Good morning, bench! Glad you have been bump-less, elmo!
Oh, I had a day on Friday. Twas awful. For starters, on Thursday night DS and DH went to the beach (I was at work) and DS fell in the parking lot, directly onto his face of course, causing chin abrasions, a massive top lip and chipped (not severely but certainly noticably) front tooth. Poor little thing! As long as we applied constant cold compresses (i.e. Fudgecicles ) to his poor swollen lip he was fine, but he had a rough time falling and staying asleep. He was really restless, resulting in not much sleep for us. (Also factoring into the no-sleep business was the fact that I stayed up late watching a million discs of Prison Break doing many productive and useful things.)
So the next morning DS woke me at a far-earlier-than-usual-hour demanding "more ice cweam for my mouf!" I got up and stumbled about bleary-eyed, managing to walk into a wall and step on several of the sharp Thomas trains littering the floor. I decided that showering and getting dressed in actual clothing was something that could wait. I put on Pinnochio (or "pokey-no" as it's called in my house) for DS and dozed with him on the couch.
Now. For this next part you will need a bit of information. My feckless and annoying brother, who lives with us, had left to visit our parents and taken his equally feckless and annoying dog with him. Unbeknownst to me, he had moved the dog food down to our seldom-used basement. I couldn't find it and assumed he'd taken it with him and so had been feeding our dog the pellets we have for our rabbit for the past day or so, reasoning that it wouldn't hurt him and I'd run out and get more dog food soonest.
So. After a viewing of Pokey-no I decided to make myself useful and pay some bills. Upon opening one from the hospital, I realized that they apparently expect us to pay them $1300 for letting some sadistic nurse jab ineffectually at my son's arm with an enormous needle DS's gluten-intolerance tests. And also, the cell phone company wants $300 immediately or they will shut the phones off, resulting in massive charges to turn them back on.
All right. So. By this time DS is hollering for more ice cream and another viewing of Pokey-no, or at least the Backyardigans. I tell him no more TV and he informs me that his lip hurts. It occurs to me that I am raising a possible con artist, and also that I am so exhausted that my body seems to be shutting down. I realize the only thing to do here is shotgun about half a pot of coffee with vanilla hazelnut cream, just to get things going in the right direction. I do this and DS busies himself tying our dog (a long-suffering golden retriever mix named Brinkley) to his ride-on firetruck. This does not seem to bother Brinkley any, so I go back to my coffee and worry about where we are going to get $1300 before DH gets paid and also, exactly how much ice cream is bad to feed a child? I mean, it's calcium eh?
All of a sudden I hear a massive holler coming from the direction of DS and dog. DS: "No no Brinkley! Big boys don't poop on the floor!" I dash over to see the dog leaving a massive pile of excrement on the living room floor. (Apparently rabbit food is a laxative for canines?) I shriek and Brinkley takes off. He is still tied to the firetruck and so drags it and DS' beloved pirate sword through the pile of poo. DS starts yelling about the state of his firetruck and runs to get it, so I shriek get on the couch this minute and don't move calmly ask him to step away. I grimly attach the dog to his chain outside and head back into deal with things. DS is still, thankfully, on the couch, staring at the floor in respectful awe. "That's a big poop," he says, and it is. It's a big, runny, pile of poop that smells so bad I can hardly keep from retching. I get myself firmly in hand as I know that if I start vomiting on the poop, I will never stop.
Of course, we are out of paper towels. I clean up the poo with baby wipes and disinfectant. The smell is awful. I open the windows and light some scented candles, which only serves to make the house smell of a weird buttercream/cinnamon/dog crap mixture. I go outside to throw away the bag. Brinkley looks up at me, hopefully. "You know what, we're not speaking" I say to him loudly. I look up to see the one neighbor I don't know well staring at me as though I've lost my mind. Which, standing there in stained pajamas, with unwashed hair and a bag of poo in my hand, it occurs to me I might have.
I'm not back inside for more than a minute when I hear Brinkley kicking up a ruckus outside. I go out and realize he's harassing the mailman. "Sorry, sorry," I say, collecting the mail. The door opens and out steps DS, in nothing but a pair of pirate boxer shorts and fudgecicle remains smeared on his chest. "Hi!" he says, waving cheerily at the mailman. "I hurt my toof. Want to see?" The mailman gives me exactly the sort of look one usually gives unshowered madwomen with filthy children and apparently vicious dogs. (Which Brinkley isn't of course, if we ever had a burglar or anything the dog would lick him to death.)
Sigh...independently none of these things would be a big deal, but put together and factoring in my approximately three hours of sleep, it was just chaos. I found out later that the hospital bill was just an insurance issue that would be resolved, and this knowledge (as well as a long showering and actually dressing DS and I) put me in a much better mood. As did calling everyone I could think of and whining about my day. As does complaining to the Bench about it. Oh well, that's life. How are all of you?