How to Ruin Nursery Rhymes and Other Things

As Difficult as PB&J

• Banner art courtesy of Brett Jordan on Unsplash •

Someone once commented that I seem to be a very calm person for a mother of five. I stared at this well-meaning friend with the glazed eyes of a person concentrating on extracting a choking hazard from the mouth of a one year old who has determined to strangle itself on broccoli. Once it sank in that my friend had actually asked, politely, how on earth I do It All so smoothly, (It All meaning my entire life as a mother), I realized that I had no idea how to answer. I usually don't think well on my feet. Think. Hah. Most days I'm only capable of lower-life-form instinct unless I'm swallowing coffee. Then I might achieve flying by the seat of my pants.

Well, I've thought about it, now, and I would like to take this moment to illustrate why I appear relatively sane in public.

(Note: none of this is made up.)

It started with a PB&J. 

"Wow," you say. "Her secret is boredom? What could possibly go wrong with a PB & J?"

Nothing. The PB & J didn't do anything. It was just sitting there, waiting, when I stopped smearing jam on its face. Why did I stop smearing jam? Halfway through making the per-usual seven sandwiches, I realized I didn't know exactly where my three year old was. (Note: Child #4 was upstairs, lounging safely in bed, silently ignoring everyone.) This escalated rapidly into a full blown search because Child #1 helpfully said #4 was not upstairs and I believed them. 

In the middle of yanking my shoes on, one of the contractors who was finishing our garage came out of the bathroom. Apparently the poor man was under the impression that that he could walk through my kitchen unscathed. He had successfully done so at least once, because he got to the bathroom, but getting back out just wasn't going to work. Not that day. No. That day, in the middle of Children #s 1 and 2 running around the living room yelling for #4, me telling them to stop yelling while hopping up and down putting on my right shoe, and Child #3 asking repeatedly for lunch, my ever-loving Great Dane decided to chase our contractor out the door. 

Horrified, I put the String of Power (pronounced lee-sh) on my idiot dog, and tried to find something heavy to tether him to, while imagining having to put him down because he's escalating into an aggressive animal. My art desk looked big enough to keep him from killing anyone, so I slipped the loop-end of the String of Power under one of the desk legs and went to find my other shoe so I could start looking for #4 again because the little blighter still couldn't be found. Anywhere. By anyone. At all.  

(Life Hack: If you can pick up a piece of furniture, so can your Great Dane.) I was about halfway to the kitchen when the house began tearing apart at the seams behind me: a great screeching of metal, crashing of glass, crunching of wood. I whipped back around, prepared to do battle, only to find my art desk chasing my terrified Great Dane into the living room.  

I don't think my dog will ever look at that desk the same way again. He was so scared he peed, which I found highly ironic, given what he had just done to our poor contractor. 

Thankfully, at that moment Child #4 decided to come downstairs, erasing my fear that it had been kidnapped from the backyard, so all I had to do was drag my art desk back to where I had it, pick up all my charcoal pencils, and then clean up Lake Wussy Dane Urine in the living room while trying to keep the one year old from playing in it.

Then I put the mop away... took off my right shoe... and finished making those PB&Js.

Now you expect me to come to my point, right? Give you a grain of insight into my supposed even temper? Tell you how I do this thing you swear you couldn't do? Well here it is. The Big Secret. Are you ready? Yeah? This is why I seem sane in public: I am surrounded by chaos 24/7. It's not so much my even temper you're seeing, it's the fact that my Chaosometer is jacked up so high that I no longer react to lower levels of cray-cray the same way normal people do. Simply keeping five kids moving in the same direction at the grocery store? That's easy. I can do that in my sleep. I probably have, actually. As long as it's anywhere below Level: Making PB&J, I'm good. If the crazy hits Trying to get Two Consecutive Minutes Alone in the Bathroom, that's a different story.