Wednesday, January 29, 2014

When Your Morning Stinks, Literally

I'm not sure why, but it seems like whenever Bryan goes away on a business everything descends into chaos.  For this reason, I dred it when he tells me he has a trip coming up.  I do everything I can to mentally prepare for the gauntlet I'm about to run and hope and pray for the best.  Some trips go smoothly and others are just a cluster of one horrible thing after another.

Early yesterday morning Bryan left for his trip to Denver.  My efforts to be proactive in making sure I got the day off to a good start were thwarted before I got out of bed.  The remote control for the alarm clock that is clear across the room wouldn't work so it screamed at me for a minute or two while I pressed every button on the blasted remote to no avail.  I would learn 13 hours later that Bryan had put the remote to our old alarm clock in our bed the night before.  Grr.

Following the alarm clock fiasco I had the displeasure of slipping and nearly falling in the girls' bathroom as I tried to rush Katie to the potty.  Why did I slip?  Oh, because my children decided to leave a path of destruction in the bathroom littered with towels, dirty laundry and hair accessories.  So approximately 10 minutes into the day I lost it.  Somehow we all managed to get fed, dressed, ready and out the door in time for Mass.  It wasn't until we go out of the car in the church parking lot that I realized that my kids were missing cold weather accessories like hats, mittens and gloves on this awesome frigid day of 18 degrees.  Sigh.  On the bright side they survived and I managed to not berate the ones who should know to bundle up.  Instead I just criticized myself for not putting a hat or mittens on the baby.  I did, however, remember to put my own gloves on.  Convenient, right?

The rest of the day went well for the most part.  The girls and I got the house in order before bed and I was confident that tomorrow would be better.  After all, I had the right remote for the alarm clock, the baby had just been washed so she'd be easy to get ready for Mass in the morning and all would be good.

Enter reality.  I woke up at 4:30AM this morning to an odd scraping sound.  What could it be?  I got up and looked out the bathroom window to discover snow.  More snow.  Not wanting to know just how bad it was I was determined to go back to sleep for the next two hours.  But the scraping sound persisted.  So I dragged myself out of bed and looked out front to discover my neighbor shoveling his drive way and sidewalk.  I was livid so I took to expressing my annoyance as charitably as I could on FaceBook and then sent poor Bryan a text at what I believe was 3AM his time.  Misery loves company, right?  Sometime shortly after 5AM the irritating sound of shoveling stopped and I was able to fall back to sleep.  While I was awake I decided to be proactive and grab the house phone in case the school decided to call yet another snow day.  6:30AM I was jolted awake by the alarm clock, and both my cell phone and house phones ringing.  School was delayed.  That meant I could grab an extra hour or so of sleep since we wouldn't be heading to Mass this morning and we could have a relaxed morning where I surely wouldn't lose my temper.

Enter 7:20AM.  I hear the girls loudly scuffling in their room but Katie isn't awake.  Wait, no.  She's up.  And within seconds there are screams of "Poop" filling the upstairs.  Katie woke up a complete mess and Madeline promptly carried her to my bathroom and began drawing a frigid bath for her.  Bathing Katie isn't fun, so the prospect of two baths in 12 hours is not the most welcome thought but I'm happy that she's pooped since she hasn't exactly been into that since she started using the potty two weeks ago.  I walked into the bathroom and found Katie with poo smeared pjs.  I had to transport her back to her room to get cleaned up before she could go into the tub.  As is always the case where there's some sort of disaster in the house, the phone starts to ring and Ellie feels the need to try and shove the phone into my hands while I'm wrist deep in waste removal.  At this point I lost it.  I finished cleaning Katie up, drew her a warm bath and got down to the task of restoring her to a clean state.  While I did that, Bryan talked to the older girls via FaceTime.  Madeline was a tremendous help as she stripped the crib and got everything sent down to the laundry room.  By 8:00AM Katie was cleaned and dressed.

A few minutes later Madeline was on her way to shovel out front per Bryan's request.  I was ready to just let it sit there.  She made it ten feet when our neighbor asked her where Bryan was and then told her to go inside and he'd clear our snow.  I know that made Madeline's morning and mine.

I've got two more mornings to go until this business trip is over.  I'm praying that things go better from here on out.

1 comment:

  1. Oh my! When husbands are away, everything gets so much harder! At least you had a willing helper towards the end :-)

    Doesn't a remote for an alarm clock kind of defeat the purpose? I thought most people who put the clock across the room from their bed do it specifically so that they are forced to get out of bed just to turn it off.

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