With the birth of George III coming up any day now, we’ve been spending a lot of time looking at old baby pictures of Gal Smiley and Captain Jelly Belly. Naturally our little ones have changed a lot, what with the growing up and getting new wardrobes and learning how to artfully push each other around without attracting enough attention to actually warrant a time-out.

But what is really surprising is how much Sir Monkeypants and I have aged. It’s only been four years since the Captain was born, but man, do we ever look young in those pictures. Naturally we have the starry-eyed look of first-time parents, who still have years of sleep accumulated from sleeping in on Saturday mornings to fall back on, keeping us perky and optimistic even when we’ve been up three times in the night to a screaming baby. But even accounting for the increased work, stress, and sleeplessness of parenthood, it’s scary how different we look.

The biggest change, actually, is our hair. Sir Monkeypants has less, probably due to the fact that our kids yank it out while he is letting them use his body as a jungle gym/merry-go-round. For me, I have way, way more grey hair, even since Gal Smiley was born just 2 1/2 years ago. It’s really a little alarming.

I used to pull out my grey hairs, but then they would just grow back in shorter than the rest of my hair, and since they are very curly, they’d stick out all over my head like a little corona of old age. So about a year or so ago, I swore to cut it out and let them all grow in. Now I would say my whole head is perhaps 20% grey, a huge change in just a short time. Seeing my old brown hair in Gal Smiley’s birth pictures has led to a sudden reversion to grey hair pulling, I’m sad to say. In the past month I’ve probably pulled out 100 greys, and I’m sure they’ll be growing back in any day now, creating the familiar fuzzy white buzz around my whole head. I really should just give it up and start dyeing, but the real reason I don’t get around to that is that I am very, very lazy, and going to the salon for a roots touch-up, or touching up at home, every six weeks, is way too much of a commitment for me. Maybe when my kids are in college and I have scads of free time on my hands, I’ll start dyeing my hair and getting pedicures.

And in a totally unrelated topic…have you heard that I am very tired? Because I may not have mentioned it before, and it’s important, breaking news. Lately I am so tired that when I finally crawl up to bed at night, I just flop down and end up sleeping with whatever happens to be in the bed. Our bed is a bit of a crap collector, so on any given night this may mean that I am sleeping with any number of kids’ toys, any amount of dirty clothes that people have changed out of to put on PJs, and any number of dirty socks that have been kicked off in the night by myself and Sir Monkeypants.

The other day I bought some new rechargeable batteries for our baby monitor and brought them upstairs, then forgot about them. And sure enough, the next morning I woke up with the impression of a pack of rechargeable batteries imprinted on the side of my face.

So that morning, I opened the package of four batteries and reloaded the monitor, which only takes three batteries.

And the very next morning? When I rolled over to say good morning to Sir Monkeypants? There was a single rechargeable battery lying in the bed between us.

Now I’m a tired, cranky, grey-haired, and senile old lady. It’s official!