It Was a Hard Day

I should be giving you a recap of my royal wedding filled weekend.  You would love to hear about the gorgeous tea I attended with ten of my sweet friends.

And how we ate four kinds of dessert then rolled into the other room for a gift exchange in which we nearly tore each other’s hats off because we are all so desperate for new towels.

If I were telling you about it, you might enjoy seeing a closer look at my fascinator.

Or I could tell you about the games James and I played Saturday night with our favorite aunts and uncles.  Now that was a really fun time.  Except for the cheating by someone who shall remain nameless.  All I will say is that he married into the family and clearly wasn’t taught by his mother that when the rules say “no gestures” it means you can’t point at things in the room.

But I am too tired to tell you all of that because today has been one of those weird days where nothing goes right.  You know the ones, when you wonder if maybe you should just crawl into bed and try again tomorrow.

It began with the electricity going out at 6 AM and staying out.  I am not sure when it came back on because I decided to leave home and take the kids to the big city. It seemed like a good excuse, but really it was something I had to do.  They all needed one thing or another that can’t be purchased in our small town.  But I have been avoiding going with them all at once.  In case you’ve never done it, here’s the problem with going to a store with nine kids.  Even though mine are well behaved, don’t touch things they shouldn’t, don’t whine or beg for things, etc…..they take up space.  We block the path of everyone else in the store and no matter how hard we try, we can’t help it.  “Move over,” I’ll say, “You are blocking that lady from getting past.”  The kids squeeze and try to move, but you just can’t be out of the way when there are so many of you.

But me and my big brain thought this would be a good idea, so we hit the road with a long list of places to go.

At every stop something went wrong.  The credit card machine wasn’t working or the prices were a mistake and they were double charging me, the kid at the register didn’t know how to add and to top it off…..I stepped on a rock and it hit that tender spot in the middle of my heel and I had this huge bruise that left me limping the rest of the day.  In one store we spent an hour and a half blocking the aisles looking for some smidgen of decency for my girls to wear in the pool, only to get to the register and find out their machines were down (second store of the day to tell me that) and we could only pay with cash.  I had $2.

Really?  Can we just pull out those old machines that you set the card in, put a carbon copy paper over it and slide it back and forth?

Nope.  I hobbled out in frustration and decided to get everyone a yogurt.  It was a splurge, but Mommy needed chocolate or something was going to blow.  It only took 3.7 seconds at the yogurt place for one of the kids to spill their dulce de leche flavored yogurt on my white shirt.

That’s it.  Mom’s done.

The weirdest part is, it was a good day.  Maybe we came home without swimwear.  Maybe I have to drive back there on Wednesday because I still don’t have any birthday presents for Adam.  But we got to spend the day together.  We got to laugh at the mishaps that made it more of an adventure.

Although I am still limping, I wouldn’t have done it any other way.  It will be a memory for all of us, especially the cashier at the yogurt place that told me the credit card machine was down (for the third time, did Bin Laden’s death somehow affect all credit card machines?).  I gave her the look of death, walked away and ate my yogurt anyway even though I didn’t pay for it.

Right now I can hear my four daughters upstairs giggling about the day and talking about how fun it all was.

That’s the best reward for a hard day, wouldn’t you say?