Not Good Ideas

Motherhood messes with my brain. I think I used to be smarter. I KNOW I used to remember things easier, anyway. At least I think I know that. See? I can't even remember if I used to remember things easier. Super.

Today the kids and I had two stores we had to go to. Two. Only.

I got them dressed and fed as quickly as possible so we could leave ASAP and take maximum advantage of Kai's morning awake time. That kid wants to nap at like 9:30am, and by the time he wakes up from said nap, Dane is in his afternoon cranky phase, so...any errands we want to run in this life phase need to be run PRONTO upon waking up. We can keep Kai awake pretty happily until about 11am, and after that the errand-running window has permanently closed for the day, barring a major emergency (I'm talking--Zombie Apocalypse-level emergency).

The errands we needed to run were easy, but we are still on summer vacation for one more day, which means I have all four "helpers" with me, which means really they are no help at all. They are cute. They are funny. But they do not increase our efficiency in any way.

We were gone for 2.5 hours. During our excursion, these things had happened:

1. Haven informed me that she had not brushed her hair. You could tell.

2. Haven got out of the car and I saw for the first time that at home when I said, "No, you can't ever go to the store without pants on, so please go upstairs and put some pants on now", she had obliged me by putting on shiny, daisy-duke, satin, pink-with-yellow-stars pajama shorts on. With her pink jeweled shirt. And her unbrushed hair. And her Crocs. Because we are classy like that.

3. I ran over Dane's heel with the shopping cart. Which was exactly why I told him eighty times (ok, that might be rounding up) not to walk right in front of the cart. Then I gave up telling him. Then he got run over.

4. Elijah refused to pull his remaining center top tooth out (on the pretense that he was "busy"), which is now sticking out like a buck tooth because of the permanent tooth coming in behind it.

5. I loaded up all children inside the cart, bought them all doughnuts to stave them off happily for 10 minutes, then pushed the cart around the store Mario Andretti-style to get the most out of the 10 minutes.

6. I realized that I had not brushed my teeth. Or my hair. And I'm serious here--I realized this. As in, the brushing of my teeth and hair had literally not even crossed my mind before that moment.

7. Kai smeered his doughnut all over his romper, thus rendering our "White Trash Family look" complete. I chose to just let it be rather than try to help him with a wet wipe.

8. Kai head-butted my collar bone repeatedly because we had pushed his nap too far and he was DONE. I continued to just hold him right at collar bone level because I couldn't think of anything better to do.

9. I had to yell out a child's name in a department store because in a really hilarious gesture, that child decided to hide from the rest of us.

10. I allowed Dane to ride standing up in the cart rather than making him sit down, because it wasn't worth the battle to me. That is, the integrity of his skull wasn't worth the battle to me. Nice. He sort of almost fell out like four times.

11. Kai started screaming like a banshee on the way home.

12. I fed Kai a bottle while driving home by reaching one hand back to hold it and steering with the other hand.

Yes, I realize that last one is not a good idea. But that's my whole point, here. Motherhood has messed with my brain. Numbers 2, 3, 5, 6 (heavy emphasis on this one), 7, 8, and 10 were also not good ideas. Who does that, seriously?? Frazzled mothers of young children, apparently.

It's a catch-22, though, because the children themselves were good ideas. I'm sure of that. I just...miss my brain sometimes. When I remember that it's missing.

Please tell me you have mornings like these.