I am not exaggerating when I tell you that there were only four of them on the shelf that day.

It was such a mysterious thing to me, this having two babies at one time. None of my friends had twins. I had very few friends who were twins and until I started announcing that I was pregnant with twins I didn’t realize how many people that I knew had siblings that were twins. I needed more information.

There was a book by Jane Seymour about having twins, but I had a strong suspicion that my experience would differ greatly from that of a Bond Girl. I was guessing that Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman would have a nanny or two. I wanted a story about someone who had been where I was. There wasn’t a book like that.

Now there is.

You might know Jane Roper from her blog Baby Squared over on Babble. I have been reading her for years and so when she asked me if I would read her new book about raising twins and write about it I jumped at the chance.

Double Time: How I Survived—and Mostly Thrived—Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins is that book I wanted when I was pregnant.

Where was this book in 2004? (You don’t have to answer that. I realize Jane’s twins were born in 2007 making that a rhetorical question.) Jane writes beautifully about the first three years of her girls’ lives and the challenges of being a new mom, a parent of multiples, work-life balance and struggling with depression.

This isn’t one of those books that is designed to scare you (you guys know the one I am talking about). This book doesn’t boss you around or shame you about how you are doing it wrong. This is just a sweet and funny memoir that resonated deeply with me as a fellow mother of twins.

You don’t have to have twins to enjoy it, but I especially recommend Double Time to parents of multiples. You should be reading Jane’s blog too.

And if you are still up all night nursing those twins it comes in a Kindle edition. This is important because if you use the Kindle app on your iPhone you can read with one hand and it is backlit so you won’t wake up the other baby. This totally works. I read Ulysses and Moby Dick on my Palm Pilot (Shut up. It was 2004) while nursing the Goon Squad.

I put it in my car right away.

My seven year old twins were sitting in the third row of my minivan (shut up) ostensibly to get as far away from me as possible but also probably because they think it makes them look cooler and so I wasn’t that worried that they could even hear what I was listening to when I noticed that they were absolutely silent.

Two seven year olds are never silent, unless maybe they are sleeping or up to no good.

In this case they were listening intently.

Why You Shouldn’t Listen to Jenny Lawson’s New Audio Book with Your Children in the Car – Besides the Obvious Reasons

I could tell for sure when Jenny dropped the F bomb and they started chuckling.

I stopped the CD.

“Do you guys think this is funny?”

“Yeah.” they agreed.

“My friend wrote this and that is her voice reading it. Isn’t that cool?” I said to my rear view mirror.

“Can you turn it back on?” my son asked.

Eh, what is the harm? I thought and then she began telling the story of the magical squirrel.

Without giving too much of the story away, “Stanley the Magical, Talking Squirrel” is about this one time when Jenny’s dad pretended to have a squirrel that understood English and could count but really it was a dead rodent that her father was using as a puppet to mess with his daughters.

It is both funnier and more charming when Jenny tells it, but that is why she has a book and I’m just sitting here at my desk in a towel.

Too much information? Sorry, I always have my best ideas in the shower then I run out here and start typing right away before I forget what I wanted to say. I’m not wearing glasses or contacts either so you can just assume that those are typos and I’m not illiterate.

Once the chapter was over I turned off the radio. “What did you guys think?” I asked.

“That was kind of weird.” said my son.

“She sure knew a lot of bad words when she was eight!” my daughter said.

That, my friends, is a high compliment coming from a child that loves cursing. My kids both think that bad words are about the best thing in the world. The other day my son asked me what my favorite language was and I said “English” and he said that his was “beyond questionable” and then started laughing.

I swear that is 100% true. He is a clever guy.

I am starting to think it is hereditary to love foul language and that my husband and I passed on some weird cursing gene. I credit/blame my mother.

I suppose it is also possible that watching all of those “Deadwood” reruns while nursing could also be responsible for their obsession with colorful language. Really, when you think about it, I should just shut the hell up and be happy that their first word wasn’t cocksucker.

Whenever somebody asks if I am like my blog in real life I say that I am exactly like my blog except I am taller and I curse more. I think it is a pretty accurate description.

I changed the CD to some compilation of punk rock songs which probably had an equal amount of cursing but the lyrics were more obscured by all of the guitars and drums and I think my kids walked away mostly unscathed. While I totally think you should Buy Jenny’s book because it is screamingly funny, I would not recommend listening to it in the car with your kids unless they are grown ups.

* * *

This is not a paid or a sponsored anything. Jenny didn’t even ask me to write it. I just thought you would appreciate my crappy parenting. That being said, those are amazon associate links so if you click on them and buy something I can still get money. Cha ching. 

Having spent a good four months of last year helping promote Duran Duran’s North American tour and having spent ALL of middle school obsessing over John Taylor* I knew I wanted to read this book so I was really looking forward to receiving it.

Yesterday, when I went out to wait for my kids to get off the bus I had two big envelopes waiting by my door. This wouldn’t even be interesting at all expect I had been home for four hours and seriously mailman, how hard is it to ring the doorbell? Well, no, it would be interesting because both envelopes had the same return address. Rob Sheffield.

Cool! I thought. He accidentally sent me two. There must have been a lot of contests.

I opened up the first package. There was “Talking to Girls About Duran Duran”.

Before I tell you about what happened when I opened up the book I have to tell you about Nancy’s contest. She posed the question “What band represents the mystical realm of the opposite sex to you – the band that captivated your love interest and left you completely befuddled? ” This was a tricky question for me. I have learned a lot of great music even from the crappiest of boyfriends. Boys taught me about Pink Floyd, The Sex Pistols, Metallica, Celtic Frost, Bauhaus… I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Plus, it often me who me that poses the music problem to my significant other. It was just yesterday that while listening to my iPod my husband said “Death Angel sucks.”

I totally disagree. I like Death Angel, (Remind me sometime to tell you the story about how I got Mark Osegueda to sign an autograph for a child that wasn’t born yet.) but I am glad he said it because it makes it easier for me to tell you that I told Nancy that the one he liked that bugged me was Skanking Pickle.

I am not a fan.

My apologies to Skanking Pickle if they are reading this. I’m sure they are nice gentlemen, it just isn’t my thing.

I had to tell you that story so that this picture makes sense.

How nice is that? A personal touch and a compliment! I was totally charmed.

Then I opened up the other package.

It was a hard cover copy of his New York Times bestseller Love Is a Mix Tape. I was thrilled. Bonus book! I have been wanting to read this book for a while. It seems right up my alley.

But it gets better. He signed this one too.

Wait! He wishes there was more metal for me? And he was awesome enough to tell me WHICH PAGE has AC/DC on it? He probably didn’t have that memorized either. He probably had to look it up. How cool is this guy?

Even cooler than that. In this book there was also a full page, handwritten letter to me that mentions a handful of posts I have written here. He really came and checked out my blog and either actually liked it or is a really good liar.

So Rob Sheffield has a fan for life and I haven’t even read one word of his books yet.

I just hope that this is his real return address. It is going to make the stalking so much easier. I’m kidding, Rob. I’m kidding, officers.

* * *

* That isn’t entirely true. In 6th grade I obsessed over Simon LeBon. It wasn’t until 7th grade that I realized John Taylor was really the man of my dreams.

I would like to be able to claim a great love for Gothic fiction, but the truth is that the narrative can be a bit slow. Stoker wrote the entire novel as correspondence or journal entries which is really cool as a writing exercise, but at times it can be tedious to read.

Especially when in my head all of Jonathan Harker’s entries are in Keanu Reeves’ voice in my head.

Gardening for Dummies indeed.

2) What movie should I watch that you think I haven’t seen?

3) What is the miracle cure I could use to ensure I am healthy in time to go to the Redskins/Broncos game on Sunday?

4) What two teams do you think are going to go to the Super Bowl this year?

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*
*

*

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2) What is your favorite non-fiction book?

3) Name a book you just quit reading in the middle, something you just could not get through.*

4) Is there an author that you have read everything that he or she has written?**

5) What book made you laugh so hard you embarrassed yourself?

* I pretty much stole this idea from ‘Twas Brillig

** Assuming they have written more than one book.

1. How much does your tooth fairy pay for a tooth?*

2. If I admit to my kids that there is no tooth fairy does that automatically give up Santa Claus and the rest of those guys?

3. Do your kids read your blog? **

4. What are you reading?***

5. Are you as disgusted by Brett Favre and Michael Vick as I am?

* That was the important one.

** Assuming a) you have kids and b) they know how to read.

*** I mean, clearly you are reading my blog, right now, but what book or books are you reading? This has nothing to do with anything other than the fact that I am curious.

My first therapist’s name was Neil Diamond, but he didn’t wear sequins, didn’t bring me flowers, and most certainly did not turn on my heartlight…

I read a lot and not many books have me laughing out loud during the freaking prologue.*

The book is called Rage Against the Meshugenah: Why it Takes Balls to Go Nuts and it was written by one of my favorite writers, Danny Evans.

Yes, THAT Danny Evans. Dad Gone Mad, people. Another one of us bloggers has gone legit.

And Danny makes us look good.

The truth is that I have been a huge fan of his for a couple of years now and I would probably say nice things about his book even if it sucked, but I don’t have to.

I was a little concerned that a book about clinical depression would be a real downer. There are certain topics that hit close to home and “Rage” hit on a couple of these for me. For example, besides just being sports fans and bloggers Danny and I have something else in common, we both lost any faith we had (and by faith I mean a belief system, like me in the corner, me in the spotlight kind of faith) after a miscarriage.

We also have this in common:

I don’t like waking up. I like being awake, obviously, because that is when all the good sports are on TV. But the actual transition from sleep to alertness kind of bums me out.

See? I didn’t have to worry about anything written by Danny being a drag, even if it was a memoir about depression.

There was one thing I should have been concerned about. I should have been worried about reading “Rage Against the Meshugenah” in public. You see, I read the end of the book on the train home from New York. Not to ruin the book for you, but the part where his daughter is born made me cry. Not just a few tears, but the kind of crying where your nose runs and all the people on the train look at you funny and your husband is embarrassed because it probably looks like he did something to make you cry like that.

I assure you (and my fellow train passengers) that it was not Gabe, but Mr. Evans that was making me cry like that and then four minutes later making me laugh just as hard as I had previously cried so that I looked like either an asshole or like I was having the worlds worst mood swings ever.

I am not going to tell you what made me laugh like that because I want you to read the book. I want you to buy the book. I ended up with two copies** of it and I am considering buying another one just because I feel like I should be doing more to contribute to Danny success.

He certainly deserves it.

Rage Against the Meshugenah goes on sale tomorrow (August 4th) and you should all read it because if you like what I write, you will love what Danny writes.

* And I don’t mean LOL either. I mean really laughing out loud.

** Yes, I was given a free copy of the book to review. I somehow got two. I am keeping them both so I can force all my friends to read it. But my point is that for full disclosure Danny asked me to review this for him and I agreed – with bells on.

I mean – my children never listen to me, why would they pay any attention to an audio recording of  “A Light in August”?

We just got back from a road trip that was 10 hours in each direction.

And Ian told me that one of his sister’s baby dolls just had a near death experience.

I guess they were paying attention when I was listening to “Spook” by Mary Roach.

Oops.