Now, you might think that when I say "days off," I'm referring to not having to work, or not having to go to school, or doing homework or something lame like that, but no. In fact, I still have to work and the boys still have homework, there's just no school.
So what, exactly, is "off" in my world? "Off," to me, means any day I don't have to bug children to get up and get dressed. They can sleep as long as they want, for all I care. They can stay in the same pair of pajamas all fucking weekend if they want... I don't care! As long as I don't have to holler 8 billion times in a 5 minute period "DO YOU HAVE YOUR SOCKS ON?" I still have to deal with trying to get them to eat food throughout the day, but you can't be late when you're eating dinner.
I thought I might illustrate (such as it is) for you guys what a typical morning looks like in our house. A typical school day morning, that is, because a typical weekend morning looks like this:
When I'm sitting on the edge of the bed like that, I can just barely see the hallway between their bedrooms out of the corner of my eye. This fact will become important soon. YOU'LL SEE.
So, here is a typical morning in our house. (I know, I know, we're very lucky we don't have to be anywhere until 9:08am and get to sleep until 8:00, I know!)
8:00 Child 1 wakes up, gets dressed, gets something to eat, all by himself, and then wakes me up. The kid is a goddamned angel.
8:01 I go into Child 2's room to try to wake him up. I tickle, I push, I shove, I cajole, I poke, I nudge... I wait
8:10 Child 2 somehow makes it from his room to the master bedroom, where he is given food.
8:10-8:30 I let him sit and watch TV and eat because he needs the time to wake up.
8:30 The getting dressed process begins. We have to leave the house at 9:00 so you would think that 30 minutes would be enough to get dressed and get shoes on and all that. Yeah. You would think.
Since Child 1, the angel, is already dressed and ready to go, he sits at the desk in his room and watches YouTube videos until it's time to go. Child 2 is magnetically attracted to this activity and spends as much of the 30 minutes as he possibly can standing behind Child 1 and watching the videos with him. In the meantime, I'm sitting on the edge of my bed with my computer, and I'm hollering orders and inquiries to Child 2, (he is perfectly capable of doing this all by himself, you know... he just chooses not to.....) and every time I yell something, I will see him, out of the corner of my eye, fucking BOLT across the hallway from his brother's room to his own.
Seriously. This shit goes on for the entire half hour.
8:30 "CHILD 2, ARE YOU STILL IN PAJAMAS??"
8:35 "CHILD 2, ARE YOU STILL IN PAJAMAS??"
8:40 "CHILD 2, ARE YOU GETTING DRESSED??"
8:45 "CHILD 2, ARE YOU GETTING DRESSED??"
8:50 "CHILD 2, ARE YOU GETTING DRESSED??"
8:55"CHILD 2, ARE YOU GETTING DRESSED??"
By 9:00 I'm practically begging him to get his socks on and out the door. On most days, one or both of us is in tears by the time we actually leave the house.
Four days. Four fucking days in a row that I don't have to deal with this.
PAR-TAY!
