Quinny comes home tonight! He's been gone for years... Well, technically 10 days, but after about 7 or 8 days, each day is equal to a year! Remember when I talked about our relay race? Well, tonight after I give him a big kiss, I will be throwing the baton at him and run, screaming! If you are a Facebook Friend of mine, you will find a pattern in my posts... For safety reasons, I try to not make it known when Quinn is gone, but I have found that I usually send out a cry for help at about day 8. It's a secret plea to Social Services to come and pick up the kids before something really bad happens. This week it was: "Is it horrible that I was slightly relieved that the kids were misbehaving so I had an excuse to throw them all in bed early?!". I know that sounds pretty mild, but if you know me at all, you know that there was some serious filtering going on right there!
Strangely, it's been an uneventful 10 days - a looong uneventful 10 days. No one was sick, nothing major broke, no one tried to burn the house down. Maybe the dullness of the week added to our misery or just made us tired of looking at each other. You would think that since it was a boring week, my house would be spotless, all the laundry would be done and put away, and I would have several things crossed off of my project list. HA! Actually, it's just the opposite... This week I got frustrated with the monotony of it all... I got tired of cleaning up the same mess every five minutes, picking up the same toys... So I just didn't. I did however watch all three Superman Man movies with the kids (the really old ones) and we also watched the Ghostbusters movies, we logged a bunch of hours in our new little pool, we played Just Dance 3, I layed on the couch reading while the kids covered the living room with Legos (and I allowed them to leave the Legos out for several days), Emma and I caught up on all of our DVR'd episodes of Dora.
I chose to be lazy because I could tell at the beginning of the week that the kids weren't going to cooperate with any kind of productivity. They were all whiny, cranky and bratty. Just getting them to take their cereal bowls to the sink after breakfast was a challenge that I wasn't up for - because I was also whiny, cranky and bratty. And regardless of how low my standards were this week, they remained whiny, cranky and bratty - so did I. Sometimes we just need a 10 day pity party, we missed Quinn more than usual and we wanted to wallow. So we kicked it into survival mode, I did as little housework as possible, we watched way too much TV, and stayed up too late.
I should probably feel guilty for being lazy and giving my kids the impression that it's ok to do nothing worthwhile for a whole 10 days - but I don't. I'm not condoning laziness and I probably didn't make the right choice (they'll work it out in therapy later!). But I know myself and my kids well enough to know that this was just one of those weeks where the slightest thing could result in a meltdown from any or all of us. I know that they were all fed, clean (thanks to the new pool!) and not in any danger. This week, that was the best I could do!
So today, after breakfast, I had the kids draw chores from the chore jar, we got the house clean, I found my SuperMom cape (I had to shake it out and throw it in the dryer for a few minutes), the laundry is put away, trash is taken out. We will all greet daddy with hugs and kisses and he will never be the wiser! ;-)
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