To Show How Much I Love Motherhood

Start last night:

I hate tuna casserole, but the kids love it, so that's what I made for dinner. But then Caleb refused to eat it because it "tastes weird now" and Daniel refused to eat it because he squirted Arby's sauce all over his and tasted it and said, "Tastes yuck with sauce."

After dinner, Benjamin pulled a lamp down and broke the bulb all over the floor. Hooray! Then Daniel wouldn't walk on that half of the room for hours because he was afraid the "Fwoor is shaddered" (because the bulb shattered, and he didn't get what happened).

So then by the time I chased everyone off to bed (after cleaning and packing all day), I was so tired I fell asleep in the rocking chair more than once while I tried to get everyone to sleep. Then Benj woke me up every hour (when he had tylenol in him; every 20 minutes when he didn't), and I ended up with two kids sleeping in my bed with me. All night I thought how nice it would be to get into a nice hot shower in the morning and have ten minutes with nobody touching me and with the water drowning out the sounds of fussing.

Now, for the next part, I'll identify the boys by numbers (by who got up first, not by age) so I don't embarrass them too much.

Boy 1 woke me and boy 2 up by having a nightmare. The commotion woke boy 3, and we all got up. I immediately went to check my email and phone messages, like I do every day in case there's something pressing to handle before everyone else goes home for the day. When I looked up, three boys were looking at me. 3 had pee all over his front and down his pants. 2 was playing quietly. 1 was standing in a pool of diarrhea. So I put 1 on a pile of towels, got 3 into the shower, and came back to discover 1 was really coated with the stuff--up the front and back, down both legs, on the bottom of his feet. So I stripped him down, left the pile of stuff on the towels, and hopped him into the shower, too. Both boys protested at that. One was too cold, the other hates showers. Got 1 cleaned off and wrapped in a towel and came back to clean up the puddles and found 2 was eating toilet paper. I cleaned up the floor and linens, and then 2 approached--with poop smeared down his legs, too. So I cleaned him up and then went back to the floor, only to discover the lysol can was empty. Meanwhile, 3 was still showering, and 1 now wanted some of the beef stew from the can he noticed on the counter. So I plopped that into a bowl and went to go potty myself.

Pretty soon, 1 was following me into the bathroom, where he was crying. "What's wrong?" I asked. "My stew will melt!" he said. "Come back to the kitchen so I can eat it before it melts!" I explained that ice cream melts but stew doesn't, and then back to the other bathroom to get 3 shampooed and out of the shower. There, I discovered poop in the tub! So out came 3, and I cleaned that up, too.

I sent one kid down to dress, sent one to finish his stew, and put raisins on the floor for another and hopped into the shower myself. The water was cold.

By then Benjamin was crying, so I showered quickly and hopped out. He cried all the time I dressed, and played in the sink while I put my makeup on. Dan told him, "No Ben! You too small to use haiwspway!"

So I went to dress and discovered poop in my bed, too. Off came the sheets, and then the mattress pad, too, and then I turned around to find Boy 1 standing in the corner--more diarrhea. THis time down the legs and not on the floor. Yet. Meanwhile, Benjamin is bawling, and I still haven't eaten anything.

Now, you may think the title of the post was being sarcastic, but it's not. Look at my last 12 hours or so, and then think about it when I say that motherhood is the best thing I've ever done, and the funnest, and my favorite, and is one of the only things I never have wished I hadn't gotten involved in (and I can't say almost any of this about my mission, which I also think was one of the best things I've ever done!).

Think about it.

The good things about being a mom are so unbelievably good that they far outweigh days like this.

Now I have to go attend to more poop and a screaming baby.