Nothing to Report Here

I feel like I have gotten lost in the minutiae of day to day life.

David was out of town over the weekend and my parents came up to help but left Saturday after lunch. A friend of mine came over Saturday afternoon and (perhaps sensing my desperation?) ended up sticking around to help me with the bathtime routine before bed.

I kept thinking that having multiple kids would not be so challenging if they were always (maybe even sometimes) in sync with each other in terms of eating/sleeping/playing, you know?

Sunday morning, I had some lofty goals. I wanted to get the house picked up and vacuumed, I wanted to jog/walk to the park with the girls and the dog, and I wanted to get myself showered and dressed in time to pick up David from the airport at noon.

Coco also had some goals: She wanted to lose her bloody mind and scream anytime I left the room without her and refuse to nap except (briefly) in the stroller.

Zuzu also had some goals: She wanted to build a pillow fort on the rug while I was vacuuming, go down the slide two more times after I said "Last time," and also shower with me.

Coco achieved her goals. Zuzu achieved two of hers and then was thwarted because I did NOT have time to negotiate around her while trying to take a super quick shower.

Instead, I showered while listening to my children finally doing something in sync: screaming and crying.

Coco was pissed that I was behind the curtain and out of her sight. Zuzu was pissed that she was not with me. Zuzu won't leave the baby alone when she's eating or going down for a nap, but she wants nothing to do with her when I could use THREE minutes to shampoo, condition, and rinse my hair. Coco will arch her back and contort herself in order to see what her sister's doing when I'm trying to nurse her, completely ignoring me in the process, but when I set her down outside the bathroom door for JUST A MOMENT, you'd think I'd destroyed her hopes and dreams for the future.

We were SO READY for David to get home.

Anyway, between picking up David and having lunch at a restaurant (the girls were magically well-behaved), we managed to get all the Sunday Duties taken care of--laundry, bottles prepped, diapers gathered--and we went to my friend Beth's house for a BBQ that was really nice except for the part that it's kind of hard to sit down and have a conversation with a bunch of kids under the age of five running around, needing various levels of assistance with different activities, and wanting to report on their dramas and squabbles. Zuzu was actually less interested in socializing and more interesting in exploring the vast toy collection that Beth's girls have accumulated, so she kept herself pretty well entertained and didn't bite anyone (win!), although I thought she might have a meltdown when it was time to leave. (Beth managed to coax her out to the car for me.)

She fell asleep on the way home, and I was celebrating what I was pretty confident would be a successful sleeping transfer from carseat to bed at 7:30pm as I carried her in the house, when I realized that she smelled terrible and I was  feeling the cold smear of a leaking poop diaper on my hands. She did not sleep through the diaper change, and what I thought was bedtime turned out to be a 30 minute power nap between 7:00pm and 7:30pm. Not ideal!

So now it's Monday morning and I don't feel very well-rested and I need to write an exam for Friday and I need people to respond to e-mails who haven't responded and I'd really like to get pictures hung in Zuzu's big girl room and that laundry that I finished didn't get entirely put away and I haven't done any reading for fun lately and I feel like I am just putting out fires instead of getting things accomplished.

Next week is spring break for both David and me, and we are MORE than ready for the break and psyching ourselves up for Potty Training, Let's Try This Again.