Friday, February 18, 2011

The Day That Wouldn't End

*Reposted from this time last year, because looking back can only make one laugh...and also remind one that red wine headaches seem to be cylical, a'hem.

I know.

We all had a long weekend.

Some with more snow than others...and for that - I apologize as I sit here in the balmy Northwest watching daffodils and tulips sprout every which way.

But any way you slice it, it was a holiday weekend. And holiday weekends mean 2 things around here:

1) No school for the kids

and

2) Nascar for the husband (Non Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks)

Lucky for me, my husband decided to do his Nascar viewing elsewhere, in a land far, far away where men are men and kings are kings...or something like that. He and his brother took off for the entire 4-day weekend to Eastern Washington to visit their step father in the woods. And watch Nascar. And drink beer. And watch Nascar.

I wasn't kidding about that "men are men" part, see?

That left the kids and I (and the MIL) to fend for ourselves.

Now, if you're my friend on Facebook, you already know that everything was fine until the final day (that would be yesterday), when everything decided to take a complete nosedive into the oblivion I like to call "oh-my-god-can-someone-please-steal-my-kids-and-sell-them-on-ebay."

In other words, it sucked.

And not just the regular kind of suck...I'm talking full blown major suckage.

To start things off, I woke up with a red wine headache. You know the kind. I spent Valentine's night eating desserts and drinking wine with friends and went to bed without drinking a gallon of water and taking enough Tylenol to sedate an elephant. Lesson learned.

Then, I tried to do our taxes, with the headache. I spent all morning squinting at the monitor and banging my head on the keyboard but that refund amount would not increase...no matter what I did. I decided to take a break and come back to the situation with a clearer mind - like maybe next year.

In the meantime, I'd asked my children (who had been diligently goofing off all weekend) to complete a small but important list of chores. Instead of doing said chores, they made new messes to contend with. I tried banging my head against a wall, or a door, or any other hard surface to no avail and they still wouldn't shake a leg.

So I went to visit my grandmother - the best part of the day, but it was cut shorter than I'd like because I had to actually work (the kind I get a paycheck for and didn't get enough taken out of for taxes and is therefore a contributing factor to the reason my refund is so much less than it was last year) for a few hours.

And I worked, worked, worked.

And I reminded, reminded, reminded the kids to do their chores in between work.

I hadn't planned a meal for the evening because, well, I forgot. So I dug around in the pantry and located one lone box of Shake n' Bake chicken coating (my Facebook friend Jennifer from college forgot that they still made the stuff) and...shake...and...bake. Yes friends, it really was that simple. I only ate a small, cell phone-sized serving of it though because I was just not sure about it and expected that when I stepped on the scale the next morning it would register that I'd magically lost 5 lbs for giving up so much dinner - but it didn't.

After dinner I discovered that while I was working, my oldest son had a shoe cleaning project going on in the downstairs bathroom. He thought it was a good idea to flush SIX full-sized paper towels down the toilet and so I plunged, plunged, plunged until the paper towel blockage was finally loose from the pipe. That was fun.

After cleaning up the dinner mess, I heard my daughter's voice from the living room. I went in there to see what the commotion was about about and there were tiny pieces of paper all over the carpet. "Mom! I made confetti!"

Oh.

I took more Excedrin for the headache that wouldn't quit and got to work on the double batch of cookies that I was expected and required to bring to a class that my husband and I were taking the following night. After I made the cookies, I had to bag them up and hide them in my bedroom so that nobody ate them in the middle of the night. This made me feel weird. I made mental note to either stop baking all together, or talk to my MIL about her middle of the night cookie eating habit.

Then, just as the night was winding down, I heard talk between my daughter and my MIL that it was time for a bang trim. Right on, I thought to myself, one less thing for me to do today. Since my MIL did hair for over 30 years and cut my daughter's bangs last month perfectly, I didn't even worry about it and continued with the baking...

But it all went spiraling down from there.

Daughter was saying "Mom, I look weird."

MIL was laughing nervously.

The bangs got shorter and shorter and shorter...

And then the MIL was telling my daughter that when anyone at school asks her about her bangs she is to say they are European bangs - as if kindergartners know what that is. We have family who live in Denmark - I bet you $100 that these bangs are grandma-messed-up-bangs, not European Bangs.

But, you decide:



It's all Nascar's fault.


7 comments:

Michelle said...

OK, I know it is so wrong, but I got to the picture and laughed rather loudly. I mean, your poor daughter, but really, that is effing hilarious.

Here is hoping for a better week!

Driving three Prince Girls said...

She is so cute she can pull off "European Bangs". Don't worry they'll grow fast.....

Anonymous said...

I have no. more. words. you said it all.

xxxooomom

C (Kid Things) said...

Those bangs bring me back to my childhood. I had some horrible hair back then. But, on the bright side, you can see more of her pretty face this way.

Julie H said...

I think MIL was sipping on the wine while you were doing everything else.

Kendra said...

See, I had a friend in high school who had those very bangs, and I was always jealous that she was cool enough to pull that look off. So it's not "grandma messed up"--it's "she's so cool that other people just don't get it!"

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