A Perfect Storm

There are times during this motherhood of mine when I'm all Seriously?!? Where the frak are these kids' mother? Cause I'm over this whole 20-year babysitting gig. I mean, I love my children more than my own life. But when they get low on blood sugar and sleep, they aren't children... they're animals.

Allow me to deconstruct.

The director of the kids' Montessori school resigned two weeks into the school year.

Yeah.

I mean, she was the whole reason we put our kids in that school and now she's gone to some other school 21 miles away. I'm not dissing on the elementary Montessori teacher (Miss D) who's going to teach both the elementary and primary lessons and yadda, yadda make it work blather, blather rearrange the classroom blah, blah you paid $30 for yoga mats for afternoon yoga that I'm not going to do because I can't get my old bones down on the floor to do the yoga with the kids but no worries because you, dear parent, can volunteer to cut out tons of laminated construction paper lessons to replace lessons the previous director took with her to the new school even though you did that shit for four years in college because all of your sorority sisters were early education majors and couldn't cut that crap out themselves but when you asked for help on your physics labs they just laughed at you yammer, yammer but you're not bitter.

('Scuse me. Jeremy Clarkson just said a funny on Top Gear. Must listen....... OK. Back to writing this train wreck of a post.)

In addition to being the kids "new" teacher, Miss D's also a chatterbox. A sweet, older chatterbox, but a chatterbox nonetheless. And when she gets going? Woo-doggies you can't shut her up! For the first two weeks of school, I picked up the J-man at 12:15PM, raced home at 5-mph over the speed limit, chucked him up the stairs, visited the loo, changed him out of his school clothes, and could pretty much throw him in the bed by 12:30/12:45. He would get a good hour of sleep before picking up Bubba and Miss-Miss at 2:15 and all was peachy-keen.

Yesterday? At 12:45? I was still standing in front of the school listening to Miss D yammer on and on and on.... And I get that she's excited about running the whole shebang and getting construction paper cutting help and that she needs hangers for the gently-used uniform sale, and ZOMG! don't forget about the box tops! *Pant pant* but I NEED TO GET J-MAN DOWN FOR A NAP OR IT'S THE APOCALYPSE!

I think my youngest got about 15 minutes of sleep. You see where I'm going with this?

After picking up the twins from school, we headed off to WalSchmart. Maybe not immediately. Maybe after school and before WalHell we had to go home, change out of two more sets of school uniforms, put two more kids on the toilet, give kids a snack, and check myself in the mirror to make sure I wasn't going to end up on People of Walmart. (I'm finally figuring out that motherhood is just a long, endless multi-tasking session during which you take one step forward and five-thousand steps back.) And after the 90-minute WalShart fiasco (a fiasco because getting three kids to follow you through WalFart is like herding cats across the open plains), I informed the Ty-man that if he wanted something to eat, he was going to have to take me and the kids somewhere, dammit. Because me + kitchen was an unprovable equation. That also meant languishing at home until Papa came home from work. Ish.

My grandfather was a pisser when he got hungry. Each summer during the late 70s/early 80s, my extended family would travel in a convoy to the beach. This was before cell phones which meant each car had a CB radio to stay in touch. And when Grandpa Simeon got hungry? The grouchy, whiny, ill-tempered crap coming out of that man's mouth would have made Chris Rock blush. Seriously. Have you ever seen a pissy, whiny, pitiful 60-ish man? I did, every summer. And my grandfather's name became a verb in our family. If you were hungry with a side of petulant, all while digesting your muscle mass, then you were totally going Simeon.

My youngest is a 3-year-old Simeon. And when he's running on a 15-minute nap? He's Simeon-squared. And last night, during our dinner out, he was Simeon-squared. He was so Simeon that his dinner didn't even satisfy the inner grumpy grandpa and I'm pretty sure the other dining patrons were calling their ENTs and making appointments for ear drum replacement surgeries.

Tonight! On CNN! Why are cochlear implants flying off the shelves in suburban Atlanta? Our report at 11!

Where's the frakking chocolate?