Rocks and Bad Days

This little boy has waited almost one month to give his daddy his Father's Day present he made for him in school.  He hid it under our bed and there it sat-quite obvious, peeking out from underneath.  When I told Patrick it was "THE" day, he ran as fast as he could to the bed and fetched it out.

Jeff said, "Wow this is heavy, feels like there's rocks in here."

He was right, which made Patrick crack up.

 Jeff will take that to work with him for sure, but for all the other cute as pie sentimental letters and gifts that we want to keep forever, I have a special storage box on top of the craft/scrapbooking/gift wrap armoire for safe keeping.  Jeff has a box and I do also and they are filled to the brim.  

I had an awful terrible no-good day today.  I am sitting here typing at 11 pm and I should be in bed.  I know that the best way to get rid of a bad day is to get a good night's sleep and a fresh new start the next day, but I need to unwind or I'll never fall asleep.  We have had to deal with some major computer issues and there is nothing I hate more than major computer issues.  It makes me want to take a hammer and smash everything with a screen in my house.  

I dream of the black rotary phone with the cord we had in our kitchen growing up.  Forget email.  Forget internet connections.  Forget virus's and phishing and all that stuff I know nothing about but has wasted about 10 hours of my time over the last 3 days.  Forget going through the maze of 1-800 numbers and nice foreign people who I can't understand even though I try so hard because I don't ever want to be short-tempered with them.  I felt like crying a few times after hours and hours (especially after getting disconnected from a long phone call and having to start all over again) of this sort of stuff.  And yes, I realize how silly this is to complain about technology while I am blogging.  But for every benefit of technology, I think I can name 10 disadvantages, darn it.

On top of all that I also had the normal stuff a bad day can mean for me...just a busy day with kids who needed to be places at the same times which meant I felt like I could never "catch up" and was constantly saying Hurry Up to them all.  I drove Abbey across town just to learn her volunteer appointment was cancelled...but not until I was all the way on the highway heading back in the middle of construction.  I came home to find the doctor's office was called...which I almost dismissed, only to remember that I had finally had a chance two days ago to do my blood work and that phone call might just be about that.  It was...my iron level was very low.  It's happened before for me during some pregnancies, but it really explains while I've been feeling so icky and exhausted lately.  I wanted to run and start the pills, and I'm feeling sorry for myself that I didn't even get a chance to fit that in today.

Patrick and Andrew couldn't be in the same room more than 5 minutes before massive fighting broke out. They needed me more than ever just to divide and conquer and distract and redirect and instead I was pre-occupied with tech support from Indonesia.  I would love to say I handled it all well, but after the third fight, I just yelled at them both for being really bad.  I felt like the older three just kept bugging me with unnecessary questions and problems when I was trying to concentrate, which made me feel like my head was going to fly off.  I snapped and snapped and snapped all day long.

I called Jeff at 5:30 and begged him to come home and relieve me so I could get the things done without the kids around.  And he did.  I fixed a box of Chef Boyardee pizza for dinner, and burned it...everyone ate it because they were scared of me I think.  

I noticed when I went upstairs to get some PJ's for Patrick this evening that is was hotter than heck up there, even with the AC blaring.  Then I noticed that someone had opened a bedroom window at some point today...wide open!!!  Probably all day. We were fighting a losing battle.

I feel like my blog is getting stupider than Jupiter as I have little time or energy to write anything decent and sometimes that makes me feel embarrassed.  I just have to let go of what I want it to be, and be satisfied with my rambling mistake-ridden, no-good-ideas or profound-thoughts-writing as I am more than ever dedicated to spending as little time as possible on this darn computer.  I have about 10 minutes in the morning and that's it...unless I can stay up late, which besides this rare evening, I'm just too tired.

As I am typing this, a huge possum just fell into the basement window well (thank goodness this window is shut) and is panicked, scrambling to get out, poor thing.  I don't know why that cheers me up a little and makes me laugh.  Maybe because he's having a no-good terrible awful bad day also?  At least I'm not stuck in the window well.  After some hard scrambling and squeaking, he made it out.  Now I'm going to bed, so I will too.