Today was just one of those days.
I pulled out the bread maker from the shelf above the fridge. It’s a balancing act I have to brace myself for. If I don’t have every muscle in my body and face flexed while on high toe-points, there could be one less mother of three and one less loaf of delicious bread today.
I managed to remove the beast from the dangerously high shelf without incident but lost credibility when I decided it would be a good idea to tip the machine over allowing the crumbs that had settled in the bottom to fall into the sink.
Somehow between the lid opening and breaking off, I also managed to lose my grip on the small appliance but caught it by the swinging cord before it crashed to the ground. Unfortunately, it took a hostage along the way in the form of one of my four burner knobs off of my stove now bent and broken but re-ordered for $5 plus $18 shipping to arrive, well, whenever they feel like shipping it.
I then decided to make a sixteen second phone call and as expected was interrupted by blood curdling chokes at second fifteen causing me to slam the phone down and run toward the sound of imminent injury.
Oh good. No one is choking or bleeding. The seven and five year old girls have decided to potty train the baby and have removed her soiled diaper where much of the soiling is being worn as socks by all three and smeared into the grout between the bathroom tiles. The girls are gagging not choking. This is a good day Mom.
A number of people that I talked to told me how upset they would be at the older girls for stripping the baby and putting her on the potty but the truth is, as a parent, aren’t we guilty of leaving them alone for sixteen seconds? Deep breath, we’ll just have to bleach the area. Okay, maybe deep breath was the wrong choice.
Some fresh air might do us some good so off we went on our bike ride where both my chain and Hanna’s fell off completely. It’s tough to re-attach two chains when I have a baby still strapped into her tandem seat and my bicycle repair certificate expired right after my banana seat retired. Covered in bike chain grease, Ellie screamed for help after yet another speed wobble fall. I think I heard, “OH DAMAGE!” which I’m going to pretend just means, I did some damage to my knee and not a child’s version of “OH DAMMIT!” which she may or may not have misinterpreted during phase one of operation diaper-smear-staining-my-grout minutes earlier.
We played with the neighbours in the backyard and their daughter left her sparkly, pink, Mickey Mouse ear headband behind. It seemed a simple enough exercise to simply place the headband on the counter until we could return it later in the day.
Another fifteen second distraction before I heard some commotion in the hallway and a snap. It was actually several snaps and two kids fighting over the now totally unfixable Mickey Mouse ears that didn’t stand a chance in our house today.
Both girls began to sob worrying about losing a friend and if there was enough scotch tape to wrap around all of the pieces (which they tried and failed miserably) to seamlessly put Humpty Dumpty together again.
Thankfully, our neighbour is Catholic which I think means technically, she has to forgive us and luckily she did but not before I considered handing her the taped together headband and fumbling it during the hand-off pretending she might have been the reason for the breakage (Protestant).
They say bad things come in threes so maybe having three kids was just me asking for it?
