I’m sitting down and laying my fingers on the keyboard with nary a plan for what to say but with a big desire to chat. I missed you guys, did you know that? Yesterday a nasty little stomach bug kicked me in the gut and laid me flat, and the day before I spent running around town like a chicken with its head cut off and spending money like it grew on trees, so I haven’t had much time for cyberspace communing. It feels good, splendid, to be back.

So are you all enjoying the time change? Was it easier to get up and out of the house this morning now that it wasn’t like you were leaving in the middle of the night? Mr. Handsome was still late for work. He’s always late for work. If we had an extra five hours he still would’ve been late for work. Bless his heart.

Speaking of blessing hearts, I learned through a friend of a friend that you can say whatever nasty thing you want to say about another person as long as you preface it with a “bless his/her heart”, best said in a southern drawl. For example, “Bless her heart, that woman never knows how to shut up! Did you hear what she said at church yesterday? You’d think she thought she was god incarnate, the way she went on and on.” (I’m not talking about anyone in particular, so don’t go trying to figure out who I’m talking about. Since I’m not talking about anyone. And if I was, it wouldn’t be about you.)

I’m torn over how I feel about the time change. For weeks ahead of time, I dread the time changing, the falling back an hour. You’d think I would like it, getting an extra hour to do something, but that’s not how it works in my house, at least not since the kids arrived. I don’t know what’s wrong with those little buggers, but as the days get shorter and it takes longer for it to get light in the morning, they start to wake up earlier. Does that make any sense? I didn’t think so. Last week Sweetsie was pitter-pattering down to our room at 5:30, happy as a lark. The happy-as-a-lark part only lasted for about an hour, and then she turned into a bear, roaring about everything and anything under the sun, which had finally come up.

The Baby Nickel was waking up at six.

Are you following me? That means that now my children, bless their hearts, are waking up at 4:30 and 5:00, respectively. They are insane! And grumpy. I hate having grumpy children, especially when the solution is so obvious—just sleep longer, you little stinkers.

As for the evenings, well, I dreaded them being so long and dark, but now that they’re here I kind of like them. We wait to eat supper till it’s dark and then I light candles and we get baths and read books by the fire. I don’t feel obligated to start projects or do work because it’s dark outside and we should be sleeping.

Now if I were to be totally truthful I should tell you that the evenings aren’t always so delightfully peaceful. Of course. The kids tend to get a big energy boost after dinner and run around like lunatics, bouncing off the walls and each other, hurtling the sofa, thundering up and down the stairs. They want to play hard and rough, and I can’t send them outside (well, I suppose I could, but that would involve lots of coats and boots and gloves…), so it’s really loud and crazy inside and then someone gets bonked on the head and starts wailing like they’ve been mortally wounded and Mr. Handsome starts yelling at the kids and I start yelling at Mr. Handsome and then we haul the kids upstairs and throw them into bed and stomp back downstairs where we sit on the sofa in our cozy, candlelit home, steam pouring out of our ears. Then Mr. Handsome and I vent, I mean talk, about our children and we say “bless his heart” and “bless her heart” an awful lot.

Okay, so neither picture is totally accurate, it’s more of a mix between the two. I mean, everything in life is on a spectrum and life operates as a pendulum (my theories—they help to keep me sane so don’t knock them), so we hit on everything in between and not everything at one time.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to making bread. I can’t seem to get my act together long enough to feed the starters three times a day. I don’t remember ever having this problem before. Even when I was hemorrhaging and ended up in the hospital, even when an explosive 14 year old foster daughter landed in our lap, even when I traveled, my starters never got neglected.

But on Saturday I went shopping all day long and forgot to put “do the starters” on Mr. Handsome’s list and then I forgot to call home at lunchtime to tell him to feel the babies, so they only got two feedings that day.

And then yesterday I got sick (a stomach bug) and forgot to remind Mr. Handsome to give the babies their bedtime feeding because I fell asleep at 7:30 and slept all night long (and that was after I slept from 3-6 pm, and that was after taking periodic naps all day long … I was doing a lot of sleeping). It’s not like I can blame Mr. Handsome. Not at all, really. See, he had been swamped with work: taking all the kids to church, hosting my grandparents who were visiting from PA, and then my balding bro and his wife came too, and making dinner (potato soup and apple pie) for everyone. If the starter babies were going to compete with all that chaos, then they needed to be the type of baby that screams bloody murder, which they aren’t.

The good news is that now I know what the starters looks like when they’ve only had two feedings. Just for the record, the white starter gets a thin layer of frothy liquid on top, and the whole wheat starter smells a little flat. They’re probably just fine, and I could’ve baked with them, except that I didn’t have enough starter to use in bread and still have some leftover to keep it going. So, we’re waiting till tomorrow.