a night to remember (mostly as a cautionary tale)

Dear readers, if you're thinking about having three kids, two cats, and a puppy while working an opposite shift from that of your spouse, you'll probably reconsider after you read the saga of my Monday night. Take a peek:

I picked the boys up, raced home to take the dog out, raced to Walmart to buy white t-shirts (they were in a 50s-themed 4H parade), raced to my parents' house to get ready and feed the boys, then raced to the fairgrounds just in time for the parade. Then, some relative peace: Bethany bought the boys wristbands, so they happily spent about three hours going on ride after ride after ride until they were exhausted and I was feeling sick from a combination of too many people and lack of dinner. And that's when I realized the sweltering fair experience was only the eye of the storm.

By the time we got home, Liam and Henry were crashed out in their seats, but Max was still awake, and it had been almost five hours since the dog had last been out. So I took Max inside and told him to lay down on my bed while I took Charlie out (amazingly, he didn't have an accident while we were gone). I brought Charlie back in and gated him in the kitchen/dining room/living room area, then Max started yelling. "Mom, Charlie pooped on the bed!" Which would have been a neat trick, since Charlie was crated in the dining room while we were gone. But sure enough, I went in to find Max laying precariously about a foot away from a giant cat hairball/vomit that had soaked through all the bedding and into the memory foam mattress topper. Great.

Meanwhile, the big and little ones were still out in the running car in the garage. So I told Max to hang tight for a minute, then ran out and woke Liam up and told him to go lay down on the couch in my office. He ran inside while I got Henry. I managed to get Henry inside (past Liam, who was laying on the office couch) and in his crib without waking him up, only to turn around and find that Liam had gone straight to my bed and crawled through the cat mess to lay next to Max (and only then did he realize why I wanted him in the office, so he ran in there and laid down before I got inside with Henry!), so the stuff was spread not only all over the bed, but also all over Liam AND the office couch. Great.

At this point, I yelled at Liam for getting into the bed when I had told him not to, which woke up the baby, who immediately started screaming and wouldn't stop. So I stripped Liam and got him in the shower, frantically tore all the bedding off and shoved it in the washer, found the spare sheet and put it on, and tucked Max back in bed, all with Henry screaming bloody murder. Then I helped Liam get out of the shower, tossed some clean clothes at him, and went into the kitchen to get the baby a bottle--only to find Charlie with an open box of baking soda gripped tightly between his teeth, growling and shaking his head. He'd obviously been at it for some time, because the kitchen, living room, and dining room floors were all covered with the stuff.

Make the baby's bottle, get Liam settled in bed with Max, feed baby and rock him to sleep, head back out and clean up Charlie's baking soda mess, and finally--FINALLY--sat down and had my own dinner at 11:30 p.m.

And yesterday morning, I got up at 6:00 a.m. to do it all over again. And the "funny" part is that while this is more hectic than a normal night, it's actually not that much more hectic. Seriously, people, it's a wonder I have any hair left at all!