Rooms we're in now don't have Internets... so I'll do this after collecting for a bit and post in bursts.

1:30 Lorien has been induced, but it may be many hours until something happens. More importantly on my way to the hospital I had one of the most amazing sandwiches I've ever had in my life.

3:00 Contractions are getting stronger now, we may not need to wait for the pitocin, but let
me tell you about this sandwich. While I was eating it I realized that I owed it to this
sandwich to tell others how good it was.

3:30 Shawn came to visit, told him about the sandwich. As a gluten-free man he was not
amused, but agreed that it sounded like a good sandwich. It was a shawarma in a baguette with chumus, charif, umba, and a bit of techina.

4:30 Baby is still head down which is good. We may get the epidural soon, ideally before
Lorien's water breaks... and ideally the baby will STAY head down. The baguette was so soft, and the meat was so tasty. There was salad, eggplant, and red cabbage. The interplay of flavours was perfect.

4:37 I've become obsessed with the pain-o-meter. It shows how much pain Lorien is in. A high number means she's having a contraction. This means she gets awarded a score, and I get to belittle any pain under her high score. She does not appreciate this for some reason.

5:03 Lorien turns on to her side.

5:37 Moving to different room to get epidural (final delivery room)

5:52 Oh God, I hate epidurals... they freak me out.

...but hell yeah I'm going to!!

After all, being a parent of multiples is hard, damn hard. But when a day comes along and you manage above and beyond what you ever expected, you deserve a pat on the back. And no one, other than another parent of multiples, will ever understand just how well deserved that self-congratulatory pat really is.

It is a quarter past 9am and I have already managed to feed (bottle), feed breakfast (cheerios and cooked carrot, pumpkin, celery), bathe (while both were wide awake and incredibly cranky), feed (bottle), dress, and sweep the floor after breakfast. All this was achieved with, when starting out, no hot water, no clean bottles, no chosen outfits, and an overflowing baby garbage that had to be emptied before being usable (and after breakfast, a floor covered in cheerios, cooked carrot, pumpkin, and celery).

It is a rare day indeed that I manage to bathe both girls totally on my own. Usually one sleeping baby at a time is involved. But to have started out with two wide awake and cranky, hungry children and end up with clean, dressed, fed, happy babies and a clean floor is quite an achievement indeed.

Now to go and cut Eli's nails (who has recently learned, by the way, to wave hello like her sister, who also waves goodbye).

(Note: I do intend to get some real blogging done to recap all of December... I've been lazy, but I would like a lot of things recorded in a better history than just random FB updates... but for now here's an amusing story from this past Shabbat).

We have a doorbell. No, doorbell is too pedestrian of a term for it. It's a household notification integrated system, featuring 12 different jaunty tunes specially chosen for their ability to stimulate the residents of a home to answer the door as quickly as bloody possible.

Actually maybe it's best described as some sort of torture device.

Regardless, we have a door ringtone that is possibly one of the most annoying things you can imagine. It was there when we moved in, and I've just been too lazy to replace it. Really in the end it hasn't been worth my effort to replace the darn thing even though we really don't want Happy Birthday or Rock-a-bye Baby blasting through the house, it's not the end of the world.

However there is another detriment to our house notification system that compounds the issue of the blaring tones. You seen at some point the outside of our house was painted. Painted by people who don't seem to understand the different between a paintable surface, and those surfaces best left unpainted. Our doorbell button was painted over you see. Now this, in and of itself, wouldn't be so bad, it would just look strange. However the paint managed to get in sides of the switch and causes it to stick sometimes. This means that every so often if somebody pushes the button it gets stuck in the on position. This causes the doorbell to play an upbeat little ditty, pause 1.75 seconds, and then play another from its extensive repertoire.

Now that we have that little bit of background information provided let me tell you a story.

Shabbat morning I took Chana to shul with me and locked the door behind me (so that Sefi would not run outside forcing my overdue wife to chase after him). The door remained in this state until the end of services. Chana walked home from shul with a friend of hers and came to our door, which as I've just mentioned, was locked. Frustrated, Chana knocks on the door and waits for an answer. Chana, like many children, is not amongst the most patient of individuals. She waited about 2.5 seconds for an answer. Now my aforementioned wife, bearing a body quite noticably past its pregnancy due date, takes a bit longer than that to get off the couch. Thus my lovable precocious daughter, in her haste, forgot it was the holy Sabbath during which it is not permissible to actively use electricity, and rang the doorbell.

The doorbell got stuck. Normally not the end of the world assuredly, but as this was on the Holy Sabbath we were not able to shut off the switch. Thus the house was condemned to 7 hours or so of The Reccess Bell's Greatest Hits.

Thus we abandoned home and hearth. Packed up our intended foodstuffs for lunch and migrated to my mother's house (which is thankfully currently around the corner from us). There we ate in the blessed absence of music, and happily napped. Later we took refuge in a friend's house until the end of Shabbat.

I'd like to think this will motivate me to at least scrape out the sides of the doorbell button so it can't get stuck any more.

Friday morning, Tzviel got his first visit to Dr. T, along with me.  We both have terrible coughs, which we caught from Mechal.  Mine was deep in my chest and we both have colds.  Dr. T started me on amoxycillin, which effectively is for Tzviel as well, since he gets it through my milk.  Since I was only 11 days post-surgery, there was no reason to take any chances.  We're both doing somewhat better.  It's so hard to watch the little guy cough.  He's so new- it's just upsetting. 
Ron put together the entire Shabbat from start to finish.  G-d bless my amazing husband! 

Tomorrow's plans are to go to Misrad Hapnim and get Tzviel's birth certificate and get him put on our Teudat Zehuts. I'll see if I can swing Bituach Leumi as well.  I also need to stop into Maccabi offices and apply for his medical card.  They're all within a street of eachother, so it shouldn't be so bad, of course, there's all the beaurocracy... Here's to hoping! 

Tonight Shawn and I decided to go out, with the girls if necessary. There is a restaurant we have been meaning to try for a while but we go out so rarely these days (back in our child-free days we'd have a date night once a month or so) that we never seemed to make it there. But after looking at the menu today we saw it had a ton of options that would work for Shawn (ie, gluten-free) and for me of course, since it's a dairy restaurant.

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Can someone give me a satisfactory answer as to why we don't eat fish and meat together?

Because seriously, turbriskefil does sound good...

So far what I got is that it's somewhere in the Talmud that a bunch of Rabbis said it's not good, but I don't think there's any actual halachic basis otherwise.

February I'll be hosting a photo carnival (carnivals are compilations of submitted posts from different bloggers pertaining to a particular theme).

In December I hosted my first carnival in my blogger.com blog, a Kosher food theme one and it was pretty straightforward with the linking. For the most part, the blog carnival notification came with the HTML code and I just had to copy paste.

With a photo post it's trickier. I want a thumbnail posted in the carnival post and the thumbnail to also be a link to the original post in the original blog. AND I want to be able to resize all the photos to a uniform thumbnail size.

And I can't seem to find the right combination of code.

When I use this (obviously without the various spaces and the [ is a < or >): [a href="http://yeshasettler.blogspot.com/2009/12/hot-and-sour-soup.html"> [img src="http://1.bp.blogspot. com/_AjqvE-2F28o/SzRyyqB052I/AAAAAAAAAns/ rUNRTJMLxH0/s1600-h/DSCF6183A.jpg" height="75%" width="75%" alt="soup" /[ </a> I don't get the image posted.

Anyone have advice?

Today, is my first real day on my own.  My mother left last night. :-(  I'm home with the baby until it's time to pick Mechal up from school at 4:00pm.  Ron will be home shortly after, so I can take Tzviel to the mohel for another checkup. Our home fell into some serious disarray during the past week.  I plan on straightening up, sweeping, washing the floors, folding laundry and cleaning bathrooms.  I'll see how far my energy takes me.  I'd like to go for a walk and buy some of the shopping list for Shabbat.  I would love to go into Talpiot and pick up some stuff, but that might be too much for today. 

Let's see how it goes...

I'm in the mood for meatballs and spaghetti so I'll be making that for Friday night dinner.

NS's version will have pureed cauliflower and zucchini in the meatballs (and I'm considering making 'porcupine meatballs' with brown rice) and making a sauce that's mostly pureed baked sweet potato with some tomato sauce to make it redder.

Tonight's dinner I think will be veggie soup with barley and I may take a stick blender to it and let NS drink it. Also give him a grilled cheese sandwich to go with it.

Tomorrow night's dinner will be home made pizza. The sauce will be sneaky sauce.But shhhh... don't tell Zach.

Depending on the weather, I may call the babysitter and see if she can come for an hour so I can get the shopping done today and not have to take the boys out in the rain. I figure if I'm gone for an hour, it won't cost much more than paying to have the groceries delivered. So far, although the sky is gray, it's not raining. EN is sleeping and when he wakes up, we'll head out. Maybe.

And tomorrow is black and white cookie baking!

Today, was our son's brit milah.  I have to say, everything leading up to the brit was hectic and stressful, even though I had had it all planned for months.  But it's amazing how the day arrived, and everything just fit into place. 

Our son's name is Tzviel Yosef. 

Tzviel is after my Grandpa Harry.  Grandpa was a truly special soul.  He was kind to all, and had a way of making each person feel incredibly special.  He was an important role model in my life and I shaped many of my outlooks on life and aspirations on him.  We had a hard time finding out his "Jewish" name.  My father had been for years saying Tzvi Hersch ben Eliyush.  My grandmother found his birth certificate and it said "Elias".  She called around and finally found out his "Jewish" name was Eliyush Hersch.  So, in Hebrew it would be Eli Tzvi.  We were toying around with the two names and stumbled upon the name Tzviel, which incorporates both names.  Once we heard the name, it clicked instantly and we knew we had the right name.

His middle name is Yosef, after Ron's father.  While never having met him, many stories have been recounted to me of his eagerness to help people and his steadfast desire to live in Israel.

By naming for these two people, our hopes are that our son will follow in the middot of the two special men that he is named for. 

As much cleaning as EN will allow.

Now that he's on the floor, he needs to be watched. He doesn't like it when I'm away from him. He's started the 'OMG I can't reach Mommy' phase much sooner than NS did. It also doesn't help that his two top center teeth are just about to cu through. Or that NS tends to step on him when he runs around... and NS insists on wearing his sneakers, refuses to have anything to do with his slippers and likes to climb over the couches and lands on EN who tends to be screaming for me if I dare set him on the floor and have the gall to leave him.

I want to get a couple more loads of laundry done too.

Took EN to the pediatrician for his 9 month WBV visit.

The dr seems to feel (and I somewhat agree) that EN is a tad behind in some gross motor skills - mainly the fact that at 9 months he's only been army crawling a month and the fact that he's made no attempts to get up on all fours yet either. He also doesn't get himself into a seated position and when put into a seated position, he's fairly unsteady. And he still doesn't roll back to tummy.

He also gave me a referral to see a dietician so we can try and work on his gagging issues.

I love those ears...

Our son was born Monday, December 21st at 5:20 pm, via c-section.  As far as surgeries go, it was really wonderful.  We had the top surgeon and an excellent anesthesiologist.  There are many more details that I would like to log on my lj, but it will wait until I'm out of the hospital.

In the meantime, Baby Boy is doing well, nursing well and looks just like his handsome father.  Mechal is deeply in love with him and anxious to help in any way.  She has handled all of this so amazingly, I'm really so proud.  Of course, she has pink eye now, but that will be for a later post.