Our mornings can go one of two ways. Before this fall, our mornings were almost always a source of calm during what were otherwise frantic days. Coffee. The news. Everybody content.

Once Nora started school, though - J takes her every morning - things changed. On good days mornings are serene, like they used to be. Good days. Days when, like, we lay out everybody’s clothes the night before, and I get up in time to take a shower, and Mina doesn’t decide to take advantage of the freedom we allow the dogs when we let them out the back door and into our unfenced back yard by trotting on out into the neighborhood streets to have some fun, without our knowledge.

Nora has to be at school at a fairly early hour and we simply have to be super organized if we want things to go smoothly.

So, you know, sometimes we aren’t super organized.

This morning, for instance. We were at a disadvantage going in. Gabe and I have colds and neither of us had slept well, so I woke up and put a robe on and stumbled downstairs envisioning getting right back into bed once everyone was off and on their way, which is a really funny thing to envision when you have a baby to take care of. Really funny.

And then when I went in Nora’s room to see if she was awake, she popped up in her bed and shouted, “I want a snack!” She has breakfast at school, but she often has a little something before. Her saying this is a terrible omen of things to come, because when she’s in the “I want a snack” mood, every thing you have to do from there on out is not only going to be the normal level of annoying…brushing teeth…brushing hair….walking down the stairs…it’s also going to be one more thing she has to do before she can have her bunch of grapes, or clementine or what have you.

So Nora’s angry off the bat and Gabe’s coughing up a storm and I look like I did that week I was doing my college essays and I refused to get out of my pajamas for five straight days and J is making coffee frantically because no matter how little time we have to do it, the coffee must be made. Otherwise we’re no better than barbarians.

I was holding the baby and went to put him down on his back on the floor, but he wanted to sit up, a skill he’s mastered very well, although his balance isn’t yet 100 percent. Just as I let go of him, Nora called my attention to something, most likely the whereabouts of her snack, and Gabe toppled over and hit his head on the wooden part of our ottoman. I always try to keep him away from this particular piece of furniture for this very reason, but this wasn’t one of our good mornings, and my parenting wasn’t quite up to par.

He immediately began crying so I picked him up to comfort him and noticed that he had a cut on his eyelid and was bleeding. I had put my wobbly baby in a sitting position near a hard piece of furniture and he’d cut his eye and had what looked like a blossoming bruise across his nose.

I felt terrible about what had happened, but he settled down after a few minutes and I could see that the cut wasn’t too deep.

Compare this incident to a similar one that occurred when Nora was about the same age. She rolled off the couch once when I had looked away for a second. No cut. No blood. Nothing like that. But I cried for about two hours, in the midst of which I called the doctor and deemed myself an unfit parent.

She was fine.

I knew this time around that Gabe was fine, too, despite the visual drama. But as we were planning on calling the doctor anyway about his relentless cold, we decided to add this latest injury to the mix and contact them sooner rather than later.

We got an appointment at 9:15 and J offered to meet me there after dropping Nora off since I wasn’t feeling great. And looking like a homeless person. I mean, he didn’t present that as a reason I might like a companion, but I know what’s up.

The doctor’s visit confirmed that the cut was no big deal, but that the cold was a bigger deal than we thought. He hadn’t been presenting any of the typical symptoms, but the doctor discovered that Gabriel has an ear infection - a double one, in fact, as both ears are affected. “What a trooper!” we proclaimed, as he rolled around on the examining table, enjoying the sound of of the crinkly paper underneath him and babbling happily.

This behavior continued as we waited downstairs for his prescription. Bruised, beaten, in need of antibiotics, and charming everyone with his wide smile and array of baby noises.

I thought about the time Nora had fallen and skinned her knee, and proceeded to talk about it for three or four weeks. And about how I’d been wandering around like the living dead for the past couple days. About how J’s day is basically ruined if he finds a hole in his sock.

I wondered if this carefree dismissal of pain and suffering in favor of good times would follow Gabe out of babyhood and, if so, where the hell that attitude came from.

I asked J if he thought maybe this child might differ from us in certain, crucial ways, and what strange and unfamiliar events could occur as a result.

“Is he going to be a quarterback?” I asked him. “Oh my God, is he going to be in a frat?”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about karma and how “what goes around comes around.” And also about emotional detachment and being zen.

Because I was a philosophy minor? No. Because of potty training and nap times and tragically mundane stuff like that. But still. You can get lofty.

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece for The Huffington Post called “What Potty Training Taught Me,” in which I hinted at the hell potty training has been in this household. Honestly, guys, nothing about parenting - not the fussiness, the sleeplessness, the loneliness, the tantrums, the contrariness - has been this hard for me.

People have a lot of advice on the subject, as everyone does on everything parenting-related, and I now truly understand, more than I ever have before, that kids are simply different, and what works for your kid may not work for mine. People who say that kids have to train themselves had kids that effectively trained themselves. People who say that you have to be strict had kids who responded to strictness.

What we have is an adorable, blue-eyed little girl, who will mindlessly pee all over the couch, then look at my face, as I try to judge how I want to play this one (our latest tactic is saying little, letting the responsibility lie with her) and then ask, softly, “Are you happy?”

Not because she’s perfected sarcasm at age three, but because she is honestly interested in emotions lately. And so when I say something like, “I’m not that happy when you have an accident,” she’ll say, “I want you to be happy.” Now we’re not even talking about potty training anymore. Now we’re dealing in feelings.

This is just one example of many when it comes to how non-interested Nora is in potty training. And for a few weeks I thought constantly and relentlessly about how to get her to change her attitude. J and I have been nothing but positive about the whole thing - at least for the most part. Maybe we needed to be more aggressive? Maybe more enthusiastic? Maybe less cloying? Maybe more hands-off? We’d tried every tactic in the book and then some but perhaps we weren’t doing it right.

Then one day I was talking to Nora’s teacher, who suggested, when I asked her advice, that we let her wear pull-ups to school for the time being to alleviate the number of accidents she was having, that her teachers were having to clean up. Less stress for everyone.

I don’t know why that did it, but I decided that very day to just let it go. Nora could have accidents. I didn’t care. She would get it. She was the only person in control of the situation - I’d always known that - and she’d get it when it meant enough to her. That day, when I brought her home from school, I didn’t leave the baby crying on his activity mat to take her for the potty break I knew she needed. Instead I asked her if she had to go and she said no. And I said “ok.”

I have felt a million times better since. When I get worried about the time it’s taking her to learn, I think about the fact that I was three-and-a-half at least, according to my mother, before I was fully potty-trained. Payback. Or genes. Or whatever.

I’ve had to face similar changes with Gabriel’s sleeping habits.

So maybe Nora isn’t the world’s potty-training champion. Doesn’t matter because she was the champion at sleep. Oh, that child and sleep. Slept through the night at barely 12 weeks. Shifted through time zones effortlessly and slept late when she needed it. Crashed when she became overtired, instead of giving us a hard time. Still, she’s an amazing and deep sleeper.

Not our darling Gabriel!

While he’s certainly not terrible, he’s required more work. A bit of sleep training and scheduling. We got him to sleep through the night a couple months ago, a feat I announced at the time with incredible pride, only to lose our stride. The past few weeks have been less than stellar. Yes, he’s teething and has gotten his first cold, but it’s hard to revert back to a place of such all-encompassing fatigue.

Plus, as I was telling J this morning, the fact that his sleep habits - when good - were because of my work, and not because of his natural patterns, it’s hard not to feel - when things aren’t going well - that it’s not my fault. Sure, he’s got a cold, but up three or four times to eat? Certainly there must be something I could do. Leaf through my copy of “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child,” for the millionth time, or not let him nurse so much at night lest he develop a habit or maybe check into a hotel for a week, and sleep there.

Well. That last one is more of a daydream.

It’s this sort of annoying and unrelenting self-analysis and doubt that might be my least favorite part of parenting. That I can obsess over the timing of Gabe’s morning wakeup for hours, wondering what in the world I can do to make it better (as in, later…5:30, kid, really?)

This line of thinking carries me so quickly to other questions, other overly-dramatic conclusions…perhaps putting him in daycare two days a week is ruining his sleeping patterns, or even worse, his life…perhaps leaving him to cry will have a negative and lasting effect on him, or maybe NOT leaving him to cry will make him needy and weak…perhaps a supplemental bottle of formula would help him get through the night, but what about the undeniable, God-given, guilt-producing, glory of my breast milk, I mean, come ON, am I Satan over here?

When I get like this, J always says one thing. He says, all casual, “He’s just a baby.” And for a while I was like, “Just a baby?! What do you even mean? He’s just a baby whose nap was 24 minutes shorter than it should have been today!”

But recently, I’ve started to get it. He is just a baby. Babies cry and are unpredictable, and me getting all obsessed over these minor details does nothing good for him. For anyone. Perhaps most importantly, for myself. Because thinking about how many ounces I can pump in a day when there is Herman Cain coverage out there - when there is Kim Kardashian and Jessica Simpson’s pregnant! - is, well, a little depressing.

So, as I was rocking little Gabriel last night, during his third wakeup of the evening, I looked over at my snoring first child - the two are sharing a room - and I thought about how easy this particular aspect of babyhood had been with her. Payback, I thought. I’m due for a not great sleeper.

And I let it go.

This is how I’m getting zen. I hope that when Justin comes home tonight, we talk about a lot of things, like whatever wine we open after the children are in bed, or how “Breaking Bad” has instilled in me a totally unfounded fear of Mexican drug lords.

Maybe just a little bit about how the hours between when I pick Nora up from school and he comes home are difficult, because the baby is fussy and I’m all worn out on motherhood at that point - because it is important that we talk about our days - but not too much questioning or concern because that seriously gets in the way of having a good time.

I mean, so does pee on the couch. But not as much as it used to.

Although I wouldn’t say that our current daily schedule “runs smoothly” or anything as dramatic as that, with Nora having started a pre-k program this fall and everyone sleeping well at present, we’ve fallen into a nice rhythm in the mornings.

Usually, while I nurse and change the baby, J gets Nora up and dressed, and they head downstairs. On our more hurried days, when the bed is way too comfortable to get up early and face the world, we get a late start and they hurry off to her school pretty quickly. But on the days we’re more put-together - the days I prefer, of naturally - we’re able to relax and have coffee for a few minutes, Gabriel happily kicking his feet on the floor and Nora incessantly asking if she can have something to eat.

Last week we were having one of our good days, and I came downstairs with the baby to find J all dressed and ready to go.

He’d been dealing with a few physical complaints here and there and I asked him how he was feeling that morning.

“Great,” he told me. “I came down early and meditated for ten minutes.”

“You did? Wow. I’m assuming you did your Jesus mantra?”

And he looked at me kind of like I was an idiot, and said, “No. I have a meditation app.”

In my very own home, by this motherfucker.

I am really sorry about the language, but there is no other way to accurately describe what I am going through.

The title of this post is a little unfair, because, in that way that we all love gossip (and in the celebrity category, you must start reading this, right this very minute), you might think I’ve got something really juicy and important to report, when in reality what I want to write about is working from home, a subject I touched on recently for my other blog, Motherland, which I know you guys are all checking, millions of times a day.

(Actually, I’ve had some technical issues with that site and haven’t been able to post much, which should be remedied soon. Still, millions of times a day, ok? No excuses).

But, despite it being in regards to a pretty mundane topic, I did see a therapist for a few months prior to having Gabriel for life coaching sessions. If you haven’t heard of life coaches, or you’re thinking to yourself that that sounds like a pretty nonsensical profession, I’ve gotta tell you, it was one of the more helpful steps I’ve taken in recent years, and I’ll tell you why: Because I needed someone to tell me what to do.

When I had Nora and found myself at home much of the time, much more occupied with childcare than writing, I found myself thinking self-critical thoughts, like, “Jewel lived in a trashcan and she became a professional singer,” or, “J.K. Rowling lived in squalor with her young kids and found the time to create the whole goddamn world of Harry Potter, why can’t you motivate yourself to develop a somewhat successful career?”

But Jewel and Rowling and the actual validity of those statements aside, finding the get-up-and-go to write - or do whatever kind of work it is you’re doing - is really pretty hard when you don’t have a boss or an office or, ahem, a paycheck. So with a new baby on the way and my life as a mother about to get all the more intense, I decided to enlist some professional help. I was really fortunate that our health care plan covered the sessions.

So off I went to see this guy and within my first hour, and undertaking his first directive - to create a comfortable office space at home - I was feeling better about life in general.

I cleaned off the desk in our guest room/office space, put up a bulletin board and tacked up a few pictures of Nora and a few of my newspaper clips.

Over the next few months I saw this guy weekly, as I got bigger and bigger, and our visits came to an end just before I had the baby. Since he was an actual psychologist I’d sometimes try to slip in other business, like how J likes to keep old magazines in the house and I try to secretly throw them away but he always catches me and gets mad, now, who is right? But this guy would always steer me back to the matter at hand, namely how to create and sustain a productive working schedule while raising children, so that I wouldn’t go crazy or feel like I was letting all my career aspirations go.

It was awesome.

When I had Gabriel, of course, all that went to hell and I dove headfirst into being a mother of two, which - at first, especially - is so different than being a mother of one, it is not even funny. Not funny, as in, total insanity.

But my darling boy has grown into a somewhat reasonable four-month-old who will probably have some daycare soon, and Nora went merrily off to preschool last week and has been loving every minute. Suddenly I’m remembering what it’s like to have a few seconds to sit at the computer, and I’m trying to put my working-from-home plan back into play.

At present the baby’s sleeping in what was once my office space, but I’m looking forward to changing up the sleep arrangements, i.e. kicking him out and taking it back. A desk, my bulletin board, a cup of tea. For now, my laptop and these priceless hours of quiet time are more than enough.

Better than a trash can, anyway.

Goodbye lazy days of summer. Here we go.

The yellow flowers have bloomed all around our front and back yards and yesterday, finally, through a series of communications between neighbors, I learned that these are most likely Evening Primrose. Which means we can stop referring to them as the yellow flowers, although we probably won’t.

And with the flowers comes ideal outdoor weather (although we’ve had our fair share of rain lately). Yesterday we spent the afternoon out back. Very idyllic until Nora sauntered up to me with a pair of pruning shears in her hand and I realized we needed to do a tiny bit of childproof-type tidying up out there before our next venture.

I don’t know if you remember but once, a while back, I decided I was going to roast a chicken because it seemed like something I should do and it was both frightening and disgusting.

Just a couple days ago, I decided that I was going to cook a whole chicken again, mostly because I was tired of looking at my husband with exhausted eyes every night and saying something along the lines of, “I guess we could eat cereal for dinner?” which is one of the most depressing things a person can say because you DO NOT EAT CEREAL FOR DINNER unless you’ve completely given up on life.

Anyway, I decided this time that I was going to cook the chicken in the slow cooker because friends had just turned me on the brilliant fact that this is something you can actually do.

Also, most importantly, I’ve been getting really into food in the past couple years, including knowing where my food comes from and I do realize that when you eat nameless, faceless chicken breasts you’re pretty removed from the process. Not that this chicken had a name or a face, but you get the picture. I’m not dealing with the whole animal when I cook, and although I probably never will (bless you and big respect Cory, the way you roast those whole pigs) I’d like to at least improve.

So I bought my whole chicken and removed the giblets, an effort which produced stress on the same level or maybe slightly less as the weekend I had to finish all my college applications and I almost died.

Then, as the chicken was lying there with its little arms and legs, or however they’re properly termed in the animal world, all splayed out, and I was skinning the thing, holy Jesus skinning it, because the cooking instructions I was going by suggested this would produce a superior result, I uttered, suddenly - I couldn’t help myself - “Thank you, thank you for giving your life for me.”

I am not even kidding you guys. I said it in a totally honest and meaningful way, and that is the moment I got a little closer to my fellow species. And to throwing up.

Throughout this pregnancy we’ve been explaining to Nora what is about to happen the best we can. I think she understands parts of it, like that baby brother is in my belly, and I think she understands - to some extent - that he is not going to be in my belly forever (I understand this to some extent, too…most days).

She’s seen the baby stuff around the house and we talk about that, we read books about being a big sister and we even took a “sibling tour” of Yale Hospital with a few other soon-to-be older siblings and their parents, which was one of the cutest experiences ever. We met a newborn baby and Nora got some graham crackers, so she had the time of her life.

One thing that J has been totally great about is explaining the timing of the new baby’s arrival to her. Timing is something that two-and-a-half-year-old Nora is just starting to grasp. Like I can now say to her, “We’re going to go to the library and see your friends after you take a nap,” and she can handle this, although she really couldn’t just a couple months ago. For a while I couldn’t talk about anything until right before it was going to happen, and I still can’t talk about the most exciting things except in this way, like going to a birthday party or to her grandparents’ house. Or having ice cream, obviously.

What J has been doing for a while now is talking about what month it is in regards to the new baby. So in February, he’d say, “When’s baby brother coming?” And Nora would say, “In April!” And he’d say, “Is it April yet?” And she’d say, “No, it’s February!” In March, the same thing. I realize she doesn’t truly get the timing of the calendar or anything like that, but I think this was the very best way to deal with the subject. My husband is brilliant at making things like this fun for a toddler and somehow has the patience to do so repeatedly while never growing tired of the game. Recently I’ve really seen the heights of what an awesome dad he is and will be. He pulls the most amazing energy out of nowhere, just when I’m about to pass out on the couch.

Whatever Nora gets out of it, watching this ongoing discussion has been wonderful for me, too. Particularly the other morning, when J hopped out of bed to get Nora dressed and ready for the day, allowing me some blissful extra minutes of rest. “When’s baby brother coming?” I heard him ask, to which Nora promptly responded, “In April!” He followed up with the inevitable, “Is it April yet?” And Nora, because she didn’t know of course, said, “No, it’s March.” So J replied with the beautiful truth that, “No! It’s April NOW! Baby brother is coming soon!”

Ever since J used my favorite teapot to clean out his sinuses several years ago I’ve been pretty appalled by the idea of using a neti pot. Well, until a few months back when I thought I’d give it a try and realized it actually produces some pretty awesome results. It’s taken me a while to get ok with the idea, but now I even encourage others to give it a try. I was just telling my mother about its nearly instant benefits last night, in fact, when she explained she was having sinus pain. She said back to me, “I don’t like the neti pot,” and I said, “Have you ever tried it?” and she said, “No.” Then I told her the story of how I, too, had been firmly against the practice without even giving it a try. And that now, I was a convert.

This morning I was explaining to J how I’d done the neti yesterday, due to some pretty intense sinus pressure, and how I was feeling better and maybe I should keep it up. And he was all, “Yeah, the thing with the neti for me, though, is…” and I was all of a sudden like, wait a second, why are we, as husband and wife, having neti pot conversations that are on the same level as discussing a favorite television show, and before I could ask him to please remember that I was only a recent fan of the whole business, and could we please take this slow, he was telling me about how there’s always leftover mucus in the back of his throat, and there’s this advanced form of doing the neti pot where you pour the water in through one nostril and it comes out of your mouth. And it comes out of your mouth. So that’s when I had to forcibly shut him up and explain that, unfortunately, he’d just hurdled my neti pot evolution back to the dark ages, hopefully not causing so much damage as to put me off it forever.