I have so much to tell you, only I can’t seem to remember a damn thing these days.

Wait, what was I saying? 

OH YEAH.

I can’t remember what I keep forgetting to write.

WHA??

I am like an early-onset Alzheimer’s patient.  During every-day conversations, I routinely forget common words, which drives my sister crazy.

"You can go to that juice place, " I told her last week when she was up here visiting.  "You know, that place with the juice and those…other things?  The juicy juice things…"

"SMOOTHIES!" She yelled.

"YES! Thank you, smoothies!"

"You know, Mom is so damn vulnerable that she believes all that — no wait! Not vuln–"

"–GULLIBLE!  GULLIBLE!!!" She screamed into the phone.

"YES! Thank you, gullible."

This even happens to me at work.  Several times a day, embarrassingly  enough.  "Can you submit a…uh…um, a summary thing of what you want funding for??" I say, ending each sentence in a question, clearly not getting my point across.

"A proposal?"  They will ask.

"YES!  Thank you, a proposal!" I say, relieved they have figured out what I’m trying to say.

I walk into a store with a mental note of what I need, only to have it totally forgotten in the time it takes me to walk  waddle from the car to the door.

And I drop things.  Actually, I drop about 99% of everything I try to hold: large or small, heavy or light, doesn’t seem to matter.

Since we’re packing to move, this has become quite a problem.  Especially because the whole bending over thing is not easy. I do that very unflattering, squatting thing that makes it look like I’m trying to lay a large egg.  Or like I’m taking a — well, you get the idea. It’s not pretty.

So my whole day consists of picking something up or grabbing something, dropping it on the floor, and yelling FRICK before deciding how badly I need it. Sometimes I wait and see how many things I can drop near other things and then just do one squatting maneuver to save myself some trouble.

It’s bad, that’s all I can say.

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So our booby class last weekend was quite fun, but there’s nothing like a three-hour lesson on breastfeeding to bring out the 13 year old boy in all of us.

When we walked into the room where the class was held, it had several couches around for the couples to sit on.  Each couch had a doll on it.  A totally CREEPY doll.  A doll that did this disconcerting thing where when you tilted her down, her eyes closed but when you propped her back up her glassy, murderous eyes would POP open and scare the shit out of you. So needless to say, I did this to BeBop on and off all day and cracked myself up.

At one point the ladies had to put on some lipstick (which was SO not my color, thankyouverymuch) and then, sort of, how do I say this?? 

Try to latch on to a balloon filled with water.

Try to suckle the balloon, if you will…

And NO, I’m not kidding.

The idea was to try latching on with our mouths in different positions to get a better idea of what the baby’s mouth should look like when he latches on…is this making any sense at all?!? (Probably not.)

Anyhoo, it was pretty funny. 

Later, each woman had to hold the freaky-eyed zombie doll in a nursing position and learn how to guide our boobs into their mouths with our nipples pointed up and…I better just stop while I’m behind, huh??

I’m not sure I’m any better prepared to nurse, and yet I did learn a lot of things in the class so who knows?

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I know there are a million other things I wanted to add, but of course I can’t remember any of them.

Something about my Mom calling my poor sister seven frillion times a day about the formaldehyde that’s apparently contaminating all of her son’s baby clothes and how she needs to either wash everything in vinegar or buy him an entirely new, totally organic wardrobe or he’ll grow a second head or something, but I can’t think of the details.

So I’ll sign off for now, asking for your good wishes as we move on Sunday into the new house.  Once I get my lap top set up from there I’ll post again and catch up with your blogs.

You how sometimes good ideas are actually not good at all?

Like, say for example, you were going to be put to death during the French Revolution and you thought it would be a good idea to stop by the guillotine a few days early and get a little looksy at what was in store in for you?

Well, that’s how I felt this week when I attended the local parents of multiples meeting on a lunch break.

Three new moms stumbled in, each with a twin stroller so large it looked like they were pushing a mobile home. I am not kidding.  Baby #1 reached the doorway approximately three minutes before his or her sister or brother and Mom entered the room about five minutes after that.

Just watching them finagle garbage-can sized diaper bags and detach the babies from the car seats that were attached to the aforementioned boat on wheels sent me into a panic attack.

And then? 

And then they proceeded to talk about how sleep deprived they were, how they were ALL on anti-depressants, how hard breast feeding is, how one twin always wakes the other one up so NO ONE EVER, EVER gets any sleep and on and on…

One woman admitted to me that she attended exactly one of these meetings prior to giving birth, because it terrified her so much.

I tried to be social and ask a few questions, but I swear my heart was racing and I suddenly HAD to get out of there.  I think I looked much like a deer caught in the headlights. (A very large deer with a huge protruding belly, but a creature practically frozen in fear, certain a painful death was imminent, nonetheless.)

I mean, it’s not like I think having twins will be easy.  I guess I just don’t want to be confronted with the stark realities yet.  Let me revel in denial a little longer, won’t you please?

After spending a total of three days with my sister after her baby was born, all my Mom can say is, "I don’t know HOW you’re going to do it" or "What will you do WITH TWO?!?" or the ever-helpful, "One is hard enough!!"

Needless to say, these remarks do not make me feel better.

My plan is to prepare as much as I can and then stumble through like a million other first-time moms of twins.

I ask you: Is this a good plan?  Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves and get back to me.

I am currently living in my own little world, possibly not at all tied to reality, which often works well for me.  Through my IVF cycle, I paid no attention whatsoever to statistics or probabilities based on this or that. I just assumed it would work and felt I would deal with any other outcome once it materialized. 

I am sort of blindly following a similar path through pregnancy.

I am assuming I am not a high-risk pregnancy, even though I’m old as the hills (OH!  Excuse me doctor, of advanced maternal age and you can kiss my advanced maternal ASS over that delightful term!); I am assuming I can push these babies out through my va-jay-jay and avoid a c-section; I am assuming I will be able to breast feed at least part of the time. I am also assuming I won’t have a nervous breakdown once I am faced with the realities of having two babies.

Some or all of these assumptions may prove to be very false, but I won’t know for a few more months.  I’m just stumbling along as if I can prepare to some extent and the rest BeBop and I will have to figure out as we go along.

To that end, BeBop and I are attending our first baby classes this weekend.

Saturday will consist of three hours centered around breast feeding.  I have to give myself props for even inviting the husband along, after he spent an entire hour in Babies R Us cracking himself up with crude jokes about the Breast Friend breast feeding pillow device ("I’ll be your breast friend…snort snort…" could be heard throughout the aisles I’m sure),

I’m sure it will be one of the breast things we did to prepare, filled with good information and nice mammeries that we’ll cherish for years to come. I just hope it isn’t too nippy in the room, because I hate to be cold.  And I really hope BeBop can hold it together and isn’t a total boob. He usually tries to milk these types of situations for all they’re worth!

Okay. I’ll stop now.

One of the (many) annoying things about this blog is that I don’t write anything for weeks and then come up with a War and Peace-length post that must take you hours to slog through. And for that I am sorry.

(Not sorry enough to get my ass in gear to post more often, but still sorry.)

So in case you had ANY doubts, I am OLD.

OLD OLD OLD, and our recent vacation down to southern California confirmed this sad fact.

On the drive down to Los Angeles, the combination of sitting in the car for hours on end and the oppressive heat was like a Perfect Storm of Water Retention and giant, elephantitus like cankles soon emerged.

I mean, my feet were huge. My ankles HUGER.  It was beyond gross.

We had to attend a wedding that evening, and so I waddled around the beautiful garden setting with what looked like flotation devices strapped to my legs.  And what confirmed the ‘old’ diagnosis was that I combined this look with FLATS.  BALLET FLATS.  At a semi-formal wedding. 

Not a good look.

I’ve never been a Stiletto kind of girl, but still…FLATS??  At a semi-formal evening wedding?  Good grief Charlie Brown.  It was hideous.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, for some reason it occurred to me that half the male guests were parading around in ugly Hawaiian-print type short-sleeved shirts.

Not that I was in any position to judge others with my granny get up, but of course I did.  "I don’t think it would KILL them to put on a goddamn blazer," I snarled to BeBop just before the ceremony started.

I had become my grandmother…who was all critical and judgmental and swollen-ankley at the end of her life. I am my grandma in the final months of her loooong life. 

Delightful.

Other ways I was a complete disaster at the wedding?

During the receiving line (which I hoped thought had died away with the Dollar Dance), a friend of the bride who I had never met said to me, "Oh! Did you bring your kids?"

"Errrrrr, uh…um.  Yeah."  I said, sort of awkwardly patting my belly.  "I pretty much take them wherever I go…" I added oddly.

I don’t know why her question threw me.  I guess all that fluid collecting in my lower extremities made my brain malfunction or something.

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Also, I seem to have become somewhat of a prude.

On the long drive down, I was thinking of your helpful advice after my last post, regarding the trimming of the hedges quandary.

"You have a beard trimmer, right?" I asked BeBop out of nowhere. 

"Yep."

"Well, would you ever use it to trim my pubes, since I can’t see what’s happening down there?"

"Sure," he said quickly.

Wow, I thought, that was easy.

[Brief pause]

"As long as you’ll shave my balls…." he added.

"Ewwwwwwwwwww" was pretty much all I could say in response.

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Overall, the trip was great, once we got to my sister’s.  And my cankles deflated slightly.

I met my adorable nephew Asher for the first time and we just hung out, ate, watched TV, sat by the pool and pretty much did nothing for three glorious days.

My sister organized a small shower/baby blessing for me at a candle-making place in Laguna Beach. 

I know!  How LA!  It was too fun.

The owner led us in a brief ceremony where each of the guests held a bead and said a blessing over it for me and the babies, and then the beads for the baby girl were placed on a necklace and the boy’s beads on a Native American wisdom stick. These are to be placed in the babies’ room.

Then, each of the girls took a candle and wrote her name and number on a small card that was attached.  Everyone took her candle and passed it to the guest on her right. When I go into labor, I am to call my sister who will call the friend on her card, and she’ll call the next friend and so on, so there’s this whole group of women who are sending me good energy while I’m having the babies!  Cool, huh?

And I know, could I be a more typical Californian??

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After a brief stop in San Diego to visit good friends BeBop and I made our way to Ojai, east of Santa Barbara, for our pre-babies alone time together.

Can I name drop for a moment and tell you that I had my nails done mere FEET (no pun intended) from Jess.ica Al.ba?

OMG, people.  She is gorgeous.

There were only the two of us in this little room, and since I was getting a pedicure I was facing her.  She was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which struck me as a little odd. So of course I kept looking at her, trying to figure out who the hell she was.

She was so strikingly beautiful I knew she was a movie star, but honestly I didn’t recognize her at first because she’s even skinnier in person. (The little bitch.)

But the staff were fawning all over her and making arrangements for transportation back to her villa, so I knew she was some kind of a VIP.  But I am telling you, she was just beyond strikingly pretty.  I had all I could do to refrain from licking, softly brushing my hand against gawking at her creamy, cafe au lait complexion.

The two days there went by far too quickly, and soon enough we were back on the road and the ankles were swelling all over again.

And  then I was back at work and we closed on our house and my in-laws came to town for another shower at my Mom’s and my cousin came to town with his wife and new baby who’s the same age as Asher and I threw my sister a make-up shower for the one we canceled when she went on bed rest in April and we’re madly scheduling the repairs that are needed at the house before we move in two weeks and I’m trying to pack and we have two baby classes this weekend and all of a sudden, out of nowhere it seems, I’m 23 weeks along.

23 weeks and Baby A is kicking like mad, but little Baby B (the girl) is usually pretty quiet so I’m freaking out about that but trying to stay calm.

Trying being the operative word here…

And all that is why I have been a terrible blogger and I’ve fallen so far behind on your blogs, and I am trying my best this week to get a grip at work and not have daily panic attacks and read up on the latest with all of you.

(Trying being the operative word here too.)