Frazzled Mom? Win a T-Shirt!

1. Mireya
   May 30th, 2007 at 2:10 pm

   The stressed moment as mother I feel that it was when my son was in Guatemala (I live in Venezuela) and he wanted to return to Venezuela because in the adventure in which he was, it had arrived at very ugly moments and they almost did not eat, did not bathe, etc. My son called to me desperate from Guatemala saying that it wanted to return and that i need buy an airplane passage to him. My son managed to escape of the adventure and arrived on the following day at the Airport of Guatemala City and after 48 hours of anguish, he managed to return to be with me

2. Steve
   May 30th, 2007 at 2:55 pm

   What about us frazzled single dads? Not to say it's any harder for us... but it's no picnic!

   Every day for me goes something like this:

   I wake up at 6:30am and make my way down to the basement of the townhouse to wake up my 11 year old daughter. I force her door to open, much to the disagreement of the pile of clothes she's left behind it, and try to convince her to get out of bed. I take the pile of clothes, and move it to another location around the corner where the laundry machine is.

   Whites? Colors? How about just "clean or dirty". Those are the two colors I can keep track of. I then make my way upstairs and throw a breakfast together for her. Somehow, I stumble out the front door with the dog for his morning constitutional. At this point, I'm standing in some variety of pajamas or shorts and a t-shirt or whatever I was wearing when I passed out the night before. My 8 year old son is usually awake at this point and standing at the door yelling something to me about pokemon while waving his nintendo ds in the air. I do my best to respond while trying to coerce the dog back into the house.

   I attempt to make him breakfast, while feeding the dog, and putting coffee in the pot. Sometime around now, I realize that I haven't put a gate up at the bottom of the stairs. My first clue is that my 6 year old daughter is in her room yelling because the dog is eating one of her stuffed animals. I pull another bowl out of the cabinet for her cereal and go to retrieve the dog, and the stuffed animal from the dog's mouth.

   I've set alarms on my phone to let me know when the kids need to be leaving to catch their busses, and the alarm is going off for the 11 year old, but of course, she can't hear me yelling because she's still drying her hair. So I go downstairs again to get her. The dog has attachment issues, and he follows me down, nearly killing me in the process. His attachment issues are overcome with his desire to play in the piles of laundry. No... not the dirty laundry... the clean laundry... which is now the dirty laundry.

   I rush my oldest daughter out the door and go to get my coffee. At this point I remember that coffee making usually requires that one put coffee into the top of the machine. I pour the hot water out into the sink and decide to just stop on the way in to work.

   Thank god my son doesn't care about soggy cereal because he hasn't removed his face from the nintendo ds. After a third reminder, he saves his game and starts eating.

   The second bus alarm starts going off, and we all (dog included) walk out of the house, and then back in to get more poop bags for the dog, and then back out but a little bit faster. I nod knowingly to the other parents at the bus stop while my son and I talk about pokemon (still) and my daughter tries to sneak onto the school bus. She's an afternoon kindergarden student.

   After my boy gets on the bus, I drive my daughter to the baby-sitters house and then do my 2 hour commute to the glory that is the mixing-bowl in springfield virginia.

   7.5 hours of work... and then another ~2 hour commute back.

   It's straight to the baby-sitters to pick the kids up, and then back home around 7pm. This is where the juggling really starts because I have to help 3 of them with varying degrees of homework complexity, and manage the dog, while cooking dinner. "If X is 9, and Y is 15, How many squares are there that rhyme with the word 'dog'... STAY AWAY FROM THE SPAGHETTI." Seriously... if I wasn't watching the dog constantly he could climb the kitchen counters like a mountain goat. On crack.

   This is actually our moment of peace. We talk about school and friends and work. This is worked out really well since I've banned the nintendo DS from dinner. Now my son actually looks at us while we're all talking. It's awesome.

   As each of them finishes dinner, I send them one by one to take a bath. I try to lay out clothes and a towel for them before they head into the bathroom but my younger two have apparently pissed off the towel fairies because without fail, they are yelling from the bathroom that there's no towels and they're already wet and can't get it themselves. I take a guess at which pile of laundry is clean and which is dirty and get them a towel. I've decided that the more interested in the towel the dog is, the more likely it is to be clean.

   Things usually calm down after bath time, and for that last few minutes before bed, we all hang out together and watch tv or read or play games on the DS's.

   Pretty much everyone is asleep by 9:30. I pick a random pile of clothes that are either clean or dirty, and put them into the washing machine, load up the dishwasher, feed the fish, and then pass out.

   So that's basically the average, low-stress day. High stress days involve calls from the sick room at school, dismembered stuffed animals, being hated because I've banned the internet, calls from their estranged mother... "Frazzled" doesn't really cover those days so I'll save those stories for other venues

3. Alex
   May 30th, 2007 at 4:59 pm

   Not here, guys - go to Miss Cellania's website!

4. Steve
   May 30th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

   lol.. oops

5. Alex
   May 30th, 2007 at 5:22 pm

   Wow Steve - and you still have time to read Neatorama? And I thought I was busy!

PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT