Vignettes

I have a sneaking suspicion that nobody’s reading blogs today anyway, so I’m going to record a few vignettes for the sake of my own chuckles and family history.

Vignette #1: Michael Mayhem’s Daily Dose of, Well, Mayhem

They were all ready for bed before I left to go shopping. Teeth brushed. Jammies on. Christian had even made lunches for school the next day. And then he went down to teach one last piano lesson. When he came back up, he found Michael holding a Jello fruit cup. “Where did you get that?” he demanded. Then he saw Julianna’s lunch bag lying on the kitchen floor, along with a half-eaten string cheese. And one more on the counter, with bite marks in the plastic. So much for made lunches and brushed teeth.

Vignette #2: Eavesdropping

“Can I come downstairs and read?” Alex asked.

“No.”

“Uh!” (You know that deeply-aggrieved grunt.) “Why not?”

“Because Daddy and I need to talk about Christmas, that’s why.”

The attempt at a dramatic sigh caught on a giddy smile. The thought of presents does that. He stayed upstairs. No complaints.

It didn’t take as long as we expected, so we turned on Netflix. The next morning Alex gave me a look. “You guys didn’t talk about Christmas last night. You watched a movie.”

Nice, Alex. Nice.

Vignette #3: Hiding in plain sight

Christian is the finder in our house. I’m bad at finding things; Alex is wretched, and we don’t even ask anyone else. On Sunday we bought marshmallows to use in our Down syndrome presentations, but I didn’t know where he’d put the Target bag and I forgot to look for it. That evening Christian asked where it was and I said I didn’t know. He got up and walked into the kitchen, where he found it sitting right in plain sight on top of a bin of clothes. When he began to mock me, I said:

Let me explain my day to you. I woke up at 3:45 and never got back to sleep. I went to 5:45 Jazzercise, came home to have you running around like crazy trying to get out the door, so I helped with breakfast and lunches. Then I had to take a shower, get my blog up, and get out of the house by 8 with the other kids so I could pick up Uncle J. on the way to drop the boys off. I spent the entire morning at school doing presentations with you, came home with crabby, hungry boys, made lunch, put Michael down for nap, and then I tried to lie down and take a nap myself because I was exhausted. But then Nicholas came upstairs and wanted to snuggle, and then he wanted me to read him a book, and by the time we finished, my sister was here. I had a twenty minute visit with her and then I had to kick her out because I had a Skype interview with an editor. In the middle of that interview Michael woke up screaming and had to spend the rest of it on my lap. That lasted until 3:15, and then the kids were coming home from school, and I taught a flute lesson until 4:30. Then it was time to battle the boys through getting dinner on the table. So you tell me, when did I have time today to look around the kitchen for a bag I didn’t need?

(We were laughing about it, don’t worry.)

Vignette #4: The chaos of Four (as if that last wasn’t illuminating enough)

I did an interview by email yesterday about Joy to the World: Advent Activities. One of the questions was:

Describe the mess of kids’ stuff and toys that, I can only imagine, is strewn across the house. Be specific.

My response:

No kid ever puts their coat away. Michael routinely wipes out on a piece of paper someone has left on the floor. I’m constantly yelling, “Do not step on the ______!” (book, DVD case)–we should buy stock in whatever company makes jewel cases. Michael likes to pull out the DVDs and shove them into the VCR. Yes, I said VCR. At the moment, we haven’t had a chance to clear out Friday’s mountain of paperwork, so Alex and Julianna both have a bunch of papers sitting on the ottoman waiting to be rifled through and sorted. Yesterday I went downstairs (where the toys are *supposed* to be) to practice my flute and spent the first ten minutes sorting the pieces of two different puzzles that had been dumped into a single pile on the floor. Fortunately they were different sized pieces. On saturday morning, after I stripped our bed to wash the sheets, Nicholas came downstairs and greeted us with, “I threw up on your bed!” Why? Because he’d upset his stomach by jumping on it. Does that give you enough? 🙂

This is what I’m thankful for this year. My family. Ahem. 😉