It's Not You, It's Me

You ever feel like some days you just weren't meant to get a single f-ing thing accomplished?

Yesterday was one of those days.

I swear, sometimes I can't tell if my children are being exceptionally naughty on a given day, or if I am just exceptionally irritable. Or if I'm exceptionally irritable because my children are being exceptionally naughty. And yes, that was a potential drinking game--every time I write exceptionally you're supposed to drink. Have one for me. Or ten.



Or it could be that I'm seven months pregnant and at that point in my pregnancy where I feel like there is not possible way I could get any bigger. Every time I eat I feel like a gastric bypass surgery patient who's seriously stretching her limits on food intake. Two bites of cereal make me feel like I've swallowed an inflated balloon. My stomach skin is stretched taut as a snare drum, my waddle is decidedly pronounced, and clothes I was certain would last me until this baby arrives are riding up over my belly button like I'm trying to revive the babydoll half-shirt craze of the mid-nineties (remember those gray CK One t-shirts? That's what all my t-shirts look like on me right now. I should just get some platform sneakers and a pair of overalls and try to recapture the glorious look of my college years. I've already got the freshman fifteen...and then some.).

This entry was actually not intended to focus on me and how disgusting I'm starting to look/feel/dress. This entry was intended to be a ten-paragraph rant about my children and how horrible they were yesterday. But you know what? As soon as Jeff came home and took them for a nice long evening jog in his initiative to get back in shape while my own figure languishes in the land of Never Fitting Into Those Skinny Jeans Again, I almost forgot exactly what my children did that made me wish it was acceptable in our species to cook and eat our own young.

Honestly though, the reason I feel like they were so horrible is that I actually had to hang out with them all day long. I think I much prefer days when I can sit and ignore them for an hour or two. Every time I tried to ignore them yesterday, to sit and write, fold laundry, or tug my t-shirt down over my stomach, chaos erupted somewhere in the house. Chaos in the form of Rollie doing something to make Elsa cry, and Elsa crying because she was a.) overtired, and b.) realized that she could get Rollie into a lot of trouble this way.

It's kind of sad to realize that a bad day for me is one where I'm fully cognizant of my children for fifteen hours straight. It was one of those days where I just didn't get a break. I felt like a guy whose needy, bipolar girlfriends were smothering him to the point where he just wanted to "cool off for a little while," but instead of allowing this to happen, the girlfriends started to go even crazier--they tore apart his couch, peed on his carpet, sat on his floor and threw around a bunch of puzzle pieces at each other and cried hysterically. Which is also why I wasn't sure if it was me or the kids that was making the day seem like one gigantic, time-out riddled Mobius Strip.

So yesterday, I just gave up. Yesterday I just did whatever the hell my children wanted. Yes, that meant going to two different parks, fishing in my backyard (where we caught three fish that I had to remove from their respective hooks--one of which was through the poor fish's eye, and yes it was as gross as it sounds...my dreams will be forever haunted by a slimy brim sporting an eye patch, his little fishlips forming the question Why? Why?), allowing them to ride their tricycles inside the house, and making a playground for them out of blankets, couch cushions and coffee tables. If it meant they weren't poking each other in the eyes or beating each other over the heads with plastic otoscopes, then I guess it was a win in everyone's column.

An exceptionally tiring win, but a win nonetheless.