Category: Being a Mom

I was thinking of alternately titling this post, “In which I totally do not have my sh*t together” OR “yet another birthday freak-out”.  Really, it could be called SO many things.

But the gist of it is: I am blowing town two days before my kid’s birthday party.  Now I will only be gone for like 36 hours and I will be back like an entire 15 hours before the party starts, so that’s ok, right??

Uhhhh…

I’d say Joshua’s birthday kind of crept up on me, but that’s just not true. I’ve had all his presents for forever. The problem is, we spent the long holiday weekend on a reunion vacation with my husband’s family in Myrtle Beach.  We left Thursday night, slept in West Virginia, then drove 8  (really 10) hours Friday, had fun, and turned around and drove 12 hours home Monday. So I spent all LAST week preparing for the trip, and I’ve only had Tuesday-Wednesday to prepare for Joshua’s Sunday family party and Monday after-school friends party, and TODAY I should probably actually pack and do laundry because TOMORROW at 10:30 a.m. I am leaving to go tour Lake Erie’s top vacation sites with some other bloggers and journalists. And I said yes even though the timing is poor because I NEED A BREAK.  And I get to take my BFF Lulee.

It’s going to be my first night away from Jonah, ever.  Totes freaking about that.  But I REALLY want to have him weaned by the end of March, and I am hoping this will be a good first step.  Hold me!!

So I’ll get back Saturday night about 8, and Joshua’s family party is a brunch Sunday at 11.  I am stacking up a bunch of donuts to look like a cake. Brilliant, right?

THEN Sunday night I am going to attempt to make these cupcakes I found on Pinterest for Joshua’s Pokemon (don’t get me started) party:

They look pretty easy, but chances are on Monday at 1 a.m. I am going to be calling Cortney and screaming “PLEASE  MAKE ME SOME CUPCAKES BEFORE  I KILL MYSELF!!!!!!!”

So there you have it. I am a total slacker. And I am probably going to ruin Joshua’s 8th birthday, even though I was out running birthday errands til 10 pm so he will have GOODY BAGS like he requested, and you know, FOOD at the brunch.  And a Pokemon TABLE CLOTH for the love. It’s a good thing I got him some cool presents!

Now I must go start my laundry so I have actual clothes to wear on the tour of Lake Erie, so I can look and act like an actual human instead of this frazzled, stressed, mombie (Mom-Zombie, you LOVE IT) that I have been for a few days.

BUT FIRST – I gotta get out the door to the library to get Joshua a book on horses he has to have for Monday so he won’t also fail 2nd grade because of his mother!

 

 

My kids have evidently entered the stage of siblinghood that everyone must go through – non-stop bickering. Everything Sam says to Kate mortally wounds her, and everything she says to him is “mean.”

They are driving me crazy.

Today’s most memorable argument was when Sam allegedly told Kate she would never be in a movie. I say allegedly, because really? He’s three. But oh my goodness, it crushed her hopes and dreams of stardom.

I should get up off the couch and go downstairs to retrieve the book I bought with good intentions but never read – “Siblings without Rivalry” – but I’d rather get feedback from you all.

How have you survived your kids’ constant bickering?

So today was not my favorite day on record. I seem to be having a lot of those lately – it must be so much fun to read my posts! Maybe that’s why google analytics said we’ve had zero readers since about Thanksgiving. And here I thought that site wasn’t working or something.

ANYWAY. Today.

The day got off to a splendid start when Andy woke me up by saying “Someone’s puking.” That someone ended up being Kate, who threw up twice before the alarm was set to go off. Yay. It was my turn to staff the sick bay so I made the 10,000 calls it requires to arrange for me, Kate and Sam to be out for the day and stayed home. Except we couldn’t exactly stay home, because today was also the one day a month that the cleaning lady was scheduled to come. We canceled her last visit here due to Kate puking last month, and I wasn’t about to do it again. My shower and kitchen floor were begging me not to. So we had to leave the house for a quick five hours.

Here’s where things really went down the tubes.

I needed to go to CVS and to run some things to Andy at school. One of the things he needed was money, and unfortunately I misplaced my debit card a couple weeks ago, which made getting cash challenging. I had a flash from my childhood and remembered that back in the olden days, people used to write checks to “cash” and get money from the bank. So, I wrote such a check for $100 and loaded up the kids and a bunch of junk in the car. We went to CVS and then headed to the bank, but when we got there, the check was nowhere to be found. I was still able to get money using a withdrawl slip (duh), so I dropped off all the junk to Andy and headed to my grandma’s (see again, homeless nomads on a sick day). She and I both scoured my car for the missing check. Not there. I scoured the CVS parking lot. Not there. It was nowhere, and there was nothing to do but wait to see if $100 would magically vanish from our checking account.

Then I decided it would be prudent to check with the pediatrician about Kate’s situation. To be honest, what I really wanted to find out was if it was ok to send her to school after these random incidents because juggling days off (especially when she seems FINE) is getting old. However when I told the nurse “My daughter has been vomiting semi-regularly since December 12,” her reaction was less “It’s cool, you must be tired of taking off work, send the girl to school already!” and more “Um yeah, that is somewhat concerning, you should bring her in.” So I took her in, toting her brother along with us. The doc had no explanation but wanted to explore it further and sent us down the road to the children’s hospital outpost to get an x-ray. But when we got there, I couldn’t find the written orders the doctor had given me 10 minutes before. I scoured my car for the missing paper. Not there. I piled the kids back in the car, went back to the doctor’s office to find it. Not there. It – like the check – was nowhere.

My car was obviously eating paper.

So we went back to the x-ray place, where they sent me back out to my car just to “double-check” and then eventually called the doctor to fax the order over. (Which really, that office needs to step up the technology. I also had to fill out a yearly update that required me to write our home address four times and record Andy’s social security number in three different places. Let’s get with the program, people. There are unorganized moms like me all over the place.) By that time, I was tweeting about hating being me. I was *thisclose* to offing myself.

We finally got the x-ray done (which was clear, but we still don’t know what the issue is) and after a leisurely trip to Target and Jimmy John’s we got the ok from the cleaning lady to re-inhabit our house. When we got home, the missing check from this morning was safely tucked in our mailbox, with a note from the mailman saying he’d found it in the street a few houses down.

My faith in humanity was restored.

My faith in myself, however, will take a while to recover.