"Mom, I'm pooped."
"Okay," I said, "We'll change you as soon as we get home."
"You're not going to throw me in the bathtub," he said worriedly. (He hates to bath!)
"No. We'll just change your diaper, okay?"
Well, he was asking if I was going to give him a bath for good reason. We went to get him out of his carseat and realized he had done more than just filled his diaper - he had a poop explosion! It was everywhere! We spent the next half hour cleaning everything up, and then I jumped into the van again and ran to a job interview. By the time I got home, I was exhausted. The kids were exhausted. I decided we would clean the house the next day.
BAD IDEA. The next morning I let the kids sleep in, and as I'm sitting on the porch couch enjoying the peace and quiet of the morning, here comes a big shiny suburban pulling into my long driveway. "Who is that," I wonder. Pretty soon, out pops our good friends Mark, Paul, Steve, and their Dad.
Now, let me paint this picture a little more clearly. I'm sitting on the couch on the front porch, lounging while I look up job listings on my laptop. I have no bra on yet, I haven't combed my hair, brushed my teeth, or put my makeup on. The porch is crowded with furniture we are storing for someone as a birthday surprise, and EVERY room in the house is messy. Every. Single. One. In fact, when I came home, I had dumped my suitcase on my bed frantically trying to find something I needed from it before I left for my job interview. I came back from the interview and shoved everything onto the floor before I fell into bed, exhausted. The room was bombed. I'm not the world's best clean freak housekeeper to begin with... but that day, every room looked awful. The food storage we had relocated to the playroom while we were working on a project was all still sitting there. The huge beanbag full of foam squares had broken the week before we left and since I didn't have time to sew it up, the kids had them scattered everywhere downstairs.
Mark gives me a hug hello and walks into the house to see how the basement turned out, which he had helped us do the drywall on. He goes downstairs, where Amanda is still sleeping. I awkwardly give the others a hug and excuse myself for a minute while I go get my brassiere on. When I come back, Steve says he wants to see the house so I start showing them around, cringing at every room we walk into. We go upstairs, and meanwhile Amanda comes up to the main floor, oblivious that we have visitors. When we come back down, she is sitting at the dining table in her nightgown eating a bowl of cereal, totally unaware they were even here. They all want to see the work Mark did down in Amanda's room too... and Amanda is freaking out because her room looks about as good as my room.
Ugh. Normally, I love visitors. But sometimes I think I need to get one of those signs on my door that says...
"If you come to see me, come anytime. If you came to see my house, make an appointment."
I can just imagine the stories they had to tell their wives when they got home.
Oh well....
