I should totally be cleaning the kitchen right now.  But it is so much more fun to write while the kids happily play Wii.

I must say that I love Wii.  I love that the kids play it for minutes at a time without fighting.

Any minute in our house that doesn't result in someone saying, "You're stupid!"  "Moooooo-oooom!  Someone called me stupiiiiiiid!!!" is a minute I can play Solitaire Blitz clean the kitchen.

Our life hasn't always been this carefree.  When the kids were toddlers I had a serious fear of open spaces.

Because if it was just me, and the kids decided to run in different directions, I had to decide who I loved the most.  Was it the girl who was hurtling toward a pond and would drown or the boy who liked to get up close and personal with large vehicles??

We were invited to a cook out at a friend's house one evening.  They have a pond and a barn and lots of open space.  All I could think was that even if my husband came along there was no way we could keep track of four 3 year olds in a crowd.  I asked her if the pond had a fence around it and she gave me the strangest look that said "No of course not you idget.  Nobody puts fences around their ponds!  That is why we have a pond!"

I explained that I wouldn't be able to keep track of all the kids in an open space, at night, with a pond.  I think that our friendship died that day.  There was never any chance when she said, "Oh we just let the kids run free."

For me that would be like leaving my kids on a street corner in a strange city and saying they would find their way home.

So now we aren't friends.  I guess that is okay.  I have other friends who understand when I say that bedtime is whenever I am tired of policing the herd.

It is easy to fall into the helicopter parent mode when you have so many kids the same age.  I do my best but every so often am hit with a moment when I think that my kids could do that and why the heck are my kids not doing that yet.

This summer the moment has been chores.  Where have chores been all my children's lives?  I am just floored by how much cleaner the house stays when the kids are responsible for their little jobs.  For one thing they  love having a little bit of responsibility.  They ask when they can do their chores, sometimes, even!  I am not saying that they always just hop up and chirp along like little Disney bluebirds to my Snow White or anything.  But they do love checking off their chore chart every day.

Another bonus is that when my child does half the job of emptying the dishwasher or folding laundry, it is so much easier for me to finish it up!  So laundry gets folded!  Dishes get put away!  I am telling you that this has been life-changing!

And the best part is that after talking to many many moms, we are NOT paying the kids for these chores.  Not with money at least.  I am using privileges.  If they do their kitchen duty then they can choose any seat at the table for meal time.  If they do their laundry chore then they can be the first to choose clothes in the mornings.  If they do their garage job (cleaning out the van and emptying the garbage) they can choose any seat in the van.  And the most wonderfullest (go away red dashy line I am making up this word!!) chore of all is cleaning the living room and playroom of toys.  That blessed child gets control of the remote for Wii or TV!

aaahhh-Ahhh-AAAAHHHH!  (That is the angels singing praises for chores!)

You know, zombies are pretty interesting creatures.  They look human until they start moving.  Or moaning.

That is how I functioned my first year as a parent.  I looked normal.  Then you could talk to me and I would not be normal.  If you have given birth to more than one human at a time, then you know exactly what I am talking about.  If you have been more traditional in your birthing, then you may have an inkling.  But you don't have the complete picture.

See, the kids were all preemies.  They were all under 5 1/2 pounds.  My smallest was 3.12.  Yeah.  That is pretty darn tiny.  They came home quickly, less than 20 days, and we truly rejoiced at our luck and/or blessings.  But then we started asking ourselves, "What the heck do we do now?????"

When 2 babies were home it was HARD.  And we were only half-way there!  They had to be fed every 3 hours, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 months.  And it took an hour or more to feed them.  Sometimes a bit less, but only if we had 4 people to hold and feed.  All those cool contraptions you see for hands-free feeding??  Yeah, we tried them all.  They never really worked with my kids.

So every 3 hours we would change diapers, warm bottles, and feed.  Then one or two babies would reflux, which is a polite way of saying they would spew all over you and the chair you were sitting in.  Usually, they only dirtied their feet.  Nice, huh?

Then we had to make the 32 bottles and add the anti-spewing meds to a few bottles but not all of them.  And run the dishwasher.  And do at least 2 loads of laundry-just the kids clothes.  I needed my laundry done about that often too because I had limited wardrobe that was spew-worthy.  I had to grocery shop.  I had to do almost all of these things on very little sleep and everything but groceries had to happen every single day.  No exceptions.

I was lucky in that we had a ton of diapers donated so we didn't buy those for the first 6 months.  And we had a ton of volunteers too.  And mostly they were wonderful people who have become more like family than helpers.

But sometimes they weren't.  Some folks meant well, I am sure, but they just didn't fit with our family.  And remember how I was a zombie?  Yeah.  I guess sleep deprivation can make you very monster-like.  I was just not very tolerant of the helpful advice I was getting.  My fuse was short.  I was sleeping about 3 hours in a row-totalling about 4 hours a day-on a good day.  It really wasn't pretty.

Other folks came in with baggage about previous hospital experiences so I got to listen to them complain about how the hospital that had just made it possible for my 4 babies to come home healthy and quick, killed their baby.  I wasn't feeling very sympathetic to that.  I know that makes me a horrible person but I would argue that person wasn't the real me.  That person was the zombie me.  Zombie me is not nice or friendly, she just wants a freaking nap.

A few others were the looky-loos.  They wanted to say they had helped.  They didn't really want to help.  And asking them to fold one of the baskets of laundry or change a diaper was not on their list of doable tasks.

There were no less than 30 people in and out of my house in a week's time.  That is a lot of people, and some were virtual strangers.  They all brought their special concoction of germs and bacteria.  Some people thought that, even after explicit requests for real hand-washing, they were 'clean enough.'

Think about being truly sleep-deprived, coping with 4 infants who have sets of wires attached to their bodies so THEY DON'T DIE, running through a monster list of things that have to be done right now, AND juggling 30 other non-family personalities in a week's time.  Did I say how not pretty it was?  It was horror film level of not pretty.

And for some reason, I wasn't leaving the house for more than an hour at a time most weeks.  That might have had something to do with the mind-set that I had to do all this stuff and no one else would do it right if I left the house.  I know.  I have control issues.

This situation lasted without a break for 5 months.  I was beyond sleep deprived.  I was in torture-mode.  As in, Guantanamo uses these techniques of torture to discover terrorist plots.  And the next 7 months were only slightly less horrific.  We learned to cull the volunteers down to the people who truly helped and we liked and we trusted.  The kids started feeding only every 4 hours then with only one nighttime feeding.  We were sleeping maybe 5 hours in a row on a good night.

So now, the next time you see a new mommy strolling with her twins down a grocery aisle, you have some idea of the crap she is dealing with both literally and figuratively.  Don't stand in front of her cart/stroller and say, "Oh my!  Are those twins????  You sure have your hands full!!!!"

She is in a hurry to get home before the babies need to be fed and she had heard those exact words at least 4 times, today, in this store.

Smile.  Say, "What a blessing!"  or "Beautiful children!" or nothing at all.  And walk on.

Don't ask if she planned this.  Don't ask if twins run in her family.  Don't take pictures.  Don't insinuate that it is better her than you.  Don't say "Suicide!! "  (I mean really guy in Walmart?  Having more than one child is not worth killing myself!)  Don't ask how this happened.  Don't count the babies.

She has heard all of this before.  You are being rude and obnoxious to think a stranger in the grocery store wants to tell you about her fertility issues, her birthing process, or her bedroom 'private time' story.

And she is a zombie and might go off on your behind.  She lost her filter the first week of sleep deprivation.