The kids woke up me this morning, fighting outside my bedroom door. It was earlier than I prefer on a Sunday morning, so I wasn’t the sweet June Cleaver type of mom right then. Not that I ever am.

I didn’t say, “What do you need, darlings?” I growled, grumbled something that I’m sure was a threat, such as, “Go away, or I’ll shave you bald and give you both a sheep dip,” and then finished with, “Go eat a donut or something. Come back later.”

To nobody’s surprise, except perhaps the Siamese cat (who bears a perpetually surprised expression due to a quirk in his physiognomy), the children did not go away. They instead reduced the argument to stage whispers, which came to me in fits and starts. When I heard “…broke it…” and “…that poor dog…” I had no choice but to come out of my cave. Like any mother bear, I emerged full of righteous indignation. What the hell could they have possibly done, so early in the morning, that required my intervention?!

Damn. Why did I reproduce? And then I remembered, it was never really a plan, just something that sort of happened as an adjunct to something else (which is the best birth control the world).

I got downstairs to find the kitchen in shambles, trash lying about, dirty dishes on the table, and… they’d already eaten all the donuts. Dammit, I wanted one of those! I then discovered that the crisis was a broken water dish. That’s all. And my two children were unable to locate a suitable bowl in the cupboard on their own. Now mind you, the broken dish? Not dangerous. Just a cracked plastic container. They were reduced to helpless bickering when it came down to selecting a bowl that would tide the dog over until we got up an hour or so later.

I’ll skip all the ranting, but I did, in fact, go postal for a good ten minutes. My children can be adorable, but they’re not so much with the problem-solving. I came to myself ranting about being stranded in Austria with an ounce of weed and no passport, and then what’re they gonna do? Neither one of them had an answer.

Since I was up, I decided to finish the laundry, which only worsened my mood. I hate laundry. I hate lugging it, I hate washing it, I hate handling wet clothes. I merely dislike folding it, because at least it’s warm, soft, and good-smelling, which it assuredly isn’t before. I have my doubts that passion can thrive in any setting where you’re forced to deal with your man’s cooty-full drawers.

That took until nearly lunchtime, so I had to chivvy my brood into bathing and getting dressed. I needed to do some grocery shopping, and I thought we’d get lunch out. Well, traffic was hellacious because it’s almost time for Posada and people will be having parties every night. Service was slow at the restaurant, but we eventually got our meals, and moved on to phase two, which was shopping.

Shopping with my whole family is like something out of a Chevy Chase movie. My husband doesn’t understand that I have a system. I’ve learned the layout of the store, and I can buzz through at a dead run, grabbing this or that, and be out in twenty minutes, if I’m left to do my job. Today, it was stuff like, “Honey, where’s the cat litter? What brand do we buy…?”

Well, for the love of God, I grab it on the way out because it’s near the checkout lines. Please don’t mess with my system! It took a good fifteen minutes extra because of the family help. My son wanted to eat every sample we passed, despite the fact that we’d just eaten lunch. And the crowds were just insane. If I’d spent any longer in the store I would’ve started running people down with my buggy.

By this time I had a pounding headache. Luckily, I keep Advil in my purse, so I downed some on the way home and tried to pretend it was later than three p.m. We put away the food, and by four, I had made a run for the bedroom, which I should’ve locked. Because my husband kept coming in to “check on me” and kiss me awake, which is code for, “Honey, I love you. Please get up and deal with the children. I don’t want to be alone with them anymore. The boy has a weird look in his eye and the girl won’t stop complaining. They want me to play board games, sweetie. BOARD GAMES. For the love of God, HELP ME.”

His distress notwithstanding, I managed to milk that nap for almost three hours. I made him feed them too. Mwahahaha! My evil knows no bounds. By the time I came down, the house smelled like burning. Andres had made dinner, you see.

We watched some TV together, and I felt more or less normal again. The urge to kill had faded almost entirely. And then the guys started teasing our daughter about her stench (for those who don’t know, she’s had a cast on her foot for three weeks… she tore some ligaments in her ankle). They drove her into a high frenzy and then capped it by joking that there were probably dead bugs inside there. At that point, her hysteria wasn’t going to end unless we did something drastic.

The cast was due to come off in a couple of days anyway, so what could we do but get the tools and remove it ourselves? It took like two hours of tag-team sawing while the Simpsons played and her brother made dismemberment jokes. Dear readers, the operation was a success and the girl reports her ankle is healed. We told her not to run for another week and take special care with it until she gets used to being cast-less again. She took a normal shower for the first time in weeks and put lotion on. Now everyone is sleeping peacefully, and I’m looking forward to another day like this tomorrow.

No, we’re not the Simpsons. But we could be. So if you ever envy my glamorous writer’s life… you might wanna rethink that. I have a dog who steals my underwear and my shoes, and a cat who cries when I take a bath. I have kids. I have a husband.

Do I need to go on?

So tell me about your latest bad day. How does your family get on your nerves? I know you love them and all, but you can vent. I won’t tell. Do the holidays make it worse?

PS - Jolene needs to email me. She won the Season of Giving contest.