Wow. Just wow. This day has been a doozy. After a day of questioning my career as an elementary teacher (is it just me or was today a full moon??), I came home to my own trio of offspring. In the words of Gwen Stefani, “This sh*t is b-a-n-a-n-a-s.” From tantrums to straight up ballistics, I’ve seen it all.

In the midst of the mad hatter dinner race tonight, a colleague stopped by to discuss a quick work question. Although it may have started off innocently enough, I’d say from the look on her face, our family meal time will serve as birth control for her for at least the next two years. Not only did she get her questions answered, she got an earful from a defiant 4-year old and a possible pocketful of spaghetti from the baby. Shortly after her departure, my husband left with our oldest to attend his activity. I took a glance at the disaster that is now my kitchen, decided I’d rather light a match to it then walk in and attempt to clean it. I then finished up with bath time, got the girls started on some coloring and tip toed back into the kitchen to see if the cleaning fairy paid us a visit.

Realizing that it was the same as I left it, I shut the light off and headed back to the girls. It took approximately 45 minutes to get jammies on and pick out clothes for tomorrow. You see, it takes a bit longer than necessary when your sole focus is to scream loud enough to make neighboring states hear your anger at your mom’s requests. We read the obligatory bed time books simply so I could cross off my “attempt to pretend to be a good mom” off my daily to do list, then hastily pushed the girls into their beds.

We are now going on minute 23 of screaming. In addition to the wall kicking, there also seems to be some kind of maniac mantra being chanted from the back of my house. Something about how my 4 year old is never reading stories with mommy again and how she’s not my friend and she hopes that all of my pretties fall out of my hair so I turn ugly. Ahhh. My sweet girl. All grown up to be a teenager at the bat of an eye. No worries, I got this. You see, I attended a parenting class at my church last weekend where I learned that yelling is bad and that patience is the key to my childrens’ angry little terrorist hearts. I learned that I should take deep breaths, speak firmly but kindly, administer consequences without admitting the defeat of their behavior affecting mine. Bla, bla, bla. I summed up all of their ideology with “turn your battle to opening a bottle of wine when the going gets tough.” I figure best case scenario, I refocus my energy on something that is a positive for me (wine) while blocking out the negative (my children), which allows the time away from each other to simmer everyone down.

31 minutes later, the screaming has stopped. The air is quiet. The kitchen is just as messy, but I’ve made peace.

Shit. My big kid is back from his activity….. And appears to be crying. Pour me another…