A Day in the Life of a SAHM

Warning: The following post was written by a very tired, PMSing, kind of crabby momma who feels like there are a lot of people in the world who do not understand what it is like to be home with two children, 2 and 4, all. day.long.

To those of you who do understand, I love you, I thank you and you my friends are invited to my pity party...if you really want to come that is...

To those of you who don't understand, or think it is luxurious to spend an afternoon lolly gagging around grocery stores and libraries and at pools with small, needy children who have incessant requests, climb things compulsively and never stop talking...maybe you should read on because you could use a good dose of reality.

Just to be up front here, I never said I was a "kid" kind of person. I mean, I liked kids a little bit more than my husband before having our own...he would actually ask to be seated at tables away from children in restaurants, and cringed at the site of a small child seated within 7 rows of us on an airplane....now that I think about it, maybe all of this craziness is God's way of setting Scott straight...and maybe I should head out and start selling 401K plans while he hangs home with our nutty children.

No, I wasn't that bad. However, you would NOT want to put me in the nursery with other children at church...I'd probably scowl at you if you told me your child hadn't pooped in days and that you had put an extra diaper in the bag 'just in case', or that sometimes, just sometimes, little Jenna has separation anxiety...to which I'd say "Dear mother, I'm going to have anxiety if you leave your separation anxiety prone child with me so you better just hang out here while I go and see if I can volunteer to clean some toilets or take out the garbage instead."

Nope. I wasn't hard wired with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, or a preschool music instructor, or a daycare worker. They're all saints in my book.

I have a limited supply of energy. I get overstimulated VERY quickly, and I tend to like things sort of orderly and non-chaotic.

Which is why by about 1:30 everyday I'm thinking about jumping ship and just showing back up at around 7:30 to make sure the house is still standing.

So, it is in the context of all of that that I write this rant about how non-stop these days are sometimes.

Like today...

I got up at 7:30 for a chiropractor appointment...I try to fit them in before Scott goes to work, just to make the latter part of the day less complicated.

When I get home at 8:05 Ava's eyes are all red and teary. Apparently she came down the stairs to find me and when she did not see me in my usual spot in the living room she decided to sit on the stairs and cry while Ella and Scott were still up in bed. Apparently it doesn't matter that Daddy was upstairs...if mommy is not around life is pretty sad...

The day progressed from there...like this...

...Ava and Ella both ran to me and whined about who could hug me first
...Ella threw herself on the floor because Ava beat her...

...I did my best to navigate the crises...

..I turned television on mostly to offer some quiet while I picked up the messy kitchen from the night before (we got home late and never cleaned up), and make this morning's breakfast...
...the girls finally come over to eat breakfast, but just seem to whine about what they like and don't like, and irritate each other by putting pieces of french toast on each other's plates...and then whine some more about how they don't like that the other person is putting french toast on their plate...

...I did my best to navigate the crises...

...by the time 17 minutes had passed on the clock and hardly a bite of food into their mouths because they had spent so much time irritating each other and whining to me, I finally set the clock on the microwave and threatened that if all food was not eaten in exactly 6 minutes that we were not going to go to the pool with their cousins.

...I've never seen food eaten so fast!

...we finally got dressed, gathered suits, towels, floaties, phones, juice cups, extra underwear for Ella and a couple of other miscellaneous things to get in the car...the next 4 hours were a blur of....

drive to my sister's house...watch four kids while she finishes doing dishes in the utility sink in her laundry room because the poor mommas kitchen has been under construction for 6+ months now...help her clean her playroom and tidy a few things upstairs since her house is usually as trashed as mine these days...take Ella to Aldi with me to get a couple of groceries...try to keep Ella from plunging out of the cart and onto to the floor for 35 minutes in Aldi...pack up our groceries while entertaining Ella with fruit chews...drive back to my sister's house...shovel food into my mouth and try to feed Ella...put on bathing suits, gather up floaties and sunscreen and towels and all pile into my station wagon...

yup...did you catch that...4 kids and 2 moms in one old station wagon that has 190,000 miles on it, and a total of 5 seats...I'm sure you can do the math.

Nope, it's probably  not legal to do that, but we were just driving to the neighborhood pool right around the corner.

yup...her husband just became a police officer in their town and I think it would have been pretty funny if he and his teaching officer would have been driving by us as we illegally drove to the pool.

Her 1-year old cried a lot because he's teething. My 2-year old ran near the edge of the deep end more time than I'd like to count while I was trying to tend to Ava which gave me heart palpitations. Her 3- year old isn't super comfortable in the pool so she tried to help him and his brother simultaneously. My 4-year old does not know how to swim either, so I was back and forth between the big pool and the baby pool at her whims.

Now, I know what you're thinking...why would you crazy ladies take 4 non-swimming kids to the pool in the first place...

Back to my original point...if you haven't had to try to entertain preschoolers by yourself, every day for 40+ hours a week, you wouldn't understand...it was a plea for 1/2 an hour of activity that would hopefully result in a chance for us to actually talk to each other for more than 2 minutes consecutively.

We finally got back to my sister's house an hour later...I threw all of our suits in the dryer and gave the kids a snack. Katie put the 1 year old down for a nap. My 2 year old spilled her juice box all over my sister's new hardwood floors and leather ottoman. The 3 year old shouted uh-oh and the 4 year old reported the entire event to me.

I gathered all of my refrigerated groceries, not quite dry bathing suits, remnants from lunch and all sorts of other miscellaneous stuff, jammed it into the back of my old, blue station wagon with the girls bikes which I had brought just in case, jammed our floaties in, slammed the door and announced to Katie that I was exhausted and that we looked like the Beverly Hillbillies in our car.

She laughed, said she was going to sleep and we departed ways.

Ella spent half of the drive home protesting her upcoming nap. I spent the entire way home telling the girls how much I needed a break. Ava told us all that she was not planning on sleeping.

Scott called to tell me he'd be home from Syracuse at 6:30, just in time for the Kirby sales guy to show up at 7:00. I wanted to be nice to him on the phone, so I basically just didn't say anything...

Some days that's all you get from me after I've been with the girls all morning...crabby or nothing...I usually think the nothing is nicer so silence is what you get....

Except for you guys...but you are choosing to read this, so you get the entire earful..

For what it's worth, I do realize that a lot of this is a matter of perspective...that I'm a very blessed woman, with a wonderful husband and very cute kids...

...but let's face it...even cute kids can drive a momma crazy after a while...

...I'll work on the perspective thing tomorrow!