After a week with both boys home, Doug and I are wandering around in a sleep-deprived torpor. The babies are up every couple of hours, and it takes an hour to warm their bottles, feed them, change them (we usually have to change each of them twice and sometimes three times, the little poopers), and get them back to sleep.

A few mornings ago, Doug, who is chronically chipper and cheerful, rolled over in bed when one of the babies woke up yet again, put the pillow over his head, and moaned. “I’m beginning to crave brains,” he told me.

I’m beginning to crave brains, too. I now understand why zombies eat them: their own brains are so foggy and muddled from never sleeping, they need to supplement with someone else’s.

The grace in all this is that the days are sunny, which helps stabilize my mercurial emotions. (When I asked Doug if it was redundant to say mercurial emotions, he said, “For you, perhaps.” Ha ha. He’s just a laugh a minute.) It also clears my head somewhat (“somewhat” being a relative term here) and makes my two older kids want to play outside.

Also, sunshine helps me retain my sense of humor, which regularly flees in the middle of the night. I got mastitis again on Monday night. (For those of you not familiar with mastitis, it’s like having the flu but with the added delight of feeling like your breasts have been run over by a Mack truck. All I can say is, thank God for antibiotics.) At 3:30 that morning when the twins got up for the third (or was it fourth?) time and my breast pump wouldn’t work and every muscle in my body ached and my breasts felt like they were going to break off and I sort of wished they would just so they would stop hurting, I started to cry with frustration and self-pity.

In retrospect, it was sort of funny (emphasis on “sort of”), but at the time I wasn’t laughing.

Then Tuesday dawned, and even though I still felt tired and achy, life was slightly more bearable simply because the sun was out and light streamed through the windows, and I became intensely grateful that I didn’t have these babies in November. Or February.

Now if I could just find someone who’d be willing to share her brain with me, I might be able to maintain that sense of perspective at oh-dark-thirty.