My kids are awesome...

said almost every mother, ever.

Seriously though, I thought in the spirit of dealing with depression and anxiety and stress rather than succumbing to it, I would make a list of everything I could think of spur-of-the-moment that I love about my babies... to counter the things that drive me bonkers.

1. They are practically incapable of being without me. Which, while extremely frustrating when I need to do stuff, is a bond that I am thrilled and grateful that my babies have developed with me. I am the biggest part of their world. My arms are the ones they want when nothing else makes them happy. My voice is the one they want to hear singing when they can't fall asleep. I am Mommy... to be that person to these perfect little beings I helped create, and protected, grew and nurtured inside my own body for almost 36 weeks, is a greater blessing and gift than I have ever received.
2. The once-gummy, now-toothy grins they give me. Sometimes it's for no reason other than the fact that I looked at them. I don't care why they smile at me, I just love that they do and every single one of those smiles is perfect and precious.
3. Baby giggles. They started as cooing, graduated to chuckles, and now are full-blown belly laughs that are so contagious they'll have everyone in the room laughing with them. Whether it's tickles or playing peekaboo through the bars of the crib (like I did with Dex tonight, who was sitting up in his diaper and squealed, laughed and fell over when I popped up to peekaboo), that laughter is the cure for any level of crappy day.
4. The now-rare moments when they sleep on my chest. Sometimes I have to sneak and pick them up while they're already sleeping to get them to sleep on me, but every so often, they will grace me with a warm, snuggly baby zonk by drifting off in my arms, and I can sit and watch their eyelids flutter and listen to their deep, even breathing. There truly is nothing in the world more relaxing and joyful than holding your sleeping infant(s).
5. How Eli likes to pat my face when I feed him. He feels my facial features (<- this, previously a typo, said "facial feathers". I want you to think about that long and hard, and how terrified you are now that you've pictured it) and pats my cheeks, and it's absolutely darling... when he doesn't poke my eyeball with a fingernail.
6. How different they really are. Dexter is already on the verge of crawling and is sitting up by himself. Eli is babbling in full, consonant-laden conversations with his toys. Their laughter is subtly different. Their cries are different. Their voices in general are different, as are their personalities and preferences While Eli is not yet mobile, and Dexter does little more than yell rather than babble, watching them grow and develop at their different paces is fascinating and beautiful.
7. The way their faces brighten up when Brian gets out of bed. They miss their Daddy when he has to sleep during the day after working all night, and seeing his face after missing him for hours lights up those big blue eyes in the most incredible way.
8. How mesmerized they are by the cats. They are starting to really enjoy the cats, more than just being aware of them, and will reach out to touch them and watch them walk by. The cats, in return, have started to become slightly more interested in the boys and will sit on the floor nearby while they play. The loose harmony between my babies and my furbabies is adorable.
9. When they cry, they say "mamamamama". Maybe my hours of smiling and kissing faces and repeating countless times "say mama! Say Mommmmmmy" is finally paying off. Hehehe (my Dad would be delighted if they said "grandpa" first though, so I do feed in gramma and grandpa in addition to daddy... I'm not totally selfish).
10. How much I really, truly miss them after being away from them for any length of time, whether it's an hour or 10 hours... no matter how crazy they were driving me before that. I cannot begin to imagine what life is like for military service members who have children and get deployed, or parents that travel often for business, or what have you. I can't imagine being away from my peanuts for too long, even when I do need a break.

Dexter and I: September 2013

Elijah and I: September 2013

Selfie(-centered)

The Toledo Blade featured a news article on Sunday about "selfies".

Seriously.

A whole article.

INCLUDING INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO TAKE ONE.

Am I the only one that is totally blown away by how unbelievably, gut-wrenchingly stupid our society has become?

One college student featured in the article said, and I quote, "Selfies are so stupid, but then I'm sitting here taking 25 at a time". Cell phones have been developed with front-facing cameras. Social media sites have been birthed to utilize and glorify the selfie phenomenon. The how-to guide included in the new article detailed the following steps:

1. Hold steady (because, as an 11 year-old kid says, if you take one that's blurry, you should retake it. NO. FLIPPING. SHIT. COMMON SENSE)

2. Try, but not too hard (.... what?????)

3. Mix it up: No duckface every time (OR HOW ABOUT NEVER, EVER, NOT F***ING AT ALL?)

4. Keep it appropriate (as opposed to Facebook porn?)

5. Amateur mistakes: arms included in photos. (How come nobody mentioned that self-conscious, attention-seeking girl you know that takes LITERALLY A HUNDRED PHOTOS of herself in the same exact pose tailored specifically to hide the giant gut that she's ashamed of? While those specific poses she uses are supposedly to be attractive and sexy and illicit the tens or hundreds of "likes" and comments she so desperately wants to validate herself? So, basically, the point of a "selfie" is to hide everything but your face anyway? WTF)

I seriously read this entire article with an open-mouthed look of disgust on my face. Maybe I should have selfie'd that one.

Is that SERIOUSLY what this world has come to? NEWS ARTICLES in the Sunday paper glorifying vanity and attention-seeking?

Make no mistake. I've taken my share of them. And sometimes, there are moments when selfies are acceptable. For example: taking a picture of you and your kid, if there's nobody else around to do it for you. Or posting a more recent, smiling, duckface-free photo of yourself (notice: I said "a photo", not a f***ing hundred). I've gone through and deleted a fair number of my former selfies simply out of shame.

Am I the only one that has grown up enough to realize how freaking stupid they are? Oh, yeah, I guess so, because the article talked about a grown-ass adult man doing the same thing. Gargh.

Rave: The body lotion NO WOMAN should be without

It's not terribly often that I come across a product that makes me giddy. And let's be honest... as a non-working, full-time mother and housewife, there aren't a hell of a lot of things that make me giddy aside from my husband, my babies, and a really phenomenal sale at Kroger.

However, yesterday, I made a rare impulse purchase in the beauty section that CHANGED. MY. LIFE.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you the wonders of Organix products... behold, the most fantasmic body lotion I've ever used in my life: Organix Moroccan Argan Oil body lotion.

This is for realsies. Shit's expensive, not gonna lie. You could probably buy a bottle of Suave or something for the same price and get three times as much lotion. Suave, however, is not capable of making you feel as though you just frolicked through a meadow laden with Pomeranian puppies, down pillows and unicorns. I received a rare lotion rubdown from the hubbs (he used to do it every night while I was pregnant because my skin itched all day, every day, so badly that I came dangerously close to pulling a Red Pyramid and ripping it off my body) and after he finished my right arm and moved on to my right leg, I sat staring in awe at my hands. The right hand was perfectly silky and smooth without being even remotely greasy, and it actually glowed. My skin was glowing. Not creepy glittery vampire glowing. Not radioactive Alex Mack glowing. I'm saying mesmerizing, perfectly healthy, moisturized bikini model glowing... just without the hot body or bikini. [EDIT TO ADD: Also, I had dead, busted-up blistered skin on my left hand from carrying 50-pound carseats. Post-lotion? Completely gone.]

I have been a not-so-hot mess the last few weeks. We moved into our townhouse during the last week of July, and I still don't have everything in place. There are DIY projects that must be finished, small things here and there that must be purchased, etc. So, needless to say, with a messy house and infant twins, I have little time for myself, and when I do, I usually use it to go grocery shopping or diaper shopping or whatever needs to be done. But last night, after the boys went to bed, I poured a glass of Pinot Grigio (granted, that happened initially because I was about to bust down the walls to get the kids next door to stop galloping and jumping up and down the stairs), climbed in the bathtub, and did some much-needed grooming. I got to shave my grizzly legs, exfoliate with an olive oil/sugar scrub (thanks hubby!... almost gone though if you need more x-mas present ideas!), and file the shit out of my feet. I washed my hair twice, scrubbed my skin raw with my Softsoap Spa Radiant body wash (another major favorite... I'm pretty sure the first thing that attracted me to it was the bright, pretty blue color... because I'm sometimes THAT girl. But seriously, it smells like the ocean and it makes me forget I live in East Buttf***, Ohio) and when I got out, I literally felt like a new person.

Until the lotion. Ohhhhh, the lotion.

It's been more than 12 hours since I first put the Argan Oil lotion on, and I still catch myself creepily caressing my own skin. It's that good.

If you're not terribly opposed to splurging on something for JUST YOU, I highly recommend this stuff!!! Organix Moroccan Argan Oil lotion... and apparently it's a body wash, too. On top of everything else I've raved about, it smells like a bottle full of heaven... which, depending on your personal definition of heaven, could be pictured as anything from the meadow full of puppies and unicorns, to Ryan Gosling half-naked in the sand, to... well, if you're me, the biggest, baddest, beastliest (yes it's a word... now) computer system ever created that would make Bill Gates pee his pants running everything from old-school Wolfenstein to modern-day COD, on a desk laden with Golden DoubleStuf Oreos and milk, coffee, Argan Oil lotion, and Stacy's Pita Chips with Greek tabouli salad.

Don't judge me.

Who needs bar-hopping booze hounds when you can scour the intarwebz for free shit?

The thrills in my life used to consist of a combination of the following: video games, drinking, chain smoking, pizza at 2am, road trips, meeting cute boys at bars, etc.

I don't miss it.

Except the pizza.

Nowadays, where my priorities have obviously shifted, my thrills now include time with my husband (rare), my babies being happy (kind of rare) and healthy, my cats not barfing on the carpet (very rare), couponing/bargain hunting, crafting/DIY and OMG ONLINE SHOPPING!!!!!!! Some single girls may turn their collective powdered noses up at my humble, home-making life. Some single girls can shove it up their collective asses.

I am so addicted to online shopping that Amazon is --and I kid you not-- bookmarked as number six out of twelve on my Speeddial2 app for Google Chrome. Shut up. I raid the site for super saver shipping deals on the stuff I need, and pair it with gift cards/codes, and, if applicable, stuff like Swagbucks.com Shop-and-Earn programs (you get a certain percentage of "cash back" in Swagbucks for shopping on certain sites, where you can then turn around and redeem Swagbucks for gift cards to stores, restaurants, or... DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNN... AMAZON!).

Between SB and InboxDollars, also, every time I need to buy something special, say printer ink, I check their websites to see if they have any special deals. For example, one time I bought heavily discounted ink cartridges through a site I found on Inboxdollars.com. I got the cartridges for half the price (they were recycled) with free shipping, and because I found it through IBD, they added like $15 to my IDB account. I later redeemed that for a check for $50-some dollars with all my earnings, which then paid our electric bill.

Do you see where I'm going with all this? It's a beautiful, endless cycle of savings! Weeee!

So yeah... most people know that we are currently pretty low-income and rely partially on PA for a little while. Don't worry, we're not spending all of our meager bank account on frivolous crap. I get excited about shampoo.

Plus, I get a LOT of gift cards and rewards codes for the surveys and stuff I do online, not even counting Inbox Dollars and Swagbucks. To date, I've earned a total of almost $70 through Inboxdollars, and about $100 in gift cards from Swagbucks.

IF YOU WANT AN INVITE TO EITHER, SEND ME A MESSAGE OR COMMENT! WE'LL BOTH GET BONUSES IF I REFER YOU!!

btw, I'm currently expecting a package of socks, a wall decal, a mini-fountain, and a hanging closet organizer that I paid a total of about 20 bucks for altogether (and it's a giant-ass professionally made decal, not the dollar store kind... which I also have many of). I could practically pee my pants... seriously. COME TO ME, UPS!

Excuse me, Mr. Mouth.

One must wonder why God refused to give babies the gift of words.

Wouldn't life be so much easier if your child could say, "Hey, Mommy, in T-minus 10 seconds I will have a load in my pants reminiscent of a 90 year-old man with IBS. Get ready!"? The stinky twinkies are finally developing a much more refined use of consonants, but at seven months, I've learned, it doesn't go too far beyond "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!" and "MAMAMAMAMAMAMAMA!". Though, I suppose, after watching my mother for 18 years and seeing that particular episode of Family Guy in which Stewie shouts "MOM! MAMA! MA! MA!" over and over, I should be grateful that that's as far as it's gotten.

And yet.

I think I've gotten to be fairly skilled at determining what my stinkers are shrieking for: cuddles, food, poopy pants, boredom, teething pain, etc. And yet, I keep thinking back to the episode of Grey's Anatomy where Bailey says to Cristina about her infant son: "That's cry number four; you need to feed him". How the hell do moms do that? I don't know wtf a particular cry sounds like. All I know is deductive reasoning: he's fed, changed, dosed with Tylenol, and surrounded by toys... must want to snuggle up to my boobs and gaze wistfully at what used to be tasty, tasty breastmilk dispensers before Mommy failed and gave up. Or, what they are already learning from their father, which is that these wubbly funbags will be the purpose of their manly existence (and a crippling weakness) from adolescence, on.

It's funny how that unbelievably beautiful, clear, perfect sound you first heard when your baby(ies) was born is the sound that will later make you want to light your hair on fire. I cried... literally, sobbed, when I heard the twins' first cries. Brian and I both did. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever heard in my life. And now, when I hear it, 90% of the time I want to run shrieking from the house.

Well played, God. Well played.