good twin bad twin

Rebecca and Jonathan have been perfecting the good twin bad twin performance since the womb. This involves one twin acting like Satan’s love child and the other performing perfect kid. Tonight’s iteration of this old pattern involved a 47 minutes tantrum from Jonathan about not wanting to eat dinner; it featured kicking, enraged screaming and pathetic tears which are always particularly dramatic on an underweight kid. “No one understands my pain,” “I just can’t resist kicking” And the trump card of “you know mommy I have a sore throat, head ache, muscle ache and stomach ache and must have the H1N1 flu” This prompted Rebecca to very aggressively eat her roast chicken “it’s the best chicken ever” She even ostentatiously sampled steamed mustard greens. “Aren’t I being helpful by eating new foods and cleaning the table” “Do you think we need to take Jonathan back to the feeding Therapist” “Don’t you think we’re a little old for this sort of behavior…..” I was not in the best place for this little performance having spent the entire day attempting to write a grant proposal that is due in a week. My new approach involves leaving myself exactly a week to get things done; as it turns out bibliographic control of Thomas Jefferson may take longer than that. Thankfully I have very smart friends and at least three of them wrote me sentences today. I’m assuming this counts as collaboration not honor code violation. And if anyone can think of a way to talk about fiddling that doesn’t end up sounding obscene that would be helpful as well. TJ is taken very seriously down here.

I set my running watch to clock the amount of time I spent dealing with work email and at 63 minutes I am still not caught up. This does not include any of the fun stuff like snide remarks to friends and family, or attempting to figure out exactly what time on Weds four women with 9 children between them and multiple jobs can run. We’ve settled I believe on 8:35 at last check. My husband finds these efforts worthwhile as he sees running as key to my sanity and thus his—he said this weekend he lives in fear of a knee injury for me.