Friday is here again (yayyyy!!), and I gotta say. Week after week, you all continue to brighten my life with the moments when you’re at your best, and moments when you’re at your…not so best. I hope you all enjoy reading these as much as I love receiving them!
Our Best:
My husband died unexpectedly in December. This week I hung up floating shelves just outside my and my son’s bedroom and put a sweet family picture on the shelf at eye level. Every night, my son says “Daddy,” and blows a kiss.
I took six kids eight and under (only two are mine) to a Mongolian restaurant for lunch and to the mall play place, and we survived. I was complimented twice on how well-behaved they were, and the one year old only ran out of my sight once!
I went grocery shopping, got coffee, and set up a crock pot meal all before 9:30. How’s that for owning the day?
My daughter doesn’t know the lyrics to “Let it Go,” but she can sing along to American Pie.
A couple of my son’s friends from school came over to play. They were outside looking at some spiders and the other boys wanted to drop rocks on them. My son stood up and said, “No! Outside is their home! They’re not bothering us! We shouldn’t bother them!” The boys looked at him and said, “Yeah okay. You’re prolly right.”
Ya wanna know what the best thing I did all week was (and probably in my entire life)? I taught my kids to do their own laundry. Every single one of them. I’m sure when the novelty wears off and they realize how much it sucks, I’ll probably have some bad parenting moments to report. So, stay tuned for that.
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Our Worst:
I left my 1 year old with a stamp, and when I came back blue ink was in his mouth and all over his face. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon on the phone with poison control.
I called our local bakery to ask them to make a cake for my son’s birthday. I was going to surprise him with it at school. When I placed the order, I was eating lunch (which you will understand the relevance of that in just a second). When I got to school, I opened the box to the cake and it said, “Happy Earth Day, Jacob.” I probably should have checked the box. And not ordered it with a mouth full of food.
We went to my daughter’s softball game and I wanted to take some video. Her first at bat, she struck out, and I stopped recording. The next girl got up and hit a home run. As she was running the bases, I realized that SHE was actually my daughter. It was her first time hitting a home run in a game, and I didn’t get it on video because apparently I can’t even recognize my own child. It’s cool, though. I still have the video of the other girl missing the ball three times.
I put my two year old in his car seat and got in the car. He sits behind me so it’s hard to really see him. We started pulling out of the driveway and he started screaming, “No buckle! No buckle!” He has said this before when he hasn’t wanted to be in his seat, so I just said, “You’re fine, buddy.” He cried the whole way to the store, and multiple times I was like, “We’re almost there! Chill out!” Then I got out of the car and noticed that I hadn’t buckled him in. I grabbed him and hugged him and told him I was so sorry, while people in the parking lot looked at me like I was a nuts.
My 3 year old was having the most epic meltdown. I couldn’t handle it anymore so I grabbed my noise cancelling headphones, went into the bathroom, and turned on some soothing music. It seemed like a brilliant idea except when I came out, my 3 year old was still crying, my 18 month old was also crying, and the living room was a disaster. But hey, for a solid three minutes I didn’t hear a thing.
We’ve had this contractor here for several days doing some work in our basement. He’s typically making a lot of noise down there, but on this particular day he was just painting so I forgot he was down there. Well, my daughter kicked her younger sister really hard, and I got super pissed. I opened the door to the basement, yelled “You sit your butt down and don’t move til I open this door.” I closed the door maybe a little more forcefully than I wanted to, and she started crying. When I heard a man’s voice I remembered the contractor was there, and I was mortified. I opened the door and he was sitting on the stairs talking to her. He was great about the whole thing, but I wanted to crawl under a rock. Now I’m so much nicer to my kids than I normally would be when he’s around.
I washed a dirty diaper with the laundry. Once I realized what I had done, it was not a good time in my life.
I took my kids to this indoor trampoline park, sat down, and put my face in my phone. I heard a kid crying, but it didn’t even register that is was mine. So I just sat there scrolling through Twitter like a loser. Then it hit me, and I looked up to see that another parent had rushed to help her. My daughter was pointing at me, and the woman was turning to look. I jumped up to run to her, but not without first saying loud enough for everyone to hear, “Ahh shit!”
I was cleaning out the garage while the kids were playing outside. They were going through all the bins looking for their outdoor toys, and accidentally opened the bin full of Christmas stuff. Not only did they find their letters to Santa (for some reason I thought it would be cute to save those), but they also found our elf on the shelf shoved in a box. No one prepares you for explaining this shit when you’re not expecting it.