That’s What I Get for Practicing Basic Human Hygiene

I mentioned I was going to tell about the day I had on Thursday. Now that I look back on it, the whole thing doesn’t seem that extraordinary besides a few mishaps, but that’s the amnesia talking. The person I was when I was going through the whole ordeal was quite flustered.

We started out the morning with a miracle: Curtis slept in until almost 9am. I didn’t care how much TV the girls watched that morning as long as they didn’t wake their brother!

Once he got up, I had no idea what we should do with our day. I have a friend who has been gathering people at different parks each week this summer for play dates, and she was going to have a group at a park across town from 10 to noon that day. I haven’t made it to any of these play dates yet, but I know my kids would love it. When I remembered the park date, it was 9:30, we hadn’t had breakfast, no one was dressed, and I hadn’t showered.

I’m at a difficult spot when it comes to showering lately. Curtis has graduated from all the sources of safe confinement I’ve been able to use (bouncer seat, exersaucer, etc.). Now I have to shower in the evening, wait until naptime to shower, or try to set up a safe environment and hope the girls will watch him. I rarely ever do the latter option. The girls really don’t watch him, and he’s into everything. And sometimes when I’ve tried to let him watch a show with his sisters while I shower, the girls get zoned in on the TV while he comes and plays with my shower door—open, shut, open, shut.

Okay, so I suppose I left out the option of getting up before Grant to shower, but if you know me, you know anything that requires me to get out of bed by choice before I am required to get out of bed by force is just not an option.

At this point, I was pretty sure getting over to the park gathering wasn’t going to happen, but I decided we wouldn’t make anything of our day if I couldn’t get it started. The one thing I thought I could count on was how much Curtis likes to eat breakfast. He had already had one bowl of cereal, but he asked for more. I thought if I got him another bowl of cereal, I could leave him safely strapped in his high chair with the girls watching him while I grabbed a quick shower. I’ve done this before, and it worked out fairly well. Our high chair has a 5-point harness which makes it pretty impossible for him to get out, and the girls had instructions to come tell me if anything was wrong.

I hopped in the shower, washed my face, and just as I was putting shampoo in my hair, Eleanor came running. She reported to me that Curtis had dumped his bowl of cereal on his head (I’m rather suspicious of my daughters’ influence in his coming to this decision). I told her he was just going to have to be okay until I got out of the shower. She said not to worry, he was having fun anyway. I don’t think that was any comfort.

As soon as I got dressed, I got Curtis out of his messy chair and put him straight in a bath. Of course, Phae wanted a bath too, but I told her she would have to wait her turn. In order to not get too detailed in my description, let’s just say that during the course of the bath, I had reason to hurriedly put Curtis on the potty. My hurry wasn’t fast enough, and I had to fish everything out of the bath. I had to bark orders at Eleanor to get me cleaners and scrubbers.

It is difficult to corral a dripping wet, nude toddler while trying to scrub down a tub.

Once the tub and some of the bath toys had a thorough scrubbing (some toys went straight in the trash), I got Curtis back in to clean him up. Phaedra kept popping in to ask if it was her turn yet.

Once he was all clean, I got the girls in the tub. One of the times Phaedra kicked water and I pointed out to her that she had soaked me, she said, “But Mommy! I’m trying to be considerate of my playtime!”

The whole time they were bathing, Curtis kept bringing me food items he had dragged out of my pantry and begging me to feed it to him. I finally had to lock him in the bathroom with us while I finished up with the girls. After their baths, I had Curtis screaming at me because he wanted to eat when I hadn’t even had a chance to clean up the mess from his last meal.

The rest of the day is a blur, so it must have gotten better once I finally cleaned things up and got my little terror napping.

That night is a whole other story.

I helped put the kids to bed, and then I went for a run by myself.

Phaedra went to sleep without problems. This was mostly because she had caused problems the night before and was exhausted from being up so late the previous night (I think we finally were done dealing with her at 11 Wednesday night).

When I got back from running, I found two night-owl trouble makers on the family room couch with Grant. Curtis was doing his usual: he went to bed for a little while, cried, realized his only option was Daddy, and screamed until Daddy brought him out to hang out in the family room until I got back to get him to bed.

Eleanor was insisting that there was a spider in her room. Grant said he had gone in, looked around, and saw nothing. He was insisting she drop the subject and get back to bed. I told her it was probably just a shadow if Daddy wasn’t able to see anything. After being sent back to bed, Eleanor started bawling and yelling out my name from her room. If she had woken Phaedra, it would have been most inconvenient!

I went to her, and she was just complaining about being scared. We said a prayer together that she could be comforted and not be so scared. I talked to her about why she might be so afraid. I explained that spiders are more afraid of her than she is of them, that they don’t try to find people and bite them. She asked me about bird-eating spiders, and I told her there was no worry at all that we could have a bird-eating spider in our house. I did everything I possibly could to dispel all her trumped up fears and get her to calm down and go to sleep. She promised to go to sleep if I would snuggle her for a while so I did that, and she kept her deal. I thought that was the end of it.

That wasn’t the end of it.

In the middle of the night, she appeared next to my bed. She said she had a bad dream. I sent her to Grant. Since little guy gets up in the night all the time and will have nothing to do with Grant, he is in charge of any wakings among the big girls. There’s one problem with this system: there are certain points in my wonderful husband’s sleep cycle when, if woken, he will babble out some total gibberish at you, go back to sleep, and retain no memory whatsoever of the encounter. This was one of those times. I think he told Eleanor something about going back into her room to look at a map and figure out where she wanted to be.

Eleanor, probably having no idea how to respond to that, asked for someone to come snuggle her so she could get back to sleep. I tried Grant, but he was stuck on having Eleanor go get a map. Grumbling, I went into Eleanor’s room. We said a prayer, I reassured her of her safety, I tried to do everything. I told her very clearly that if I snuggled her, she was not going to get out of bed again. I snuggled her.

She got out of bed again. I was rather frustrated. At this point, Grant and I were both just telling her to get back in bed. She was trying to find something to blame. She thought the episode of “Arthur” she watched that day might have caused the bad dreams and fears. I don’t remember how we got her back to bed. I think I threatened her, and Grant went in to snuggle her.

She has blamed bad dreams on TV or movies before. Sometimes I believe it. One time, she said she had a bad dream from watching a leapfrog learning show about math in space—a nightmare about a meteor shower. I told her if she couldn’t tell the difference between reality and make-believe, we were going to have to quit watching shows. I even sent her out of the room while Phae and Curtis were watching Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood the next morning until she and I had had a chance to have a serious talk.

Grant thinks she was just causing problems in the night because she didn’t get her way at the beginning of the night. He could be right. I don’t know what it was, but I do NOT want it to happen again. I couldn’t go back to sleep after all her interruptions. I think I was up sometime before 4am that morning because of her.

And the next morning, she came out and shrugged and said, “It turns out it was my imaginary invisible spider all along!” as if we were supposed to just laugh it off as a funny misunderstanding. Ha. Ha.

Is there any wonder why I’m super cautious about what movies my kids watch?

That was our Thursday/Thursday night. It’s a good thing the other days this week weren’t all that bad.

You wouldn’t know by looking at her that she was gearing up to destroy our sleep/sanity that night, would you? (This was one of her poses she wanted to do.)