Unpredictable Chaotic Bliss

You never know what the day will bring.  Even with the predictability of being a stay home mom of two toddlers, this is true.  While I must admit our “adventures” are limited.  (Say like… to the park, grocery market, or nearest Chic fil A play area.)  There are still a plethora of places and situations one can find herself in when she’s running around with little kids as sidekicks.  The randomness of being a parent of young kids is constant.   You wake up thinking you’ll scramble some eggs and bacon, and instead its pancakes and sausage they want.  Sure, this is one miniscule example.  But this is just the first five minutes of your day.  You believe you’re ahead of the game with their outfits picked out the night before, only to be met with pouty lips, and watery eyes because it’s the wrong shirt you’ve chosen.  (You pick and choose your battles, but with just fifteen minutes left to get to preschool, I’d be willing to bet you’d swap that striped shirt for the Batman one, too.   You’d probably also feed your kid whatever it is (within reason) that will get him to eat, just so that you can follow through with brushing of the teeth and the hair, doing the dressing, the putting on of the socks and shoes, the back pack, etcetera etcetera etcetera – just to get out of the freaking door!)  Then….. someone’s got to poop.  ALWAYS!  Poop never ceases to come at the most inopportune times!  Just before the movie starts at the theatre, right as you’re about to stuff that fork full of pasta fasul into your mouth, and always when you’re rushing out the door to get somewhere on time!  So, after doing his business and, attempting to wipe the tushy himself, he flushes the poo along with twenty pounds of toilet paper, causing the toilet to over flow- soaking more than just the floor.  Time to pick out a third shirt, and grab your good towels to clean up the stinky, soaking wet mess happening on the bathroom floor.  (Because the good towels are the closest to you and because the only things you care about right now is trying to NOT be locked out of the preschool building.)   All in a weekday morning!  See?  Hectic situations ensue on a daily basis with these tiny, chaotic people.  Schedule things?  Ha!  The very idea of scheduling laughs in my face.

How about you’re rolling along the highway at 60 miles per hour heading to a doctor’s appointment, when one of your kids projectile vomits.  The flowing liquid in the rear view mirror catches the corner of your eye, and the screams or horror from his sibling next to him render you so off guard that it triggers your foot to slam on the brake.  In doing so, the airborne mass of disgustingness propels forward at an even higher velocity, covering your face just as you turn backwards to see what exactly this disgusting looking levitated matter is.  Now you’re swerving off the road, where you vehicular manslaughter a baby turtle, and narrowly miss a billboard sign for some kind of erectile dysfunction medication in the middle of Interstate 95, wondering what the heck happened, and how the hell you’ll ever be able to afford the nine hundred dollar ticket for reckless driving you now have because the cop who came to your aid is single and childless and has no sympathy whatsoever for what you’ve just gone through! 

No.  This did not really happen to me.  But it’s entirely possible, give the fact that kids are so damn unpredictable and have a knack for making things happen that you couldn’t have possibly foreseen in a million years. 

And oh the questions I’m faced with explaining to these inquisitive boys and the things we get into because of those incessant inquiries.  It’s a domino effect, and there’s no end in sight!  This morning, for instance, I found myself answering the question from my four year old as to why some people call the beach the desert.  Undoubtedly a question brought on by some cartoon episode I had entertaining the kids while I attempted to cook breakfast.  (Who says tv doesn’t teach?)  Out came the laptop, up came the Google screen, and in a nano second there was a map of the US, which aided me tremendously in my explanation of how sand without the ocean is not a beach.  ….Whiiiich brought us to finger painting pictures of the sand and surf per the kids’ requests.  A filthy kitchen, two color-covered little dudes, and a whopping mess of paint, papers, brushes, toilet paper rolls and plates later…. I’m exhausted, and I’ve spent my whole morning and afternoon doing something that I didn’t anticipate I’d be doing when I awoke this morning.  This, of course, means that I got nothing else of any importance done today. Like, organizing the bills (Me?  Organized? Ha!), calling to have some erroneous charge removed from my checking account (PI work, aka those dang websites claiming free trials to look up legal documents on people but who really jip you by charging ANYWAY, costs money), making one single bed in this house (Oh well, we’ll just mess ‘em up in a few hours again anyway), or finishing any one of the hundred unfinished house projects that have remained unfinished for months (What’s one more day?)…. But to be fair, making a mess painting with two lil cuties in the kitchen is way more fun than doing adult chores.   Any day.

Point is: 

If you’re an anal retentive, scheduling crazed, orderly, clean, hectic-life-hatin’, methodical, precise person- do not have kids!  Or.  Have them anyway and embrace your newfound chaos.  You’ll be kissing goodbye this idea of an actual clean and structured lifestyle for a good long while.  But if anything is worth it, kids are!

End note:  Literally, just as I was about to post this, my four year old came running out from his bed screaming "Bloody nose!  I got a bloody nose!"

I couldn't make this stuff up.....  Unpredictable, indeed.