Worst Mother Ever: Presentation Day

I have been working all day to clean up. My in-laws are on their way!

We are excited, but man, we have gotten MESSY lately.  By 5:20, I couldn’t even finish straightening up. I just ran out of steam.

I told the boys, “Nonna and DaddyO will be here in 2 hours!”

“Yay!!!” they all cheered. I said, “We still need to go upstairs and finish cleaning up, after dinner.”

Daniel jumped out of his chair, and said, “Me go clean upstairs!” Then he did this super hero running thing and dashed up the stairs. I could hear toys being thrown into boxes. I haven’t gone up to check, but 6 minutes later, Daniel came down looking very pleased with himself.

“Me cleaned it all up. My room. Yours room. Brothers’ room. Me did it.” He grinned from ear to ear.

He’s so adorable. We have never had a kid before that mixes up all of his pronouns. I have no idea why that just happens for some toddlers/preschoolers, but I’m hoping it will click for him soon!

The boys are learning about the Westward Expansion trails in school this week. I was looking everywhere for my Oregon Trail game. I was just sure I had one, but I can’t find it. I am way more excited about playing Oregon Trail than they are anyway.

After looking and looking, I decided to give up and just update my blog.

My two little boys are playing cars in the garage. My two big boys are running around upstairs playing, probably destroying all of Daniel’s hard work. It truly is like shoveling snow in a blizzard.

I’m an anxiety-ridden train wreck this week.

Yesterday was our “family presentation” at tutoring. We did our presentation on Washington, D.C., the perfect topic for us.

We lived there for the last 5 years, and we loved it.  We planned and created Friday-Sunday. I stupidly left the presentation tri-fold board out on the dining room table.

At 8:30 am, Monday morning, I went to grab it and rush everyone into the car. We were all running way behind, as I had let the boys sleep way too late. We had a time change hangover, I guess.

I bet you can guess what happened. I mean, OF COURSE, one of my children had drawn extra drawings on it. Of course, it was Caleb. The drawings were pretty good. The word bubbles were the problem. There was a drawing of Abraham Lincoln, with a comic bubble reading, “Boo hoo boo hoo baaa baaa hhaa haa baa”

I began to unravel.

I know. You think I am happy and laid back. I’m actually an uptight, controlling, stress ball, especially where achievement is concerned.

Besides that, there was a large drawing of a wooly mammoth, not bad, but it had a big comic bubble, which read, “Aburham Lincun” or something like that. I just remember that it was spelled wrong, off by a couple of letters, like he’d obviously tried to sound it out.

Why, Caleb, why?

I decided to cover up these comic bubbles with more DC photos. Only I couldn’t find any of our DC photo albums. Oh, wait. That’s because I haven’t printed out a single photo in about 3 years.

I’ll just cut one out of a DC coffee table book. Where is that thing? I was desperate.

Apparently, I have a box of stored books, because it and one of my favorite DC albums, made by Aunt Janet, was also missing. I couldn’t find them.

I tried to print more off of the computer. I worked on that for 10 minutes, but my computer was convinced that we suddenly didn’t own a printer.

Printer problems. But of course.

Finally, I snatched up our photo book of DC, one like you order from Snapfish. It hurt me to do it, but I had to cut the photo out with scissors. The mammoth part was huge, so I just tore out a whole page and covered that up.

Done! No one had a lunch packed or a snack.  “Everyone get in the car!!” I shouted, as I grabbed a bag of Tostitos and headed out the door.

I forgot my receipt book. I forgot sandwich bags. I was badly rattled, and so was poor little Caleb.

We pulled into the parking lot a few minutes late. Joshua said, “It’s no big deal, Mom. They can just let other people present before us.”

“We are the only people presenting, Joshua, that’s why I’m so freaked out!”

“Oh. Then yeah, we should hurry up.”

I told the boys to grab our presentation board and the Washington Monument that Caleb made out of Lego blocks and go ahead of me to the big room. I had to drop off the little ones first.

They waited for me outside the front of the big room. I dropped off the babies, and headed up the back stairway, missing the boys entirely, so I got to the room, and they were nowhere to be found.

At this point, I was fighting back tears.

To make a long story slightly shorter, we did finally find each other. The presentation went just fine.

You should have seen me going around to book bags and pouring in Tostitos without sandwich bags…..That was a low point as well. I just didn’t want my boys to starve.

There are days where my children lavish me with sweet words of love and praise. There are other days where one of them will say, “worst mother ever.”

Well, I’m pretty bad sometimes, but I’m sure there was a worst one at some point in the history of civilization, don’t you think? So not really worst EVER.

😉