What it wasn't.

Much fun. Well, the bambinos had a blast in Florida, but the adults? Not so much. The sleeping arrangements were challenging, all four of us in one small bedroom. The first night there I ended up dragging a blanket and pillow to sleep on the bathroom’s cold terrazzo floor just to get away from B.’s earth shaking snoring. We bought an air mattress the next day and B. was relegated to the bathroom floor for the remaining nights.

The trip home was Awful. Yes, with a capital A. What should have taken nine hours was stretched to over fourteen due to obscenely heavy traffic on I-75. Silver lining? We now know that the babies are capable of making the trip to visit their other set of grandparents in Pennsylvania - a twelve hour drive - in one day. We have that trip to look forward to* at the end of May.

B. is already gone again, off to Denver for the week. He’ll be back for a week, then gone again for three weeks. As the children mature it’s getting harder and harder for him to leave home for so long. I wish I could go on some of the trips for him, ‘cause god knows I could use the break.

*Dread, actually. Nothing against my in-laws at all, it’s just so much work travelling with toddler twins.

Near disaster, nearly a disaster.

In spite of a rather crappy week I’m feeling pretty lucky. The tornado that tore through Atlanta came less than two miles from our house. We were without power for thirty hours (in itself sucky) but had no real damage otherwise. Go down the street a mile or so and it looks absolutely unreal, trees uprooted and covering houses and cars, insulation blown and stuck onto everything, houses missing their entire roof, weird debris everywhere.

So yeah, lucky. Freaked out too, though. I was home alone with the babies and although I knew it was storming, had no idea that there were tornados in the area. We had lost power, everyone was asleep, and there were no sirens, nothing. If the tornado had veered in our direction, we’d never have known it was coming. Scary thought.

I’ve not been a good mother lately. This month long trip of B.’s is finally nearing its end, but I’m ragged and worn out. I snap at the babies and am impatient and not much fun at all. True, Little Boy and Little Girl have entered, shall we say, a “challenging” stage in their development and are themselves not much fun much of the time. I’d like to rise above and be the uber-mommy I fantasize about, patient, loving, always calm, never frazzled, but it’s just not happening. I’ll keep trying.

Although B.’s return is imminent, there’s no real break for me. A few days after he gets back we’re loading the kids up into a rented minivan and heading down to Florida to visit my parents. I get a vaguely ill feeling when I think about two defiant toddlers in my parent’s unchildproofed house. For a week. ‘Cause you know, I’m not already worn out and stressed enough. I would have much preferred to schedule this trip another time, but B. didn’t have much choice about when he could take leave. So it is. Wish us luck.

Still no improvement on the bambino’s talking. Little Boy and Little Girl will both say the word “shoe,” but that’s the only new acquisition. Little Boy still doesn’t say “mama” at all, while Little Girl will say it occasionally. They’ll both make a snake sound (“sssssssssss”) and bark like a dog, but that’s all the animal noises. They have hearing evaluations scheduled for early April, and then speech evaluations late in April/early in May. I still have hopes that they’ll be talking by then, but I realize that’s unlikely.