Monday treatments

I guess that TECHNICALLY this is a Typical Monday.

I.e., my mind was a raging forest fire of stress last night and the Jetta has a flat* and thus I had to drive M to the train station so that we could both get to work today, which, as this is my early day, meant that we both had to leave by seven (ha), which, bless my MIL's heart, meant that she would take the kids to school, so that in order to keep her from having to go far above and beyond the call of duty, meant that the kids had to be out of bed, dressed, combed, and fed before we left.

The feat was accomplished, though, and with a minimal amount of crying/ hissing, even if the kids were both lying on their backs waving their arms and legs in the air like drowsy pink pillbugs when we walked out the door. So that was good, and un-Mondayish. And I have a new-to-me espresso maker in my office with me today: also un-Mondayish (although I am still perfecting the ratio of grounds to water). However, the most important thing: today is not yesterday, and for that I am glad.

Yesterday, inspired by a vague charitable impulse, I decided to drive to Fort Collins with the kids. Si could do a playdate with his old friend from first grade, Helen could...tag along, and I could pick up my MIL from the memorial service she was attending and drive her home. Furthermore, that would put the four of us out of the house for half the day so that M could get some work done. Win-win-win, right? Except that in my misty-eyed bumbling charitableness, I sort of forgot about me, and how there was very little in this long-ass thankless drive for me, and how such imbalance, while perhaps good for my soul, is not at all good for my mood. In painful addition, Helen was coming off a sleepover with a friend from her preschool whom she hasn't seen for several weeks. So: two quarreling kids, a long-ass drive, a sense of martyrdom, and vexation that I wasn't even doing something that anyone had asked me to do but had actually brought this all upon myself.

Yeah. It was a long drive. We weren't even out of Denver proper before I'd started to rant about money. The drive back was even longer and I actually pulled over (into a gas station, not by the side of the highway) at one point to clear my head and also show the kids I was serious about not provoking/kicking/screaming/pinching/tattling. ("How about I buy them some McDonalds?" offered my MIL at this juncture, which I angrily refused, a sort of compressed display of 75% percent of our conversations on child-rearing/ life). Ugh. I felt like a bully-mother-martyr--a person who has her place but certainly wasn't why I'd planned the outing in the first place.

On the positive side, though, Si got to see his old friend, and while they're sort of obviously growing apart, he still laughs more with this old friend than with any of his newer friends. They spent the last half of the afternoon telling each other gross-out jokes and laughing hysterically. Also, did I mention my espresso machine in my office? Now I just need a breadmaker (set to "muffin") and a comfy couch for naps, and I wouldn't have any reason to leave.


*We've apparently fallen into a Bermuda Triangle of brokenness.

Sad

My mood this Monday morning is toeing the "bummed" line, wavering between actual local sadnesses and crises and occasionally veering out into "let's surf the internet and find out what WORSE things could be happening and then imagine them and weep." Occasionally I'm foraying into mad territory--sometimes life steps in and fucks up all your plans and there's nothing you can do about it! This sucks!--and then also into the more midlife crisis-y "so you wanted to be a ranger at Yellowstone National Park and raise your kids to happily roam the woods AND be fluent in Spanish AND physically close to all of the important relatives and look how things turned out instead"--which upon examination looks less like a "life interfered with my dreams" crisis and more of a "reality interfered with my dreams."

Which doesn't actually make the non-actualization of those dreams any less bitter. Plus, there are the actual local sadnesses and crises, none of which are new but which are kind of wearing me down right now.

Anyhow. Apparently it's Monday or something. (*signficant glance at sulking self*)

Weekend recap

Oh yeah, baby. It's spring.

Well, OBVIOUSLY it's Monday, since one of my children is having a meltdown at the breakfast table. Technically he is now out of the house, walking to school after having missed the bus, but the meltdown still lingers (and really, if I opened a window I could probably hear it). Subject of meltdown: it's teacher appreciation week, so our lovely, highly-organized school moms had the sweet idea of having every student bring a single flower to school for his/her teacher.

I'm guessing the moms who organized this have girls. Or kindergarteners. Not third-grade boys.

Nevertheless, thanks to my Monday-morning inflexibility on random points, I made him go through with it. I had my regrets, of course. I'm not sure if I really believe in making him comply with the sweet but slightly clueless appreciation choreographing of the PTA Moms--it feels a bit like being the sort of mom who throws a sulking fit if the Hallmark card does not arrive for the Hallmark-developed Mother's Day celebration or is not accompanied by the approved Hallmark-designed gifts. However. He loves his teacher, and as I did point out in my tactless Monday-morning mood, she daily does all sorts of awkward and humiliating things for her students. The least they can do is reciprocate.

Bah.

Moving on, this was a weekend about restaurants (we are going to start trying to save money ANY DAY NOW). On Friday I dragged Hubs away from house misery and we had a date night in the city: dinner at Sasa Sushi, which was perfectly delicious but not necessarily worth a special trip into the city, and then we went to the Denver Art Museum's last-Friday-of-the-month Untitled program, which was quietly awesome, and also crowded. The Buntport Theater Troop was doing a little sketch/riff on the subject of the evening (the F-stop), and this was a) why I wanted to go and b) totally and completely worth it.

Then on Sunday after Si's team got creamed YET AGAIN in their baseball game, we went to Don Carlos, an awesome little Mexican restaurant in Littleton. Awesomeness example: they make their own refried beans from scratch, using a special bean from their home state that they import. Also, they're pretty cheap. AND, they're housed in an old Howard Johnson shack. What's not to love?

Okay, enough with the crosslinks. The final highlight: goose gossip. On my Sunday run I passed a pond where a bunch of geese were having a cacophonous COW. Honk honk honk honk! Honk honk honk honk! It went on and on and on so that even though I usually ignore the doings of Canada Geese, I stopped to watch. This is what I saw: two geese in the water, shouting at two geese up on a concrete block island (which makes a perfect nest spot). I assumed the two in the water maybe wanted the nest spot for themselves and were trying to shout the other two geese away. Then I saw that there were already some eggs up on the concrete block. THEN one of the two geese up on the concrete block slowly and deliberately rolled an egg off the block and into the water. The cold-blooded nerve! This made the geese in the water so mad/distraught that they flew up and bit the other geese, and won back their nest, at least for now. The other two geese swam off and pretended to look for a new nest spot in the grass on the side of the pond. I resisted the urge to go chase them off. Egg-drowning creeps.

Have a great Monday!

Must Be Monday

Breaking news: Mondays suck. Even if I'm feeling cheerful, there will be SOMEONE in the family who resents the fact that it's Monday, and will make everyone else in the house feel their pain. Such as the child who awoke to remember that he left his backpack at school, and proceeded to make it a DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT MAKING ME TAKE MY LUNCH IN A NONREGULATION BAGLIKE CONTAINER kind of morning. Involving weepiness, missing the bus, and having to be walked to school. This was followed by the rising of Child 2, who ALSO didn't want it to be Monday, but had to search harder for a point of contention. She finally settled on not eating her cereal unless it was on the table in the kitchen instead of the table in the dining room. "I want to eat at the OTHER TABLE," she said in a ugh-it's-Monday kind of groan. "That's fine, sweetheart. Pick up your bowl and move it to the Other Table." "I want YOU to move my bowwwwl." Etc.

Question: does my own Monday morning crabbiness sometimes involve being, uh, inflexible on random points of contention?

Answer: maybe.

Ugh. The day at work has been fine, but I'm kind of dreading going home. I'm also hoping Si was able to track down his backpack.