How We Do It

"How do you do it?" I get this question a lot when people hear we have two sets of twins.

Some people do it with the help of family nearby. Some people have a nanny. Some quit their jobs to become stay-at-home moms.

The following pictures describe how we do it.

This is the back yard. Those are weeds, not shrubbery.


These are the shoes that Charlie and Joseph gathered to donate to Haiti. For their birthday. Three months ago. They have been sitting in our dining room all this time. [Update: We finally shipped the shoes off a couple of weeks ago.]

This is my bedside table. Off to the right is our bed, which we have not made in years.

This is a corner of our bedroom. I'm not sure of it's purpose, other than it used to be an open space, so it got filled with stuff. There are several backpacks (why do we have several backpacks?), a posterboard with Joseph's school project (are we keeping it? I don't know), and miscellaneous other things (although I have no idea, really, what things).

These are all of Charlie and Joseph's book. We removed them from their room last September because they were reading instead of sleeping during the night. And we threw them all into this huge, bulging box. Where they have remained ever since. We only read the ones on top now.

This is our old mattress and box springs standing up against the wall in our bedroom. As of last month, it is actually gone. But it was there for eleven months before we got rid of it.

This is a little settee in our bedroom, piled high with clothes we need to donate, and probably some other stuff. None of it -- not even the settee -- belongs in our bedroom.

A few months ago, I started a project to clean out my closet. I put the clothes I intended to get rid of on the ground next to the bathtub. I never finished the project, and the clothes are still there. If I take a bath, I just use them as a bath mat.

This is the duffel bag with all of our ski stuff. It is sitting in the hallway. We went skiing in March. I haven't unpacked yet.

This is our wall in the entry way. We used to have a decorative shelf there. Sometime before Christmas, the shelf fell down, leaving these huge holes. They are one of the first things that people see when they walk into our house. Since I took this picture, we have added a larger hole, courtesy of the door handle and the lack of a door stop.

We do it by completely neglecting every other aspect of our lives.