Just Another Day

I haven't blogged in months. And as much as I don't want to taint my return to the blogging world with overwhelming amounts of insanity, it just so happens that insanity is the particular phase of life I'm living in right now.

Not following? Don't worry, you'll get it. Just read on....

I spent the last 3 days writing out the various moments of craziness on our trip home from Tulsa only to wake up this morning to maneuver through another round of insanity.

The moment I wake up this morning I realize that for the 14,598th day in a row (ok, I'm slightly exaggerating) my allergies are going berserk. Nose running, countless sneezes, itchy throat, you get the picture. I make my way to the medicine cabinet to find I am down to one. single. Benadryl. With my allergies, that will only get me through breakfast.

N.B.D. (Mom, that means no big deal - I know how you are with abbreviations.)

I'm planning to take the girls to see Jim for lunch today, per our standard Thursday arrangement, so I'll just hop over to Walmart and pick some up while I'm out.

I get the girls fed and dressed before they go play in Kyra's room. I'm bustling about throwing in laundry, yada, yada, when I notice the girls are sitting so cute reading their Beginner's Bible. As I come in the room, Kylie looks up at me with her big blue eyes and chipmunk cheeks. Those cheeks (seen very frequently around here) mean that Kylie has once again put something in her mouth that she shouldn't have. By the looks of the half missing page out of the Bible, I can tell what it is even before I fish hook it out of her mouth. Silly Kylie. I guess we haven't gotten to the scripture that explains the appropriate place to hide God's Word is your heart, not your stomach.

I soon discover that despite the fact that I'm in a sundress, I'm profusely sweating from doing the dishes. Hmmm... that's not normal. I check the thermostat.

It reads 79.5 degrees.
Inside my house.
At 10:00 in the morning.
Not.
Good.

I head down to the basement and check all the "right places" to make sure everything is the way it should be. I see nothing out of the ordinary which means the problem must be something out of the ordinary. Super.

I make a call to the company that we've used in the past for service in hopes that a little annual maintenance will cause things to cool down a bit. They tell me they can come out between noon and five, so I cancel our weekly lunch with daddy and sit around our steamy house to wait.

I can tell the heat is starting to get to us because we're all irritable and whiny (yes, me too). Kylie decides she want's to color and I decide, for some crazy reason, that I'm going to hang some pictures on the wall that have been patiently waiting to be hung since January. I can see Kylie out of the corner of my eye sitting at her table coloring away. I get the first picture up and reach for the second. When I turn back around, Kylie is gone. I have this sneaky feeling she's coloring on something she shouldn't be, so I race to find her. The first thing I see when I spot her? Chipmunk cheeks. With orange drool coming out the corners of her mouth. Ugh.

I scoop her up and take her to the kitchen sink where I swab out an entire orange crayon that has been very thoroughly chewed. The crowns of her teeth all have huge chunks of the crayon stuck in them, so I end up having to use a toothbrush to scrub it all out of her teeth. She's eaten crayons before (wow, I sound like a super observant parent), but this was the worst incident to date. Had my husband seen it, he probably would've thrown up in his mouth a little bit. (He has "issues" with messy kids.)

Kylie is a wreck from the intense teeth brushing session, so I put her down for a nap. About 45 minutes later, the HVAC maintenance man shows up and starts checking everything out. Two HOURS later.... he says to me, "It's not good. You're going to need a new compressor or you might want to just replace the whole unit. Not what you want to hear, I know."

No, Mr. Maintenance Man, it's not at all what I wanted to hear.

He says he did a very temporary fix, but it won't get the house nearly cool enough to be comfortable. The only thing he can do now (besides take my credit card) is schedule a time for one of their sales guys to come out and quote us on the compressor or new unit. I ask him for a ballpark figure, but he says he can't give me one. He does, however, give me a coupon for $500.00 off a new unit. My IQ isn't at genius level, but I'm pretty sure anything that can afford a $500.00 discount isn't cheap. Oh joy.

As soon as he leaves, I gather up the kids and head out the door. If the house isn't going to get much cooler than 82.5 degrees downstairs (upstairs was even warmer), I'm going to at least enjoy the fully functioning A/C in my van as I run around.

We stop at Jim's office so he can say a quick "hello" to the girls and so I can record the store closing message for Memorial Day. We then head to Wal-mart so I can pick up my now seriously needed allergy medicine. I end up buying 2 boxes of popsicles and 2 cartons of ice cream. That's how I temporarily fix a broken A/C.

We stop at my sis-in-loves to pick up some pots and then head back to the house strictly so I can put the frozen treats in the freezer. I don't even get the girls out of the oh-so-heavenly cool van. The way I see it if we can stay out until bedtime it will make the rest of our afternoon much more tolerable.

Our next stop is Becker's, a teacher's store. I realize as soon as we get there that my stroller is sitting in my garage, so I'm going to have to carry Kylie around. Just as I suspected, Kylie does NOT want to be carried. The second we set foot in the store she start's flailing and screaming to be put down. Kyra quickly finds her way to a little play area in the store and I convince myself that Kylie will be fine if I put her down in the play zone.

Not so much.

She SPRINTS around the entire perimeter of the store before going through the employee break room into the private "employee only" bathroom. The two employees behind the counter just stare in silence as I emerge carrying a screaming Kylie. I didn't buy anything. I didn't even look for what I came to look for. I was totally stressed out.

But there was still too much daylight left for us to head home. So I hit up Old Navy (since I KNOW they have shopping carts I could use to restrain my child) and both girls were fairly well behaved while we were there. It gave me a false sense of confidence that we could handle stopping for dinner on the way home.

Normally I'd just swing through the drive thru at Chick-fil-a, but seeing that I didn't want to eat at home (or in the car) and that I would have to go in somewhere to eat, I decided to go to a sit down restaurant. It would take longer than fast food, so according to my calculations, it could be our last stop and we'd make it home just in time for bed. This was a major lapse in logic.

We get seated and meet our server who announces that it's his first night training and to "go easy on him". As he's asking for our drink order, Kylie dives head first over the back of our booth into the vacant one behind us. I hop up to swing her back around to our side and as I sit back down in our booth one of the straps on my sundress breaks. I quickly put my hand over the top of my dress (afterall, I'm not wearing a bra because it was just too darn hot for that) and spit out "bring us 2 chocolate milks and a coke zero". He backs away, embarrassed, and I scoop up both girls and the diaper bag and make a beeline for the restroom. It's only 15 feet away, but it felt like it were 15 miles.

I lock us in the handicapped stall and survey the damage to my strap. I realize it broke in a way that I could tie the two parts back together just so it would keep my dress up while we ate our dinner. Despite Kylie climbing all over me in the booth, I hardly moved for fear the knot I had tied would slip and I'd repeat the embarrassing moment all over again. A little over an hour later, we emerged from the restaurant, knot still in tact.

When we got home the house had cooled down to a lovely 78 degrees, so I bathed the girls (who were super sticky and stinky), put them to bed, and settled in to record this crazy day here on my blog. As I write this, storm clouds have moved in and the temperature outside and inside has dropped dramatically. For the first time today I'm comfortable sitting in my house. So now I'm gonna go ruin it and go for a run. That's insane, you say? Well, like I said, insane is all I know right now. And I'm getting pretty good at it.