Grrrrrrr. So this was my morning: on my way to work, I got pulled over for having a taillight out, and it turns out my registration had expired. In March. What was I doing in March... hmmm.... oh yes, having twins. Apparently you can have your car seized and towed for not having up to date registration, a little fact I was quite unaware of. But I must have looked pitiful enough, and explained about the twins, and got teary, because I was let off with just a ticket for the light. (Phew!) If such a situation happens to you, you too will need the following links to get you back up and running (and laughing again): NJ DMV - got me re-registered, online, in about 5 minutes. Everything's peachy now, so Mom, don't worry. Eugene Mirman - "Hey Jude" and the "Who Medley" are my faves so far. Party Hard! - Ahhhh, college days... what happens when 3 kids, a boombox, and a video camera make the rounds. (warning: super long)

Reinventing myself. After Sophie was born, I had a really hard time figuring out who the heck I was. Like, can a mom still be cool? Is it ridiculous to wear hip-hugger jeans and a fairy t-shirt? Should I cut my hair and was it okay to still wear it in braids? (The answers, thankfully, are yes, heck no, no, and of course it is.) Now with the twins, I'm more secure, but I feel the need to make some subtle (and not-so-subtle) changes. I find myself being more introspective, more contemplative. *I wonder how much longer I can make organic, no-sugar meals for Sophie yet still eat a Hot Pocket standing up in front of the refrigerator. The answer: make more wholesome food since I'm making it anyway and freeze it. *The more I work at Mutts, the less meat I eat. This makes perfect sense to me. *I'm having trouble reconciling the fact that I will download music off the internet for free with the fact that I don't want anyone to steal people's artwork. It's the same thing. No more free music for me. *I also find that if I squeeze in time to paint at night, I wind up being much, MUCH more able to handle the babies and my workload in a sane manner. I literally need to paint every night to make it through the next day. So at the end of the summer, I may just end up being a wild vegetarian Mama artist who takes time to work on writing her first book. (More on that later.) And this, too, makes perfect sense to me.

My first day back at work is tomorrow. I will be packing my backpack with the necessities: laptop, sketchbook, lunch, and cookies that I'm making tonight in celebration to share with the rest of the office. It's a little like the first day of school; I'll have all my clothes laid out and my lunch all bagged and ready to go. I will actually have a reason to get dressed in the morning. I know exactly what work awaits me when I return (and it's exciting to me) and I'm ready to hit the ground running. In terms of energy/exhaustion, this is going to wind up either being very good for me, or the thing that finally sends me over the edge. (I'm betting on the first one.) Send good vibes in the general direction of Metuchen tomorrow for me, please.

Question of the day: Should I cut my hair? The temptation is great to grab the scissors and just start hacking...

Painting my way through So I've come up with an idea that's literally getting me through my days lately... I've been painting a story, right off the top of my head, one page a night. I'm loosely basing the procedure on the comic-in-24-hours theory, but bending it to my schedule: one page in about one hour, done whenever I can get an hour free but trying to stick with consecutive days as much as possible. All I've been doing lately is dreaming of painting and wanting to have a paintbrush in my hand as soon as possible... but it's a good thing to dream about when your day is a never-ending cycle of sleep deprivation, formula, pee, burps, and picking up toddler food off the highchair. Power to the puppets! Way to go Avenue Q! I've wanted to go see this play for so long... this year's best musical has puppets aplenty, and many Sesame Street alumni in the cast. With songs like "It Sucks to Be Me" and "You're a Little Bit Racist", how can you lose?

Lots and lots and lots and lots of pictures here and here. More about motherhood, art, and possibilities, coming soon.

It's either sadness or euphoria. That's my life right now... it seems I'm either crying all day or laughing my pants off. And while I'm quoting Billy Joel; this song was written just for me. Especially the taking-the-phone-off-the-hook-and-disappearing-for-a-while part.

Double the fun! See more pics online in Grandma's album.

ANGELA IS HOME AT LAST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Woo hoo! At last (82 days later), the little muffins are home together. Right now, Angela wants to be fed and Peter is staring off into space, with a "oh, Mother, what have you gotten us into now?" look. Sophie was excited to see them and is working on telling them apart. Grandma is here with homemade cinnamon buns to celebrate, and I've already been chalking up the driveway with welcome home messages. Life is good.

Those of you who want to know what motherhood is really like, read this... it's so true.

Acting like a grownup. Today I had a rare chance to be a "grownup" - I got to get dressed up (meaning, not jeans or sweats) for a MuttsComics.com anniversary luncheon. The first thing people said to me after I got back was "You don't look like you had twins!"... which was precisely the reaction I was looking for. (5 more pounds to go and I'm at my pre-twin weight, 5 more after that and I'm at my pre-Sophie weight. I look pretty good if I do say so myself. ;) Paul and my dad watched Sophie and Peter, and I got to go into work and have adult conversation about art, design, and, of course, Mutts. The company's grown and I find it exciting to be coming back in June to a bigger art department - more people to share ideas with and less pressure for me to be a design machine. After a wonderful lunch, there were even a few minutes to try to work on these crocheted flowers - which Allyson has down pat but I can't get the hang of. I had a great time, but at the same time I felt so torn - I wanted to be there and home, too. I savored being by myself with nice clothes and no Sophie attached to my leg, and at the same time I wanted to be on my hands and knees, chasing her around the room. I almost cried when I got into the car to go home (not the minivan, for a change) because I felt such a pull for both. I'm sure I'll get it together by the time I go back.

Living is not enough... one must have sunshine - freedom - and a little flower. ~Hans Christian Andersen

Welcome to the world... My new little nephew, Jude Garrett Bazerman, was born this morning to first time parents Carole and Marc. What a fantastic Mother's Day present! I immediately went here and requested a certain Beatles song to be dedicated to him. Happy Mother's Day, And don't forget to check out these amazing mamas: Jill, Michelle, Claire, and Julie, all of who show you can be a mama and still be as creative as ever (maybe even more so)! And another new arrival... I am eagerly awaiting the debut of SARK's new website (and lusting after her new book as well). Yum.

Due date, but no Angela yet. My due date is TODAY. I can't imagine how I would have managed carrying these muffins to term - they now are over 7.5 lbs each - and then take care of them while recovering from a C-section. My dad says that God stretched everything out so that it would be in a way that I could handle it. And I am, just. We are still spread out, with Angela contending for the Fattest Baby Ever in the NICU award, and Sophie and Peter doing their thing here. So in honor of Mother's Day, I'm going to do little character sketches of my little ones: Peter: is just the cutest thing around. Since Sophie never opened her eyes fully (because of her ptosis) we never got the full effect of that head-on, blue-eyed baby stare. I love it. When he cries he sounds like a kitten; he's already lifting his head and changing sides when he does tummy time. The only thing that drives him up the wall is the fact that he can't see behind himself and his head doesn't rotate around 360 degrees - I guess that will be extra incentive to learn to roll over. Would be perfectly thrilled if I would feed him constantly all day so that he could snack when he wanted to and not every 4 hours. Angela: still being (in the nurses' words) "a naughty girl" and having apnea episodes that keep her from going home. She definitely wins the Chubbiest Cheeks in the NICU award and the Baby Who Has Been There The Longest And Really Needs To Go Home Already award. Thankfully, the nurses love having her around. I pray that Peter picks up her eating habits - 4 oz. in 20 minutes! She likes when you rock her and sing to her. And naturally, she's adorable. ;) Sophie: amazes me every day with how smart she is. She not only knows what birds are, she will comment on them singing outside and then point to the bird mobile I made and announce that they are birds as well. She has a huge vocabulary for a 14-month old, and is going to walk any day now. She understands that there is a new baby in the house, but can't quite wrap her mind around the fact that another one is coming soon, too. And you can watch her do animal noises here. Coming soon from the same session: Sophie doing parts of the body and talking about flowers).

Beauty is... My dear friend Snowflake sent me this link to Pantone's Birthday Color site. Here's what it gives for my birthday's color (August 15): You are magnetic and others find you attractive. I find that to be both right and misleading. I have never thought of myself as attractive; never thought I was hideous, either, just average. I think I have good days when I might actually use the word "pretty" to describe myself, but then I've seen photos of a day when I felt particularly spectacular and was incredibly disappointed at how goofy I looked in reality. Which brings me to my point.... I think that any attributes of beauty or attractiveness that anyone sees in me come from the me that's inside. I think I am on the plain side, and anyone who thinks I'm otherwise has seen the real me shining through and that's what's lent the sparkle. I've often found that confidence and a happy spirit do more to make me attractive than whiter and straighter teeth or shiny hair could ever do. (My husband disagrees and thinks I'm beautiful to begin with, but you know what? He's supposed to think that. I'm not going to convince him otherwise.) So thinking further along these lines... I know how much self-esteem has to do with beauty, and how much a lack thereof can make a physically beautiful person unattractive. When I was growing up, in my preteen years, I was told over and over again by my peers how ugly I was, what a loser, and of course I believed it no matter what my parents said to me. What I became was a very late bloomer, which wound up working just fine for me, but the seeds of that 12-year-old taunting still run deep. I'm so determined to give my kids a strong sense of their own self-worth, to encourage them to let their true selves sparkle and shine and to believe in themselves no matter what anyone else says to them. I tell them every day how special they are and how much I love them, and I'll just have to hope that a daily dose of that will help innoculate them against the cruel things other kids say. So, how much of beauty is skin deep? And how much comes from the light inside you? ps ~ the Pantone page also says, "Your sensitive nature can work best in a creative field such as performing or decorative arts." So they're not all wrong.

I'Mpossible. It's been an adventurous, scary, thrilling week. Peter is a delight and Sophie is thrilled to the tips of her toes with him - every morning she points to him and shouts, "Petey!" and already she's tried to share her Cheerios with him. He's on a monitor which seems to mostly want to alarm us in the middle of the night because a wire's coming loose - not for medical reasons. It's reassuring, but annoying all the same. One thing I know for sure - I've been stretched in so many ways these past weeks, stretched to learn new things, pushed to do things I never knew I could handle; things that pre-twins I would have said were just impossible. But I'm reminded of a wonderful SARK quote, where she says "Impossible means I'm possible." Right now, the possibilities of what I am capable of seem endless. I never knew before that I could possibly feed two newborns soley on pumped milk for a month, but I did it. I didn't think I'd ever fit in my jeans again, or get to go chalking or do anything artistic, but I've been doing those things too (joyfully!). Every day brings new challenges, and every day I learn that it's possible for me to rise to them and do them with all my heart. Interesting note: It's been 7 weeks since the twins were born, and this week was when my C-section was supposed to actually be scheduled. And the twins' official due date was May 8.... they're still not supposed to have been born yet! Now, if we could just get Angela home from the hospital....

At last - Peter is home! (And there was much rejoicing.)

Angela is still having problems eating from a bottle, but Peter could be coming home Easter Sunday. WOW.

Things that have made me cry/melt in the past few days: - Sophie pointing to my braid and saying, "pretty." - a beautiful letter from my brother telling me what a great job I'm doing being a Mama. - watching the Sesame Street 35th Anniversary special (which was pretty disappointing) and seeing the clip where Susan says, "But Big Bird, Mr. Hooper's not coming back." - a crystal paperweight with a baby angel blowing kisses to the moon, from the moms on the Mother's Retreat my mom helps run every year. I do a scripture passage on a poster for them each year, but I had never expected something back. - the fact that the wonderful women from my Cornerstone group have been making our family dinner each Monday since before the twins were born - it's the hugest help. - and this: a mysterious package I received today with no card or return address, containing a gorgeous set of cards entitled "Mother's Nature: Calm and Confidence for the Motherhood Journey." It's beautiful and it's also the kind of thing I would love to make one day. I have my guesses as to who it is, but I'm not sure...?

Happy Birthday! Peter and Angela are one month old today! We made chocolate-chip cookies and brought them to the hospital to celebrate with the nurses. See more photos of them (finally!) here.