You know it's gonna be a funky day when you wake up late, it's raining, and the car needs to go in the shop. In other words.... it's a Monday.
The infamous Honda Odyssey has to go in for a timing belt replacement before I'm left with a blown engine and thousands of dollars of more repairs on this hunk of junk. This means 6 family members have the use of a BMW meant for a midget. It only seats four so picking up and dropping off kids at school and Pre-K has to be cleverly maneuvered; i.e., USE THE FREAKING BUS - which they totally loath because they say it "smells funny".
So the hubs sets off at 6:30 to drop the van off so that it can be the first one worked on, only to find out when he gets there that he is already sixth in line and the car won't be ready until today.
Great! Two days of stuffing whining, sweaty bodies into the BMW. The week is off to a great start already.
I get the first three kids off to school without much conflict, but then Nia decides she wants to wear her bathing suit with her new skirt and her hot pink boots that are meant for weather. Now normally I just go with her gut, but not today, and NOT this outfit.
I spend the better part of 45 minutes begging, pleading, whining, being firm, back to begging, bribing occasionally, and then finally deciding not to talk to her at all until she resolves to give up the bathing suit, put on a shirt, and wear socks with the boots if she's gonna wear them.
She shows up in my room 10 minutes later dressed, but with tennis shoes on this time. I should have just figured out with all my motherly wisdom, to just leave her alone in the first place and she'd come to her own senses.
But NoooOOOooo! I gotta do it the hard way. I need a Dr. Phil intervention here cause we are not 1/2 hour late for school and the hubs is calling nonstop wanting to know WHEN I'm leaving the house and picking him up because he has waited SO long for me so far that he started walking and now he's walking in the pouring rain.
And I'm at fault for this decision??????
I drop Nia off feeling sorry for her cause her little face is still red from crying about the whole swimsuit couture for class thing. As soon as I get back into the BMW, it won't start. I crank, and crank, and crank, and crank, and all the while I do, it's saying "screw you - I ain't starting!".
I do the usual looking around to see if anyone is noticing that my car is being as stubborn as Nia was this morning. I expect tantrums from my kids, but not our car - or should I say the hubs car, which it is, and which it takes on the same personality as he does at times.
So I start talking to it and soothing it and telling it I promise I'll make the hubs take better care of it. I am actually stroking the dashboard and again looking around to see if anyone is watching. It's pouring the rain - who is going to be standing outside at this moment watching me stroke the dashboard of an archaic BMW? But I still gotta look!
Finally she starts, and finally I'm on my way to pick up the hubs who is now walking to the animal shelter to see about getting Remi neutured now that he has agreed to having the cats nuts severed so that he will stop the horrid howling he does in the house at night.
I'm driving over the 3-mile bridge into Pensacola and I have forgotten that the car needs new front shocks until the front starts rocking up and down and I nearly lose my breakfast in the floorboard from it. Now I don't get seasick, and this just might be the first time I've actually gotten car sick cause the front of the car is resembling "the wave" in a baseball stadium as it goes UP and down, UP and down, and my stomach goes, UGH and burb, UGH and burb! I have never been so happy to get off a bridge in all my life.
I finally get to my destination only to see that the hubs is walking again to the end of the road where I'm suppose to pick him up at the animal shelter. As he enters the car, he smells like he has just walked the Sahara from end to end. The interior of the BMW is very small, and his intense sweaty body odor permeates what little space I have to breathe in in this car so fast that I exit as quick as I can in order not to die from the noxious fumes he is emitting.
"What's wrong?", he asks with a slightly annoyed look (who can blame him - he's been walking in the rain for an hour).
"Oh my God you need to go home and take a shower!", I say between gasps of fresh air and rain pouring on my head. My God! A carload of elephant farts would have smelled better than that man did!
We both laugh as I get back in the car, roll the window down enough not to let the monsoon rains in, but just enough so that I can breathe - not just from his odor, but from the eventual trip back over the 3-mile bridge.
The rest of the day (the next 1 1/2 hours), goes pretty much okay. I leave to pick up Nia from school at 1 and as I'm walking her to the car I ask her, "How was lunch today?".
"I didn't have any.", she replies looking at the ground.
I pause for a few seconds and then realize I sent my daughter to Pre-K without her lunch. You may not think this is a big deal, but she goes to a Pre-K that doesn't serve her lunch there. So my daughter sat there while everyone else ate and she didn't.
I am a very, very, very bad mommie on this Monday.
So I took her home and made her whatever she wanted. She had a Nutella sandwich first, a quesadilla second, a bowl of peaches third, a bowl of broccoli last; and then she topped it all off with a bowl Peanut Butter Cup ice cream from Ben and Jerry's.
It was not what I'd normally serve her, or in that order, but rather it was a guilt lunch so that my daughter wouldn't see me as the sorry excuse for a mom she would later come to recognize when she hit her teen years!
Then..... No, my day isn't over my any means at this point.
I have a meeting with Toni's teacher today, but before I go, I want to get the shelves up in Julian and Nia's room before we go. Everything is fine and dandy until we are on the last damn screw in Nia's room. The hubs ask me to pick up the drill from the floor while he holds the screw in place. I pick it up and then Nia flies into the room and yells "Whatcha Dooooin!"
I drop the drill on my foot. It doesn't just "drop" on my foot - it falls straight down so that the phillip's shaped drill bit lands right between my 2nd and middle toe on my right foot and lodges itself there somewhere between muscle and bone, and cutting a slit in my shoe in the process. YES I was wearing shoes and STILL managed to do this! I am left with a "X" marks the spot on my foot and toes swellling all over the place and blood spurting through this little mark on my foot now.
As I lay on Nia's bed screaming into a pillow, the hubs eloquently remarks that I gave birth to four children naturally, this pain should be nothing compared to that. If I had had a shoe, or anything to fling at him, it would be landing up the side of his head at that moment. I just let out another agonizing moan into the pillow instead as Nia is stroking my head telling me I'll be okay.
I eventually clean it up, slap a few bandaids on it, and get myself composed for the meeting with the teacher. But not before thinking, "Hmmmm.... maybe I should visit my friends in the ER since I haven't paid them a visit THIS month like have the past TWO months? I think I am due for a tetanus shot since I haven't had one since, like 1980 after 28 stitches from a car accident!"
But then I snap out of it and go on with this Monday that I have been given and want to give back to whoever will take it.
Now I have to juggle taking the hubs to work and meeting Toni's 3rd grade teacher for a meeting about her not handing in her homework of late. My God! A little over three weeks into school and I'm already being dragged in for a parent/teacher conference. I get Nia ready to go again, and she would rather take a nap, so it takes some more prodding and bribing to get her back into the car again. We drop the hubs off, but not before noticing that the oil light in the BMW is coming on and he has to drive to three different places to find a quart of oil to put in the car because he "forgot" to do so the other day.
We get to the school and wind our way around the sea of cars already lining up to pick up their bundle(s) of joy amongst the torrential rains unleash itself on Nia and I through the half busted umbrella the hubs offered us because I was still in "bad mommie mode", and walked off without one when we left the house.
I arrive to Toni's teachers room wet and cold. I instructed Nia and Toni to sit outside the door and gave them the iPhone in which to busy themselves with a few appropriate games like "Pocket God". The teacher and I sit ourselves at these chairs meant only for 3rd graders and which we look completely ridiculous sitting on ourselves.
She begins to explain to me about how Toni isn't finishing her work, handing it in, zoning out, being unorganized, and I'm responding that this is the first time I've heard of her doing this. She responds that she has call ALL of her past teachers and they all have noticed the same thing (Huh?), and bottom line.... Toni has ADD.
"Excuse Me!"
She explains that Toni needs to be tested for ADD as soon as possible and put on the appropriate "medication(s)", because she is in jeopardy of falling behind because she may have to repeat 3rd grade like she did 1st.....
"Wait! She NEVER repeated 1st grade!", I tell her teacher.
"She didn't?", her teacher replies with a very puzzled look on her face that let's me know that someone informed her that she had.
"But...... we think Toni is gifted because her reading level is so far ahead of the rest of the students.", she continues.
Well! At least some good news came out of this meeting so that I don't have to go home and cry in my pillow because the whole stinking school system NOW thinks my child is... is..... de - fect - tive!
Then I realized after the meeting that my child IS NOT defective. She is hardwired differently and thus does not learn the way the public school system thinks/says she should learn because that's the only way they know how to teach her - only if she learns her academics within the frame they are use to "dealing" with.
I am very clear about my feelings toward the treatment(s) of ADD and ADHD. I will not be "medicating" Toni with psychotropic drugs so that she can fit into a square box when she in fact, is not "square". She is a round peg that needs to have the tools at her disposal in order to work within square peg school system. I respond to this "diagnosis" of ADD like I did when I was told the twins would "very likely" have asthma by the time they were three because of the medication I was given for their lungs while in the hospital with pre-term labor. They are almost 12 and have never been "medicated" for asthma because they never got asthma, and they was because we were proactive in the way we fed them and what we exposed them to at an early age. Toni is no different in our approach and she will not be a Ridelin or Strattera child.
And that was my soap-box moment in all this.
When I get home, I go into research mode. So much so that I forget to take Nadia to volleyball practice and she has to remind me three minutes before she has to be there. I take her, come back, then resume researching ADD again. Then I forget to start dinner and don't realize it until I'm aware that I have to pick Nadia up, then pick the hubs up, then come home and make dinner at a time when everyone is expecting TO BE ON THE TABLE ALREADY!
So I toss the chicken into the microwave and punch "defrost" as I'm headed out the door with Nia in tow to pick up the rest of the family. Nadia is 15 minutes late getting out of volleyball which makes me 15 minutes late picking the hubs up, which makes dinner 15 minutes later still.
After hobbling around the kitchen on 1 1/2 feet, we eventually eat at, 7:30 and that's 1 hour before Toni and Nia go to bed. I resolve to let them stay up a little later so that they won't have nightmares from eating so close to bedtime, and while I am cleaning up the dishes, I get a little, itty-bitty sliver of glass stuck in the bottom of my foot from Chowder knocking my pie plate into the floor the other day and whoever swept and vacuumed, missed, that one little piece that HAS to end up in my foot after a day like this!
I announce to the family that I officially give up for that day. I'm taking a bath in order to dig and prod the glass out of my foot, soak the already injured one, and try to gain some sort of sanity before I have to wrestle kids into bed. I leave the kitchen cleaning to whomever volunteers for it.
Did I mention that the kids are still doing homework by the time I get out of the tub at 8:15? After assisting them with their homework, allowing a little extra stay-up time, everyone is finally in bed and partially conked out by 10 pm. I was in a coma by 10:45.
The hubs let me sleep in this morning and opted to get up at 5:30 to get the kids ready for school.
THANK YOU!!!
I finally awoke this morning to a very cranky four year old who was insistent that she was NOT going to school today. Yep - she went to bed too late last night. After a few minutes of begging, prodding, bribing, and having a general deja-vu moment this morning, I felt it just wasn't worth it and let her stay at home instead.
She fell asleep on my bed soon after that decision and she has been asleep the whole time it has taken me to write this post.
Regardless of my to-do list today, I think I'll follow her que and sit back and chill today. It's been pretty chaotic since school started, but sometimes you just can't fight a bodies natural primal scream to sit down, shut up, relax, and stay away from drills!
That is until all the kids come home from school in about.... three hours!
