Cat in Heels

Daylight savings time is nothing to parents. Except maybe a pain in the ass. It’s just another day where things are all screwed up from the first squawk out of the baby monitor, which is an hour earlier than they normally wake up no matter what kind of crazy voodoo you’ve been trying to work the previous week to make sure they’re on a schedule. This year was particularly bad on Sunday. Maybe it was a Halloween hangover or something, but I walked in the twins’ room and S, who is the Houdini of diapers, is rocking the deep v Elvis look and I marvel at how cute she is before realizing the reason she looks like that is because she has figured out how to work zippers overnight and taken her wet diaper off. What the hell is she doing? The whole day pretty much stayed on that trajectory and I found myself saying some really insane things. “Stop coloring on your sister.” “Why is there ham on the dog?” “Who pooped?” “Did you seriously just poop in the tub?” (She did. My bathroom ha...

This weekend we were getting ready to go out and as I was putting on shoes I noticed that S’s toes were almost to the end of her sandals. And I mean touching the very top inside. And they were hard to buckle. Apparently the kid’s feet grew overnight and her two month old shoes no longer fit. Of course I work all week, and Stride Rite is 30 minutes away which puts us straight into bedtime assuming I feed them dinner. That’s a recipe for two kids walking around Stride Rite screaming while trying to crawl under fixtures or just making circles while crying. Yes, they do strange things when they’re tired. Of course I need the shoes by Saturday because we have something to do, and I won’t have time in the morning with breakfast and naps and what not, mostly because I want to avoid being that person with two screaming children in a store. Of course there’s the internet, but free shipping is 5 days (i.e. after Saturday) and for some reason I feel like I need to see the shoes if I’m bu...

I wish had the time to do funny and clever mom things, or the creativity to think of things like arts and crafts. Instead I just write this blog, which I can knock out on my phone while riding home on the train or on my lunch break, and half the time it’s not even about being a mom because I figure that’s going to bore all the people who came to read about whatever else I happen to be discussing. One Australian woman with twins has become my hero though after a bazillion friends sent me links This is funny. People need to relax.  to the article and posted it to my wall. Seriously, if she was in the States we’d be having a glass of wine together right now and telling our kids to stop doing whatever it is they’re currently doing that they shouldn’t be. As a joke, this hero mom attached some FAQs to her kids in the stroller, presumably so people won’t ask her dumb questions while she’s out. While she never actually took the kids out with the signs, the internet predictably...

I love shoes. It turns out buying them for my girls is as fun as when I buy them for myself. I am also already dreading the day when they get an opinion and stop letting me pick out the ones I like best. My girls only had gym shoes, which worked great this spring, but I needed to get them ready for summer, so a few weeks ago we piled into the car, drove to the mall, piled out (seriously do you have any idea what goes into taking twins to a mall?) and wandered into the nearest mall. The new shoes getting ready to jump into action at the park. Of course the store I wanted to go to was on the opposite side of where I came in, so we schlepped across the mall with all the people stopping to point, yelling out things like “Are they twins?” and “Oh my god, how do you do it?” (double stroller people) and went to Stride Rite . Lucky me they were having a sale on sandals, but of course only a limited selection. We picked out one style for both girls, and then literally as I am being ru...

After working 40+ hours a week, commuting, being a mom, a wife, doing some kind of sad excuse for housework (does folding laundry that’s been sitting in the dryer for 2 days count?) and various other crap that makes me who I am, I stare at my closet full of clothes (many of which are too big or too small) and my new collection of shoes, some of which were bought with the intention of running after toddlers, and I think “Who the fuck am I?”. Last night I was giving the girls a bath and we made shampoo mohawks, played with rubber ducks and splashed until they managed to start splashing water outside the tub and were turning into squawking baby prunes. S finally demanded “Up” which is universal for any position other than the one she’s currently in (down, off, out, and sometimes actually up) and we started drying off. With two babies you can imagine that there’s some kind of madness that goes along with getting them bathed, dried off and diapered. “Don’t stand in the tub.” “Don’t ru...

There’s life changers that are really obvious and turn your entire life on its ear (like the day I came home with twins), and then there are the subtle changes that you don’t really notice until you have some reason to look back. At that point it sometimes makes you wonder “Who am I?” The other day I was texting with a friend and we were discussing work, jobs, next steps and the path that got us there. We've been friends since we were about 15, moved to the city around the same time, spent our 20s putting in 50+ hours a week at the office, trying to establish ourselves in careers, and spent weekends bar hopping, drinking too much and making some questionable decisions. Eventually we started spending weekends in, got married (me, not him), moved, got new jobs, kept working a million hours a week (does that stop?), had twins (me again) and once in a while we manage to not have meetings on the same day and we meet for lunch. Closet vomit. I seriously need to get this under contr...