Poops, No Dating, and Malpractice

OK, it's 9:22 and I feel like it should be midnight. I'm exhausted. Although I complain about Annie as my alarm clock, I do believe that I prefer it to an actual alarm!

I knew that it would take me longer than usual to get ready this morning so I tried to give myself plenty of time. I know myself well enough to know that when I feel rushed, nothing goes right. Anyway, after hitting the snooze on my phone twice this morning, I had the realization that beginning next week, that alarm would be my wake up call every day. Yuck. However, since I only hit snooze twice, I thought I was a rockstar and didn't have to hurry too much. Wrong! I really underestimated how long it takes a one handed person to get ready. I showered and laid everything out the previous night but my preplanning didn't help my handicap! I won't even begin to tell you all of the thoughts that flew through my head as I tried to figure out how to get my dang bra on. Yeah, I know you're tired of hearing the gruesome details but it's truth. Believe me, I thought about going ala Hippie more than once during that battle with the boulder holder. I did finally win only to realize that I had it twisted and jacked up in the back but I wore it that way. If anyone noticed, they had the sense to keep their mouth shut! And then, there was the doing of the hair. There was no way I was going to wrangle a flat iron or curling iron one handed so I'd already decided to just pull the mess out of my face with a clip. Um, NO! You have to hold your hair with one hand and clip it with the other. Grant finally had to come and help me with this task. Poor Grant. He deserves an award for the crap he puts up with from all of the girls in the house! Anyway, the drama went on with putting socks and shoes on, getting Annie dressed, and then the fixing of her wild hair. By the time we were all ready to go, I was exhausted.

Here's a summary of today's camp. Parents have to stay so I tried to keep the girls corraled for 90 minutes which proved to be very interesting!

Waiting in the eerily quiet mall for the store to open.

The boys got to work on their projects.

Annie decided to cling to a table until she could use an iPad, too!

Dasha sat at the counter playing her games for a long time which was nice!

Annie preferred to put some wear and tear on the store's computers.

I also need to note that Annie spent some time digging through my purse during the 90 minute interlude and snacked on quite a bit of chap stick and then found a box of fruit punch mints. OK, she liked the mints. No big deal. If her mouth was full, she wasn't able to scream or make audible demands. I lost track of how many mints she actually had. I figured since they were sugar-free that I wasn't doing too much damage!

After camp was over, I dropped boy #1 off and then dropped boy #2 off and Grant jumped out, too! Oops! Dang, I hate it when you lose a kid in someone's front yard! However, I knew that boy #2's mom would bring him home eventually! (I should have unbuckled Annie and pushed the girls out, too)!

So, the girls were starving so I tried to bribe their silence with a kid's meal. It didn't work. Annie talked through the ENTIRE meal! The girl is SO like her Daddy! Man!

She barely ate anything but she sure told us all about spiders on the roof, drinking Sprite and sneezing, and some weird retelling of Jekyll and Hyde (I think). Like I said, her mouth never stopped!

We made it home and I Tylenol-d up and put everyone down for quiet time. I admit that I sat down to soak my hand in ice water and tried to find something indulgent to watch on TV but couldn't find anything. So, I read.

When Annie was ready to get up, she started shouting that she pooped on her bed. Yeah. I remember this drama from last week. She decided to change her own diaper. As I hesitantly opened the door, I half-way expected to see the same sort of scene. Instead, it was like the scene from that movie Daddy Day Care when they are trying to teach the kid to use the toilet and he evidently covers the entire bathroom with poo. Yep. That's the kind of mess we were dealing with. It was at this moment that I remembered that the mints were sugar-free and probably had sugar alcohol in them which has a laxative effect. Crap. Crap. Crap. I started with cleaning Annie. The only way to do it was to put her in the shower. Once I had sufficiently given her a bath with one hand, I started trying to clean her room and the carpet. I won't go through the detailed cleaning list but let's just say that this happened a total of 3 times. My poor mom ended up coming to help with carpet duty. Whew!

So basically, I've gotten nothing more accomplished today than being a chauffeur and cleaning up piles o' poo. I'm trying so hard to keep focused on moving forward and not letting this be a major setback but it has definitely put a damper on my rainbow today. The timing is horrible. My classroom needs to be set up and that's sure not something I can do one handed. (Thanks to a few old students that volunteered to come help me). But once again, I find myself having to rely on others for things that I like to do myself. It's that dang perfectionist in me! I want it done MY way! What a brat I am!

The other hiccup today was that the girls spent quite a bit of time video chatting with their Daddy. They absolutely love doing this but Annie continues to talk about Daddy constantly afterwards. She asks when he'll take her to swing and slide and do all of the fun things that he does. I don't want her to lose those warm fuzzies but I also don't need those fuzzies invading my scabbed over heart, either. It was rough. I knew bed time would be hard. She asked for "Daddy's smell" as she normally does and then wanted more put on his shirt that she sleeps with but when I kissed her goodnight, she said, "I want to kiss Daddy night-night." Yeah, my answer was simple and, "He's in Texas right now," but she didn't fall for it this time. She said, "No. He's in the puter." I wasn't about to explain the principles of video chatting but then, she said, "I get in my seat and drive and get Daddy and give him a kiss." Seriously, for two years old, she's persistent and won't quit until she gets what she wants. It took a whole lot of distracting and book reading to move her on to other subjects but my heart took a beating. It would be so much easier if I could just flip a switch and have some sort of force field up that filters out emotions.

To make matters worse, as I started working on the homework that I have for this counseling gig, I found that the entire first chapter was nothing but a scab ripping party. I admit to slinging the book across the bedroom and watching it bounce off of the window and land in the floor. (My right hand still works just fine, thank you)! In all of the jostling, though, some forms fell out of the envelope the book had been in. The top one was a form that is supposed to be signed stating you won't date while you are engaged in the counseling. Really? Are you kidding me? Is this really a problem that they want you to sign a waiver for? I flipped through the others thinking that I might just be able to write off the next nine months and call it quits because the whole curriculum was ludicrous. Nope. It was pretty grounded and sensible. There went that excuse. The next waiver had to do with keeping everything said in confidence. Yeah. No duh. (Although, most of greater Atlanta seems to know my dirt via the blog so I really don't even worry too much about that)! The last one was just a statement of your faith. That all made sense. I don't know when I'm going to get around to picking that book up off the floor, though, and completing the homework. I wonder what the punishment is for not doing your homework? Maybe I'll just have to sit out of recess! If that's the case, I'll forfeit the recess! Maybe I should just give it to Grant and tell him to fill it out while pretending that he's some cartoon character. Yeah. He could fill out all of those heart wrenching questions from Sponge Bob's point of view! Yep. That's my plan for tonight. Maybe I'll come to my senses tomorrow but for tonight, it's just too much to handle. It's impossible to tend to a serious heart wound with only one hand! It's a malpractice suit waiting to happen!

So, tonight, I'm heading upstairs to get everything prepped for another early morning excursion to the Apple store. My hand is throbbing and feels like it belongs to King Kong it's so swollen! The doctor couldn't see me until Wednesday afternoon but I guess that's better than next week! I'm actually trying to type using both hands to at least keep the fingers on the King Kong hand from getting too stiff. It hurts like heck but it's better than pecking letters with one hand!

When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom Proverbs 11:2

This is the verse that came up in this morning's devotional. Why is it that I sometimes feel like bricks are being rained down from heaven on my head? I got it! You had me at HELLO! Maybe this is the season in my life where I learn to be a graceful receiver instead of a graceful giver. Just the sound of that makes my skin majorly crawl! I hate being dependent on others for things I'm capable of doing myself but, for some reason, this doesn't seem to be jiving with the lessons I need right now! Ugh!

Goodnight everyone.