I must fess up. We’re broke, but spoiled.

Since I don't qualify for maternity benefits (one of few freelancing downsides) Justin is on paternal leave, off work until sometime next spring to wrap us all in full-time, glorious daddyness. Another gift from Liam: even though we’ll be broke — beyond broke, just having inflated our mortgage with the ORANGE! renovation — we're both struck with a sudden conviction that (cliché #1) life is short; (cliché #2) life gave us lemons; and (cliché #3) all we need is love.

We tackle this infanthood + toddlerhood, both a trial and some kind of sweet, magical dream, holding hands. Bleary and gnawing at financial fingernails but together, elbow-deep in diapers and fishsticks and bike-pedalling, fart-promoting leg exercises (that would be for the baby, for the uninitiated).

So yes, I’m living in la la land when I speak of the second child being as easy as a chia pet. This has not escaped me.

We divide and conquer in this exquisitely Canadian, government-sponsored arrangement. Cheques with a ‘Q’, small but significant, are delivered every two weeks by a contingent of mounties who come bearing survival packs of maple syrup and poutine and La Maudite beer.

It's not much, but it keeps the power company and the credit card barons at bay while we play with trains and get peed on, often simultanously.

Yesterday, two months after we sprung from the NICU, I spent my first unassisted day with two children. Wait. Stop. Nowhere close. The first evening, better put. The first latter section of evening. After my parents picked Evan up from playschool and gave him supper, me racing against traffic to get Ben home from routine bloodwork and prescription pickup.

(I feel like the world’s most overindulged flake to admit all this, knowing so many of you out there care for multiple offspring on your own from the getgo — especially you federally abandoned, just-delivered, 6-week-crunched American comrades).

So there I was, left to get Evan to bed while also looking after Ben.

AT THE SAME TIME.

The stuff of everyday for you, perhaps, but near-Olympic for me.

Ben scrabbled for my bosom in the mei-tai wrap, scootching down while I squished myself up like when you pull up to the gas station and turn off the ignition too far from the pump. All the while fishing for runaway blind brown trout, bent over the bathtub while Evan wailed at the indignity of… well, being a toddler. And then, shortly thereafter, Ben wailing at the indignity of enduring neglect-o-matic #1 while I ran through 'If You Give a Moose a Muffin' for Evan like an over-caffeinated auctioneer.

But I did it. Delayed competence but competence nonetheless, even if it’s half-effectiveness with one and half-effectiveness with the other.

Evan down for the count, I nurse Ben into oblivion and put him in contraption #2 to cook garlic in a scoop of butter, then add super-stinky stilton, vermouth, devon cream and parmesan. It simmers for gnocchi while last night’s salmon heats up in the oven, and then I chop tomatoes and basil. And that’s supper, fishsticks be dammed. I am not a good cook but I am improvisational, and I bankrupt us on groceries, and I happen to, by complete accident, know what Japanese panko crumbs are and where to buy them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but like so many things, you may as well try.

The effort of it makes me human again, sitting here reflecting with you, on my second glass of cheap red wine and my fifteenth chocolate animal cracker, as Ben snores next to me in contraption #3.

Crunchy, silky, passable competence.