Outnumbered Two to One

• My six year old has the flu. It sucks. He’s had a fever since Saturday. He’s lethargic, his appetite is nonexistent. I hate seeing him this way, I really get beside myself with worry. The kid is so damn skinny as it is, I’m afraid he’s going to waste away to nothing. I find myself hovering over him, constantly brushing the hair from his forehead and urging him to eat something, I’m driving myself bananas. It reminds me of when I brought him home from the hospital, he was so tiny and slight, he was terribly jaundiced and every time I looked at him I would dissolve into tears. I don’t want to cry every time the poor boy sniffles, I’m going to give him a complex, not to mention the puddles I’ll leave behind turn our ceramic tile floors into quite the slip hazard.

• Yes, it is in fact that time of the month again…thanks for asking.

• Sigh.

• It’s not that I get completely unreasonable during this particular phase of the lunar cycle, it’s that I tend to walk a very thin line between unreasonable and certifiable. It’s like I teeter on this very precarious edge, poised ever so delicately on that precipice I like to think of as the cliffs of insanity. Those of you who’ve never watched The Princess Bride really should.

• So let’s see…cramping - check, migraine - check, lower back pain - check, anxiety…anxiety? anxiety, where are you? Oh there you are, hiding behind the sugar cravings and the mood swings. Check, check, check. All systems go. Let’s just hold on to our hats shall we?

• It’s not that I meant to eat the muffin batter, I mean, I’m an adult, I can overlook the gooey, cinnamon and raw egg concoction in favor of healthier fare, like a carrot stick, or a bowl full of bran. I was actually on my way to dig some bran out of the pantry, when the muffin batter accosted me, nay provoked me, into licking the mixing bowl clean in a matter of seconds. It was over so fast, I barely have any memory of it at all. It must have been mind control. I’m thinking maybe the government is to blame, or aliens or…probably the government.

• According to our pediatrician the flu epidemic we’re currently battling is highly contagious so we need to take adequate precautions to ensure it doesn’t spread from child to child. Considering my kids are routinely spitting/coughing/licking one another, I am pretty much guaranteed to have four sick children sneezing directly on my person over the course of the next few days. Worse still is the fact that Spring Break is next week, so I’ll be home bound with four sick and incredibly bored kids for seven whole days. I may have to give myself a lobotomy as a precautionary measure.

• I’ve officially stopped watching Heroes. I’ve deleted it from my DVR as an act of protest against bad writing and lackluster acting. I think NBC is really going to miss me on Monday nights, I can feel it.

• That field trip I went on was instrumental in reminding me why I abandoned my aspirations of becoming an elementary school teacher. By the end of that interminable bus ride home, I was ready to fling myself from one of those emergency windows in the hopes of escaping the kicks to my seat and the incessant yammering. Kissing asphalt seemed like a better prospect than knocking one of the little monkeys unconscious with a souvenir Spider-man mug.

• It did however make me happy to come home to my own sleeping monkeys, that coincidentally missed me while I was gone.

• For the record, I would never knock a child unconscious unless they really deserved it  with overpriced drink ware. It’s just not in my peaceful, loving nature.

For more randomness…well, you know where to GO .

Giveaway. Nuff said.

Thanks to the Wii, I now feel like I reside in a bowling alley. Even my two year old walks around shouting, “Yeah, baby!”any time he hears the sound of crashing pins. I should start charging my children shoe rental fees.

If I live in a bowling alley, I should be able to eat nachos on a 24 hour basis.

I feel like a walking Midol commercial today, except for the fact that I don’t actually ever take Midol and don’t even know if it works. But really that’s just a technicality, my misery right now would be very convincing. “Cramping, bloating, and back pain? Does this always happen to you?”

I may not be the best mother for letting my youngest watch Jurassic Park this morning, while I sat in the recliner sipping my coffee and wallowing in self pity. Although, in my defense, I did cover his eyes when the T-Rex ate the lawyer.

Last night, after walking in to my daughters’ bedroom for the third time, I turned to my husband and said, “It must be the PMS, I can’t even remember why I went in there.” He looked up at me and said, “PMS, that explains a lot.” Which is not altogether a PMS friendly statement, so I promptly shanked him.

Okay, I didn’t really shank him, but we did watch a documentary on the local jail system, which kind of put me in a shanking frame of mind.

It also made me happy to be a law abiding citizen, except for that time I drove through a toll without paying. Shh, don’t tell anyone.

Today is my husband’s 37th birthday, when I met him he was only 21. I really don’t know how he got so old, he’s closer to 40 than 30, and since in my mind I’m still 18, he is clearly a cradle robber. The perv.

I should try to will myself out of bed and bake him something in honor of his big day…or I could just serve him some ice-cream.

PMS is like a get out of jail free card, except I have to feel like road kill for the better part of the week. It’s not quite the trade-off I was looking for.

Stupid nature and it’s uncomfortable biological processes.

I’m just not feeling it.

Maybe it’s the hormones, maybe it’s the shrinking numbers in our bank account, but this whole Christmas thing has me feeling like a deer in headlights. The holiday season is speeding recklessly toward me and all I can do is blink, frozen as the driver sings drunken carols and chucks empty bottles of nog out the window.

If you ask me, Thanksgiving is just a gateway holiday. Blowing the door wide open to the dangers of Christmas - tinsel, pine trees, stockings and scotch tape.

Oh the pressure.

I don’t want to shop, I don’t want to decorate. What I do want to do is eat scads of leftovers and curl up in the fetal position.

Not an option with kids. Kids want Christmas music, they want to author Christmas lists and watch Christmas movies. They want a tree and happiness and joy and fun, so for them I will stir my inner elf with a red hot poker and wait for her to do a little jig, maybe find the motivation to do some online shopping while the kidlings are asleep. And sometime next week, we’re getting a Christmas tree.

It’ll need decorating.

Can you hear me sighing?

I’ll take plenty of pictures, I’ll fake some enthusiasm, eventually the spirit will catch on like a bad head cold, right?

Yeah, I’ll work on that.

Perhaps you bloggy readers can offer some tips for slaying my inner Grinch and getting in to the holiday spirit? Bring it.

Maybe it’s because we’ve been so busy lately or maybe it’s the tension of the impending holiday season, but this month the PMS just caught me totally off guard.

Sure, I’ve been a little more anxious than usual but I attributed that to the forced social interactions - festivals, shows, baby showers - they all put me on edge. I do okay once I get to wherever I need to be - I smile, I laugh nervously, I socialize, I eat, I leave. But the precursor to that is a stressed out drama mama who changes her clothes five times, cries about the state of her hair, then walks around slamming drawers and cabinet doors for no reason.

How did I finally come to the obvious conclusion? I guess the two monster zits on the side of my face gave it away. It’s like a puberty flashback without the adolescent awkwardness, instead I’ve got thirtysomething awkwardness, which believe me, is not as endearing.

Then there’s the anger. That bubbling-up-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach fury that makes me want to shake the snot out of someone. (Not the kids, we have a don’t shake the kids rule…but maybe the dogs or a door to door salesman.)

It doesn’t help that the kids spent all day yelling at each other, which makes me yell at them, which makes everyone else yell even louder. I don’t even want to know what it sounds like on the outside, but I’m pretty sure the noise travels for at least a three block radius. So by the time my dear husband called me from work to wish me good-night and talk about my day, I was. just. not. feeling. it. The best I could do was grunt in periodic intervals and perhaps snicker in disdain. Any questions he may or may not have asked me were met with a combination of sighs, clicks and eye rolls he was not privy to since he was on the other end of the phone line.

It’s like everyone is suddenly irritating x 10 through no fault of their own.

It’s me, it’s all me.

Who am I kidding? It’s them, it’s all them.