Dirt Floods the Basement, and other Normal Day-to-Day Occurances

7:30am: My 3 1/2-year-old boy, Dirt, trots in carrying his pillow and gets in bed with me. Only today he isn't going to go back to sleep like a nice cuddly little boy who lets his mommy sleep in. He smiles and prods my eyelids open, repeatedly. I feign sleep, hoping he'll leave me alone and maybe fall asleep again himself. Then he starts punching me in the arm and yelling, gleefully, for me to "Wake up right now! You gotta wake up, Mama!" (He probably learned this tactic from the many, many times he's seen me trying to rouse his daddy. The punching and yelling, that is.)

This goes on for a good 15 minutes before he gives up and leaves. Victory! Except then he comes back, wearing his cowboy boots (with the gym shorts and t-shirt pjs), and announces to me—although for all he knows I am asleep—that he is going outside. I don't care.
 He has roused the household. My door is now open for a pack of excited dogs and a very loudly purring kitten to repeat Dirt's attempts at getting me up. They are slightly more productive, but only slightly. Then I hear my 2-year-old's loud, demanding, sing-song voice from her room down the hall: "MaaaMAAAAAAA! MAAAAMAAAAAA!" She is persistent. DAMN.

 I heave myself up and peel my eyes open. When I open Tuesday's door, she gasps with excitement and then declares to me, while pointing to her diaper, that she has a "tiny poopoo". It is not tiny. When she is clean and “fresh?” (Tuesday pronounces everything inquisitively), I hold her over my head and toss her, and something snaps in my neck. Now I can’t turn.

My kitchen sink is full of last night’s dishes. I have been trying to give up my OCD need to do dishes right away, on occasion, but I loathe waking up to a messy kitchen. The dishwasher is full of clean dishes to be unloaded, and the countertop is icky. The flies love it and I hate them. HOW do they all get in here? Both the washer and the dryer are full of laundry to be processed. The trash is full and needs to be taken out. My bare feet have floor debris sticking to them. The beasts all need to be fed—including children, dogs, cat, and horses. But first: coffee.

I take some allergy medicine because I am super duper sneezy, and then the  ibuprofen looks pretty good, considering my lovely new pinched nerve, and then I see my vitamins, which I never remember to take, so I have a nice time popping pills, and then decide to eat a loaf of banana bread with a pound of butter on it, because, you know, you can’t take pills on an empty stomach, and then, and then, I decided this sentence was plenty long and contained just enough commas.

The aforementioned chores were completed around 10, during which time the kids were sorta-kinna watching Bambi II, which I put on while they had their breakfast. I end up watching their movies more than they do, and get so choked up that I can barely speak. At cartoons. The kids are starting to play together much nicer; I only had to freak out at Luke for being mean to Tuesday a time or two. Later I let Dirt go back outside to play, but I am both too lazy and too busy to accompany Tuesday outside, so she is forced to stay in the house with me while I kill flies and continue doing chores, which present themselves one after the other after the other (both chores and flies). She is mad about it and keeps pleading with me about shoes.

Around 10:30 Dooley calls and says he was denied the use of his debit card on a $1.32 purchase and requests that I investigate. Evidently the teller was full of crap when she said yesterday’s deposit would post by this morning. Stupid Wells Fargo. How I hate you. I call to complain but it doesn’t do any good. We are charged overdraft fees and I am mad and vow to quit banking at WF, again, but I won’t, yet, because their online bill pay is so darn convenient. So I pay the cash advance fees and transfer more money from my credit card, which I HAD paid off. Ugh. Soon we’ll be ballin’, though. In theory. Once checks from Dooley’s new job get more regular and we catch up on stuff. Riiiigggghhht.

Dirt is back in the house now, and he tells me the floor is really gross, and with his very serious face nodding slowly, he tells me we need to vacuum. COME ON!!! I had just gotten to rest, literally JUST flopped down on the couch to breathe while watching the special features on the Bambi II disc for the second time (because it is equipped with “fastplay” and just keeps cycling). I am learning how to draw Thumper. Then he actually brings out the vacuum and threatens to do it himself, the cord poised near the outlet. So I get up and vacuum. It DID need it. But then the crap vacuum shorts out half way through and I had to finish an hour later.

Soon it is lunchtime. Wait. I skipped a part. Sometime after breakfast the lovable monsters demand canned peaches. Dirt got me the can opener and everything. As soon as I have them plated and served, I get “No thank you I don’t want that.” (At least it was polite.) So I force them to eat most of the peaches, angrily reminding them that THEY WANTED THE DAMN PEACHES IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The other part I skipped was the flood. Maybe around 9am? Dirt was being such a nice, big boy entertaining himself outside and not bugging me—or so I thought—and he decides our walkout basement needs to be watered. Or washed? Luckily the thing is unfinished concrete, but he dragged the hose in and pumped in a pretty good amount of water before I got twitchy and went to check on him. Upon making the discovery that the front corner of the basement was semi-flooded, I yelled “NONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO!!!!”, and Dirt, who is usually unperturbed by our reprimands, starts sobbing and runs away. Then I feel bad, but clearly he knew what he was doing was, indeed, naughty. I find him back inside watching Bambi II, curled up on the couch, milking it. He says he’s cold. It’s 80 degrees out and pretty warm inside, despite the ever-present clamor of the swamp cooler. Whatever. So I get him all nicely situated on the couch with his pillow and blanket, and gently remind him not to water the basement. Why? Um, because. Because…the basement is not thirsty?

So now it’s lunchtime. Tuesday gets Kix cereal and Dirt gets leftover noodles…and peaches. While they eat, I read an unhelpful article about discipline in a copy of Parenting magazine (from three years ago—for some reason I still have it from the time all the baby/kid companies find out when you have a baby and furiously peddle their wares at you). I am thrilled when they go down for nap with very minimal arguments a little bit later.

It is 1:30pm and I have a moment to myself. I freaking love naptime. I thought I had a moment to myself last night when I escaped for a shower (literally ESCAPED…I ducked out and ran to the bathroom at a moment when Dooley had both kids), but a second later both kids were banging down the door: “What are you doing, Mama?!” I yell for Dooley and he retrieves them while I shower, but the moment I turn the water off, I overhear him saying, “Go get Mama!” I could kill him. Seriously, dude? FIVE minutes? That’s all I get? I storm out dripping wet in my towel and give him a cheerful earful. Ha. Cheerful earful. I am saved by a phone call from my old college roommate and I am *allowed* some privacy for the phone call. I literally lock the bedroom door.

So yay naptime. It has currently ended at this moment. I have enjoyed the purging of my mind via this new blog, but now the darlings are awake, and Dooley will be home soon. I turned on “Silly Songs” to momentarily appease them, and am listening to a song about a purple cow who thinks she is a chicken, all by myself, because they left. And now they want to watch Dragon Movie (How to Train Your Dragon) for the hundred billionth time. Fine. I still can't turn my head all the way.

Gotta go. I hope you have enjoyed my run-on sentences and constant changing from present to past tense.
Stay tuned for riveting tales of pillows. Although it might be a long time before I have enough material built up in my brain for rants of this magnitude.

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How do your children/dogs wake you up? Do you watch the same movie over and over and over and over? What evil deeds have your kids done when you thought they were behaving and suddenly it was quiet?