Last Second Scrambling

I had a long list of chores to complete before the twins arrived. I needed to do things like set up the cribs, install the car seats, and obtain a helper monkey to assist with the twin duty, or at least train Abbie to the level of helper monkey. I tackled a few tasks weeks ago, like assembling one more crib in kids’ room so the twins can co-bed for the first several weeks, allowing us to simultaneously save space in their cramped room and turn our noses up to the SIDS alliance. Other tasks I meant to do, but first Ellie spent almost a week in the hospital, and then the twins arrived eight weeks early. The result was the aforementioned pileup of boxes of new baby gear waiting to be assembled and standard household chores like washing clothes and cleaning cat puke.

When I heard my wife’s family would be in town this past weekend, I immediately created a game plan for how I would spend potentially my last couple days of free childcare before the twins came home. As soon as they arrived I shoved Abbie off, picked up a few loose pieces of trash that had been annoying me since Tuesday, and started working on the children’s clothes. We received a glut of new clothes in the days before the twins arrived and more pieces continue to trickle down like so much rain washing out an itsy bitsy spider. With no time to take care of things, I had stacks of tiny clothes arranged by size and piled on Abbie-proof perches throughout the room Also, Abbie started bursting out of her 12-18 month tops before Ellie went in the hospital, necessitating the switch to the 18-24 month wardrobe. With someone else in the house to check Abbie every time she whines to verify that she’s suffering no physical harm by being denied access to the medicine cabinet, I had everything swapped and stored in under an hour.

Next I placed the car seats and our nifty new double stroller that a generous person thoughtfully gave to us into my car. This wasn’t necessary yet since the twins won’t come home for another couple weeks, but I was anxious to clear some space in the house and remove their box before it morphed into another countertop. Before ratcheting the car seats into the, um, car seat I placed a sofa slip cover between the seats and the, uh, seat. I should have done this long ago to protect the seat from marring, but never did so. Because when I go to sell my car in several years the imprint from three children’s car seats will kill my resale value, much more than the 200,000 miles on the engine or the assortment of three children’s worth of stains on the rest of the interior.

Next I assembled our glider. This was a brand new purchase made on our crazy post-Thanksgiving shopping spree, the one where Ellie was on her first full day out of the hospital and still managed to use her coupons at the mall. The glider’s upholstery is “leatherette,” which is one of the finest materials available for use on furniture that sells for under $80. The chair could carry such a low price because it came stuffed in a box containing approximately 70,200,897,470.12 chair molecules. It also contained instructions and three different tools that vaguely fit in and around the molecules to assemble them into a chair-like form. After about an hour of sweating, grunting, and uttering words that made me glad Abbie doesn’t repeat everything I say yet, we had a beautiful new leatherette clad chair that’s actually very nice except that it smells like spoiled formaldehyde.

By then I was pretty tired and I’d reached a minimal amount of preparedness for the twin’s homecoming, so I took the rest of the morning off. We could always continue with Abbie’s helper monkey lessons on Monday.