kiwords

This morning after breakfast and a brief newspaper reading/hide-n-seek playing session
I hauled the many school books to the table. I flipped through them for a moment, pondering all we’ve accomplished thus far this year, and I felt like a successful homeschooler.
Then it took one solid hour to get Tre to settle down and start working, complete with tears and arguments and consequences, and I felt like a homeschooling sham.
We survived the morning, and for lunch I served homemade spaghetti and meatballs (cause yes, I’m just that cool), with grape juice to drink and followed by actually remembering to give them their vitamins, and I felt like a nutritional genius.
After school I let them eat a few of the leftover chocolate candies from their school valentines, and that became one more, became one more, became one more. Soon they were all three sitting amidst a pile of pink and red foil, faces smeared with chocolate, eyes glazed, and I felt like a nutritional child abuser.
There was a moment while we were doing school where Tre and Max were both bent studiously over their work, scribbling happily away. Raphael was in the other room, listening to music and quietly working on puzzles for FORTY FIVE MINUTES, and I looked at them and glowed with love. I thought how amazing my kids are and how great a mother I am and wished I could have at least two more.
Then a while later Raphael somehow got a Go-Gurt tube out of the fridge, punctured the bottom, and carried it around. Sort of an indoor evil blue sprinkler system. Tre and Max watched me dance around, trying to grab the Go-Gurt from a flailing Raphael. They got a good laugh. When I finally had it in hand and was surveying the damage, Max remarked, “I saw him with that and wondered when you’d take it away. What a mess.”
And I wasn’t sure I even wanted to keep the kids I have.
Now all the darlings are tucked in bed and as I think about the many moods of me today I realize…
What? You expect a moral of the story here? Please. Have you been paying attention at all? Mine is not the most stable of minds, and I’m taking it to bed.