Tonight I collapsed on the couch after dinner, and despite being clambered upon like a jungle gym by two children at one time, I could not roust myself up for a good half hour. Clearly the brain drain caused by major house decisions on top of normal every day trouble-shooting has taken a toll.
Speaking of day-to-day life here, the kids are cranking up the daily trouble-shooting requirement exponentially. Sam and Anna have decided that it's tremendous to race around the house making as much mess and racket as possible. (You can make a complete loop if you go down the hall and turn through the master bedroom, master bathroom, laundry/pantry area, cut through the middle of the kitchen, hit the french doors to the backyard, and then about-face to race through the living room to the hallway. I find toys, clothes, diapers, cups, food, stuffed animals, and much much more strewn all along this path of destruction.
But the worst part is the volume. The rules of this game must, by my great skills at deduction and inference, include the following rule: Thou shalt not run this course without screaming at the top of your lungs the entire way. Anna has an ear-splitting, migraine-inducing shriek that she wields like a cannon, especially when pushed, pulled, tripped, or by any other means annoyed by her brother. And I'm not being hypersensitive here. Elli has started expressing extreme displeasure when they start their laps.
The last three days have been especially intense because we've had a lot of (much-needed) rain. The kids have been wilder than usual from being cooped up in the house for so long. I finally let them play outside in the rain yesterday. It only helped a little though -- they wouldn't stay out for long.
Elli was so finished with the whole thing tonight that she could barely eat. I am so beat down by it that my patience is about 1 millionth of a millimeter. Which starts a vicious cycle -- the kids yell and scream, so I yell to stop, so Elli yells and cries for all of us to stop, which stresses me out even more (because now we've added to the volume and intensity of the house).
I'm not sure how to stop the cycle. It's so hot and sticky outside now, even with the clouds, that the kids won't stay out for very long, and it's way too hot for Elli. I can't really blame them for not wanting to be out there, either. The pool is only an option if I have an extra pair of adult hands, which lately has been once a week.
Somehow I have to survive the rest of the summer without going through a pound of aspirin and turning into Witch Mother.
Maybe I should invest in a good pair of earplugs. And a tubal ligation. If this is how life with three is, I don't want to touch four with a fifty-foot pole.
