TGIF

Tonight I loaded the kids in the car after feeding them a well-balanced dinner of Ramen Noodles and cheese crackers. Yeah, I admit it, I'm rather pathetic at meals when David is on business trips. Especially when he's in NYC and I get little receipt emails from Seamless Web telling me he ordered Indian food for dinner. But, I also served orange juice with our "meal", so it's all good. I like to think the natural orange of the OJ cancels out the synthetic orange of the cheese crackers. (Honestly, it's a good thing David comes home tomorrow, because if I eat one more piece of junk my stomach is going to walk out of my body in protest).

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, loading the kids in the car, which I accomplished in short order. Then I went to grab my keys off their designated hook and they were nowhere to be found. If you have small children, you'll understand the problem this presents -- they could be anywhere. In the laundry hamper, down the toilet, under the stove... There are no limits to how far car keys can wander when two little feet (or possibly four) are involved in the the wandering.

I tore about the house looking for them, all the while listening to Michael yell from the garage, "Mom! I'm ready to go!" And then I found them. Zipped neatly in my diaper bag. Put there by me. This afternoon.

Apparently it was my brain that had wandered off.

So, we drove into town and I picked up Matthew's new epi pens (he's allergic to eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts. And sunflower and sesame seeds. Weird). Meanwhile, Michael quizzed me about the contents of every food item he could come up with. "Do bananas have eggs in them, Mom? Do popsicles have eggs in them?"

Afterwards we went to the grocery store. One of the store's employees volunteered to take my cart back inside just as I reached my car to unload. He stood there and watched me buckle the babies into their car seats and heave all my groceries into the back of the minivan by myself (about a five minute process), and then he smiled at me and dutifully wheeled my cart back to the store. Um, thanks for the help?

I came home to see that the dinner dishes had somehow multiplied gremlin-style while we were gone (the house is so trashed I keep expecting it to appear online in a report of the latest natural disaster) and that the bread dough I'd set out to rise hours earlier was sitting in a sad looking lump on top of the dryer (time to open a new package of yeast). While I was distracted by putting the groceries away, the babies were playing in the flour bin. No, wait, it was Michael who was playing in the flour bin. (The elbow-length white powder "gloves" he was sporting gave him away). I sighed. "How old are you?" I asked.

"I'm one!" he said, cheerfully.

Frankly, that explains a lot.

After the kids were in bed I settled down to work on cross-stitching Matthew's name onto his Christmas stocking. The only problem is his name doesn't fit, so I'm kind of changing up the pattern as I go. After two hours of stitching I had to undo the entire H and half the E. I should have named him Bob.

But the good news is it's past midnight now, so technically it's Friday. Thank goodness.

I've had enough of this week.