The Too Hard Basket

image thanks to weheartit.com

There are days when things just become too difficult. Days when I feel like climbing back into bed, pulling my blankets over my head and wishing that I could go back to sleep. Days where I wished that I had a 'Too Hard' basket and I could just dump the offending day in there.....
'Damn you Friday! In the 'Too Hard' basket you go!'

This morning I awoke early.....too early, to find a small person breathing very loudly in my ear. 'Mum' he loudly whispered, 'Mum, will you get up and play cars with me?'

No, no I won't get up and play bloody cars with you. It is five fifteen in the morning...I want to sleep damn you...I want to sleep!

Of course I didn't actually say this, I sort of muttered 'In a minute darling, go and wait for Mummy in the lounge room' and then promptly fell back asleep. Only to wake up at quarter to seven and completely freak out because the latest I can sleep in with out being ridiculously late is quarter past six.

Then, understandably Mr 5 (the early riser) was miffed. Quite possibly because I had kept him waiting in the lounge for an hour and a half to play cars.

Mr 5 in a good mood is delightful. Mr 5 in a bad mood is, quite frankly, scary.

So, he grumped through breakfast, grumped through getting dressed, grumped through teeth, hair and packing bags, grumped through tidying his room and grumped his way out to the car.

'Sorry,' I kept saying, 'I'm really sorry, we'll play cars this afternoon...I promise' I kissed, cuddled and tried to mollify him while I searched in the voracious depths that is my bag for my car keys........

Snotty tissue from Miss 2.....ick.......squashed sultanas stuck to my purse.....yuck......soggy bit of biscuit.....ugh......lip gloss minus the lid, sticky contents everywhere....sigh.....but, you guessed it, no keys.

'Darling, have you seen my keys!' I bellow....waking up any nice, normal neighbours that may be sleeping at that hour (who hadn't already been woken by Mr 5's grumping)

Of course he hadn't.

So then we all scour the house trying to find the damn things. I dump the contents of my filthy hand bag on the dining table...no keys. We check kids bags, counter tops, kitchen draws, under beds, beneath couch cushions and in every little nook and cranny imaginable...no keys.

By this stage we irrecoverably and incredibly late. It takes twenty minutes in peak hour traffic to get my children to school and today was the one day that we needed to be there early for dance rehearsals.

I end up leaving my poor husband with my key less car and 'borrowing' his.

Once the children had been safely deposited at school I flew home so Hubby could actually go to work. He had spent the time I had been gone searching for lost keys and when I had arrived home had still had no joy.

I walked in and noticed Miss Two's tea set sitting on a step. On a whim I picked up a little pot and lifted the lid....there were my keys.

Hubby and I clutched each other laughing at our own stupidity........'So,' I said cheerfully....'Can I go back to bed now?'

The Frazzled Mumma.....

I've had one of those mornings....you know the ones.....the type of morning when everything that can go wrong does....the kind of morning when sanity is on a razor edge and I feel inclined to leap from this burning building before it goes crashing down to the ground.

It started off with oversleeping. I rarely oversleep. You see I have four built in alarm clocks that tend to awaken me before the sun actually rises and the world is dark, cold and immobile. This morning the alarm clocks were broken, and so resulted in me waking at quarter past 7 and then completely freaking out.

I ran around the house like a demented banshee, screaming and yelling at the still sleeping forms of my Husband and children. They didn't appreciate my wake up call and dragged their feet reluctantly.

I sculled my morning coffee and resulted in burning my tongue. This pissed me off. Coffee is something to savour, enjoy, inhale slowly and calmly. I could not appreciate it and therefore my bad mood was established.

I ruined the porridge so the children scored lumpy, claggy goop in their breakfast bowls - rather than the usual smooth and delicious offering. They moaned and complained but I silenced them with a 'look', my 'look' the 'don't mess with the frazzled Mumma look'

Lunchboxes were thrown together, I have no idea what ended up in them, possibly an arrangement of random items from the pantry. This made me even crankier than I was already....I like to take time and care with school lunches. It makes me feel like I deserve my 'good Mummy' award. It makes me feel like I'm sending them off into the big, bad world with the tools necessary to deal with whatever is thrown at them. They can beat off school bullies with a good, nutritious salad sandwich, I'm sure. But today I failed miserably....pre-packaged, plain and boring all the way....

I had to cajole them into their un-ironed uniforms, I had to bribe them to clean their teeth. I had them all lined up to brush hair when I discovered something  crawling in one of them.......Eek! Crap! Flipping Bloody Hell! Off to the shower with a head full of chemicals to kill the creepy, disgusting little bastards.

And then...into the car, strapping in the wiggly, whinging Toddler, breaking up the inevitable fight between the two eldest. I sat down, took in a couple of deep breaths and turned the key in the ignition....nothing, zero, zip...my beloved carrier of small people had died, resulting in a lot of silent cursing and slow, systematic head butting of the steering wheel.

Thank god Hubby came to the rescue, piling the monsters into his eternally reliable Falcon, a promise to come back and charge the blasted battery and off they went. Their little fair heads just discernible through the back window. For a moment I feel a tiny bit bereft at their departure and then I sigh, think of having another cuppa I can actually savour and I slowly creep back into the bomb site that is my home.