What a day!!!

Oh wow. I am really not fond of days like this!!

Up and running all day long…thought we were needing to go help a lady, got ready for it like crazy, then didn’t have to go. Then trying to make a difficult decision with Matt while running around feeding the girls and trying to help them let mom and dad have a time to talk. One kid finds the watercolors and paints herself. As I’m scrubbing her off, there’s one spot of red paint that just keeps reappearing!! Then I realize it is blood and she had a nasty cut from something, and I feel like a great mom! Then we’re trying to clean up smeared pb&j from exhausted crying toddlers, then off to pick up glasses, get them adjusted, and to the doctor.

LONG dr. visit later with all sorts of ups and downs for a couple of us, and it’s too late for daddy to take us back home and get to work in time, so we have to take him. But on the way there, he gets a call saying he will have to travel between buildings tonight, so he needs the car. So, the girls and I sit in the stuffy car in the parking lot for a while, waiting for daddy to have a break at work so he can take us the 45 minutes back home before he runs to the other building. Run home, trying to fill prescriptions (unsuccessfully) before the pharmacy closes, then dump some milk and crackers down the girls before we have to run to a meeting at the church. (No naps yet, of course!!)

The meeting lasts an hour and a half…good meeting, but I can hear the girls crying in the nursery and some older kids in there being grumpy at them. I go in to take care of it, but find that the kids will be leaving soon. Problem solved? I went back to the meeting.

No. Before they left, the kids clean the nursery spotless and then turned out the lights, leaving my kids no place to go and thinking that they are not allowed to go back in.

And we’ve got an hour left. With some leaders who have no children and think that they know all there is to know about children, and that they should definitely be seen and not heard. hmmm….make that not seen or heard. Yeah. I’d love to have a room full of people like that and a weapon of choice….but I will take some deep breaths and possibly borrow the treadmill again to get rid of that thought. :) So for the remaining hour I’ve got one baby fussing, another one strewing my debit and credit cards all over the room, and two running in and out crying because they’ve had no naps and feel like no one wants them anywhere.

9:30 pm, and we’re finally done with the meeting. Home!! So we get into the car after I chase the girls around the car about 10 times, because somehow they caught their 2nd wind…or is it their 200th? Part-way there, with several kids crying, while I’m trying to play peek-a-boo in the mirrors, something smells hot. Is that my car? Some fervent praying later, we pull in to the house. The unbelievably messy house. The house so messy that if a robber broke in (since I had forgotten to lock the door), would have left because he would have thought another robber had been here already and that there was nothing left to tear apart.

I throw a pizza in the oven and fire up the nebulizer for the 4th breathing treatment of the day with a kid who hates her breathing treatments. One wrestling match down, and we eat some undercooked pizza while I hold a crying baby and a very angry toddler who is covered in hives and needs her other breathing treatment yet. I step out for one second to get something and come back to three unclothed children. (How do they move so fast?)

An hour later, pizza is finally eaten, breathing treatments are finally done, and girls are begging for a bath but momma is just way too tired and it’s too late. They’re starting to wail from exhaustion. (I think I was about to, too.) I literally chase two of them and sit on them to get their pjs on while another one struggles to get hers on backwards and upside-down by herself. Are we close? Are we close? I think I see bedtime in sight!!!

The baby is crying really hard now. As I go to get her, one of the girls beats me to her just in time to be right in the line of fire as the baby throws up all over mom’s bed, where she had been lying. So now two kids and a bed (where I was planning to sleep soon) are soaked.

And this is getting really long, so I’ll spare you the next ten things that happened. But suffice it to say that 20 minutes later I was at the bottom of the stairs crying while three girls upstairs and one down on the couch were all crying, too. I felt horrible. I hate my girls going to sleep sad. I can’t stand it. I love them so much. I was just so tired.

But as I sat there, something to the effect of this went through my mind: “Just do the best you can, but be sure it is the very best. Then leave it in the hands of the Lord.” (Gordon B. Hinckley.)

I realized that even though I was exhausted, I could do a little better, give just a little more, if I really tried and sought His help. I wanted to. I wanted to do better and give my girls and I some peace again. So I prayed for help, and while I was praying, they all fell asleep. I went upstairs so I could tell them I loved them, even if it had to be in their sleep.

As soon as I whispered it, they all woke up and started to cry again.

But this time I had it in me to sit down and rock the baby while I sang to the other girls until they fell asleep again. In that final moment of peace and of quiet, I did know that the Lord had helped me, and that everything truly was in His hands.

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