I'm Not Making This Up

Today . . . . .

Piper wore a tiny, tiny ponytail in her hair - Pebbles-style. It was unnecessary. But it was cute.

Bergen came running into the house this morning carrying a dead bird. "Hey, Mom - I found a dead bird," he announced. This was also unnecessary. And not cute.

Riley had to receive five shots at the public health department for her upcoming adventure to Kenya. The facility was ugly, windowless and depressing. The nurse acted as if the two of us had single-handedly, purposefully set out to ruin her day. I hope if our government ever decides to choose universal health care they can figure out how to run that system better than their current government-run health care system.

I took six children (five under the age of five) to eat lunch at Mellow Mushroom. (I was the only adult. I just want to emphasize that.) And no one spilled anything. No extremely inappropriate noises were made. Pizza was ordered. Kids colored. We ate the pizza. No one complained about drinking only water. Riley didn't even really complain when the server gave her a kid cup with a lid. Baby Otto slept through the whole meal, allowing me to eat both my Caesar salad and my pizza slice in relative peace and enjoyment.

While in Target I confiscated Mosely's prize quarter after finding it in her mouth for the second time (post-warning). The child perfected the most pitiful, humped shoulders, lip protruding, arms crossed waddle for the remainder of our visit. She seemed as if the Peanuts music was playing all around her and a little black rain cloud was raining on her alone.

At dinner Riley offered to make us all a delicious smoothie. She has made smoothies many times before. I assumed that she knew the basic blender operating instructions. Silly me. One loud noise later, followed by a spraying of strawberry goodness across the cabinets and a shriek from the blender operator, I realized Riley was not aware of the cardinal blender rule. Never put anything into a blender that is turned on. Certainly not a long wooden spoon. Oh my. After being assured by Riley that the break of the spoon was clean and all wood chunks were located, we all proceeded to pick our way through toothpick and telephone pole sized wooden chunks in our smoothies.

After dinner Piper climbed on to the table and when I told her to get down, she fell off. She was only wearing a diaper, which somehow made things seem worse.

Bergen fell up the steps and scraped his knee and his ankle, causing copious amounts of blood and a concerned Piper Finn, who kept reaching out to touch her brother's blood, despite Berg's constant cries of, "Please don't touch my blood, Piper. Please don't touch my blood."

Mosely spent at least eight minutes crying because she couldn't remove her water-soaked shirt after playing in the stream.

I didn't take any photos of any of this. It seemed enough just to live it. More than enough. (Besides, the dead bird was really disgusting.)

It isn't even seven o'clock.

Can everyone go to bed early?