M is in New York this week. He made time to check out the Occupy Wall Street protest while he was in Lower Manhattan. Funny, because I feel like I’m living my very own anarchic takeover here at home. The protesters are better organized than you’d expect from the nine and under set, especially given that one is a baby, and one is a certain seven year old who wanders the earth looking like he is being raised in a back alley. They may even be more together than their Wall Street brethren.
Their demands are few, but clear:
1.We won’t sleep – ever, and therefore, neither shall you.
2. We demand far more TV, specifically of the crappy and inappropriate  Nickelodeon tween variety.
3. We insist that all formal meals must be replaced by constant, roving snacking.
They repeat them with such remarkable intensity than I am all but about to give in. This morning, after a night during which I fell asleep before ten (stunning) but awoke at eleven and stayed awake until after two when I fell asleep with Fiona’s knees digging into my lower back, I was stumbling around the kitchen, making breakfast and packing lunches. (Speaking of sleep, or lack of, why was this article not at all a surprise to any of us? The NYT needs to dig far deeper than this.)  I must have looked particularly disgruntled (hey, when do I get to protest?), because Francie asked, “Don’t you wish you like, only had one of us?” (In hindsight, I’m sure she was asking, “Don’t you wish you only had me? Because I sure do.”) ”
No,” I explained. “Why do you ask?”
“Because you wouldn’t have to work so hard if you only had one of us.” I then explained that I chose to have all five of them. And that even though it’s really hard work sometimes, I’d do it all again. Really. I hoped the conversation had ended there because I really didn’t have the wherewithal to go much further than that, and I really really needed to concentrate. (I’ve been guilty of an assortment of lunch screw-ups lately. Apparently Efram would rather starve than eat lunch out of Francie’s Hello Kitty thermos.)
Bennett could not resist a chime in:”What do you mean chose? You mean you just requested us and we showed up?”
Oh dear God, please don’t make me have this conversation at seven a.m., with M on another coast when I’d be so successfully been avoiding it for months now. “It’s a far more complicated discussion. We’ll have it another time. Look! A shooting star!”
You can say that in Seattle at breakfast, because in November, the early morning is indistinguishable from the late night. Phew.