HIV to me. They were learning about AIDS at school. I was probing to see what they were being taught and said, “So, how do you catch HIV or AIDS?” And one of them answered with a twinge of disdain, “You don’t catch it! You just have it!”

This morning, while we were staring at the tea kettle, waiting for its whistle, TwinBoyB remarked that he wanted to see the “vapor.” I said, “Well, look, there’s the steam now!” And he said, “No, Mom, you can’t see steam. You can only see vapor. Steam is invisible.”

I started to argue, then stopped myself. What is the point in pointing out fact to a kid who already knows it all?

It’s going to be a long decade.