The Long Day

Mercy woke up at 6:00 am and thus started a day that felt like it might never end. I spent the morning dealing with things like missing underpants and soggy Cheerios (thankfully two incidents entirely unrelated to each other). Albeit a little frantically, I managed get everyone successfully fed and dressed and off to aerobics by 9:00. When we got home, I finished the last couple chapters of my book while the kids played outside, then Mercy crawled around in the van while I cleaned it out and vacuumed. I fed Mercy and put her down for a nap, made lunch for myself and the boys, then finally got around to taking a shower. During quiet time, the boys played computer and I cleaned both bathrooms and did two loads of laundry. I then went to lay down for a few minutes, but Mercy started crying. It was only 2:00. We went from the front room to the back yard to the boys room to the front yard to the kitchen and back to the boys room and nothing would please little miss Grumpypants. Finally at 4:30 I gave up and made dinner, serving streusel pancakes and orange juice for our evening meal hoping to appease the "starving" children who refused to eat the tuna sandwiches I made for them a few hours earlier. After dinner, we set out on a walk. Having learned from previous experiences using the sit-n-stand, I put Mercy in the umbrella stroller this time so there would be no room for extra passengers. The boys begged to ride their tricycles (Abraham doing so in flip flops) and while it was against my better judgement, they seemed so eager that I caved in and consented. Perhaps on another day it wouldn't have been so bad, but it was hot and I was grumpy and the walk took forever. They wanted to go down to the woods at the end of the main street through our neighborhood (about six blocks). We got within a block, then realized Hyrum had lost his cape, which he had given to Mercy to hold. So we back tracked two blocks, found the cape, retraced our steps again and continued on to our destination. The woods turned out to be scarier than they'd remembered and they didn't want to play there after all, so we headed back home after maybe two minutes. While the whole ordeal took nearly an hour, it was still not even 6:00 yet when we got home. Mercy was so grumpy that I tried putting her down for bed at 6:30, but she only rested for about 20 minutes and was back to crying. I was able to talk to Matthew for a few minutes before he was to be picked up for dinner. He thinks everything went well and feels reasonably confident about the whole thing. I put Mercy back to bed at 8:00, hung up the last of the laundry, did the dishes, then rallied all the energy I had left to tell the boys (who were playing games on pbskids.org) that it was time for bed. I admit that I bribed them with the opportunity to sleep downstairs again if they would quickly and without complaint brush their teeth and go to the bathroom. They complied well with the whole bedtime routine and by 9:00 pm all was still and quiet.

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I post this not to complain, but to remember. I think I would be missing part of the point of recording our lives if I only wrote down the happy, easy stuff. I want to make note of what a long day felt like as a mother of three young kids during a humid Indiana summer. I can already see myself looking back and smiling.