She's here!

I went to bed last night at 10 p.m. and seriously, like two minutes later, the babies started crying. I kicked David. "Urgh," he said. "The babies!" I moaned. (Our deal is -- he feeds them first, around midnight, and then I feed them when they wake up again, usually around 3 or 4 a.m.) He said nothing and started snoring again. "Did you feed them?" I demanded and cracked my eyes open -- it was 3:15 a.m.

Ugh. My amazing helper is here and I'm seriously tired -- almost as tired as when the girlies were newborns. All of a sudden, I have a glimpse of life with four children!! (And trust me, we don't want that.) The au pair is great. She's very sweet and very brave, and very good with the babies, but she is unfamiliar with hot water showers, clothes dryers, dishwashers, etc., and she needs lots of instruction. (She carried the Kenmore downstairs yesterday to vacuum her room and then came back up a minute later, saying, "Mary, I can't make it go??" And I went downstairs and said, "You need to plug it in!!" And we both laughed.) Also, it's tiring, communicating with somebody whose English is really good, but not great. (Although I'm sure it's much more tiring for her.) And, okay, I know this is really sad, but it turns out that it's kind of a big effort for me to be nice ALL THE TIME.

That being said, it's going to be good. I think. She is nice, after all. And she's really smart, so she catches on to all of our weird American ways very quickly. And today is her birthday! I made a cake and we're going out for pupusas. And on Saturday, we all went to the Arlington Fair. This is my little chicken on the swings ride, which she absolutely insisted on boarding.



And this is the Opie with Josephine.



And this is Margaret, looking absurdly fat. How did we lift her up there??