Sunday: Joe went to China. Did church alone. It went ok. Grant fell asleep on his friends in primary.
Monday: Grant threw up at the table just as we are sitting down to eat breakfast. He throws up again right be fore we go to take the kids to school.
Tuesday: I knew it was going to be a hectic night: 5:00 soccer practice for Madi, 6:00 3rd grade meeting at the school, 6:30-8:00 soccer practice for Logan. I tell the kids if they get through the night ok then we will have ice cream when we get home. 1 minute later, as I am backing out of the driveway I hear yelling and crying.
Me: WHAT is going on???
Madi: Grant hit me with his thermos!
Grant: Madi spit at me.
Me: So sad. No ice cream.
Practice one goes ok. We get to the school, which is supposed to have babysitting. They tell me the big kids play in the gym, the little kids go to the art room. I explain that the baby will do much better if he has a sibling. I drop everyone off and head to the classroom. 50 minutes later I return to find a screaming Ammon and a crying Grant. Apparently it is not so cool abandoned in a strange place with strange people.
We arrive at practice two 30 minutes late. It goes ok.
On the way home (at 8:00--bedtime) I tell the kids that if they hurry and get showered and dressed for bed, then they can have a banana bar and milk (we ate dinner at 4 and had been out running around in 90 degree weather for 3 hours, they had to be starving). I hand Logan the keys to the house. I get in the house to see Madison and Logan kicking each other and calling each other names.
Me: Welp, you just lost the banana bars. You may have a glass of milk.
Crying and gnashing of teeth for the next 30 minutes. By Madison and Grant. But mostly Madison. There may have been some voluntary head banging on the walls. GEESH!
Wednesday: I've been looking forward to this day. No soccer. No meetings at school. I scheduled an appointment at a car shop because the van had been making a funny noise.
OK, quick side story. Last week I spent two days at the car place because 1. I had to get the car inspected and 2. the Noise. They didn't diagnose the problem until the end of the day, so Joe went in to pick up the car and find out what was up. The mechanics saw his "BYU Law" shirt and immediately said to each other that they had to be careful because he was a lawyer. Then they said it was highly unlikely, but legally they needed to tell him that the worse case scenario was that my tires would BREAK OFF while driving!!! Joe explained that he would be out of town for a week. . . would it be ok for a week? Probably, but no promises. Sounds GOOD!
So anyway, I arranged with some friends to drop our other car off at the car place so I could drop the van off, switch car seats, and then drive the car home.
The car wouldn't start.
Seriously. I can't even make this stuff up. So I go back in there and hand them my car keys and explain that they are going to make a bundle of money off of me today. They feel bad for this mom with 2 kids (they don't know that there are actually FOUR kids!) at 8:00 am, so they have someone come look at it right then. It's just the battery. Whew! So I walk next door and buy a $120 battery and it takes about 5 minutes for the mechanic to fix it "for free." Not really, because he kept my battery that I could have gotten a $20 refund for, but oh well. At that point I just wanted to get out of there.
(I just heard back from said car shop. Along with the $100 I spent last week to diagnose the problems, it is going to cost me another $500 to get everything fixed. I guess it could be worse, much worse, but I can think of a lot of things to spend $750 on!)
So.... It seems to me that when Joe goes out of town, there is some crazy going on. It might be funny. Like in a year from now.
I do have to acknowledge that it could have been worse. I mean, Grant only threw up twice. And since he hadn't eaten for 12 hours, it wasn't really that bad. Knock on wood, but no one else has gotten sick. And the car? What better place to be stuck than at a car shop? And friends? I had several friends ready to come and pick me up and cart me around town. A good friend even brought us a delicious dinner and a stack of paper plates and boxes of plastic ware! So my life is still pretty good. Baby, I've GOT this!
Any bets for what will happen tomorrow?
