Happy Holidays.

I am on holidays from work, which I was totally looking forward to. And yet, here I am, the midway point of my week off and feeling something less than wild enthusiasm. Why this should be the case, I have no idea. But then I thought about it. And maybe I do have an idea.

The first thing is that my day starts like this:
"Mom, Alex is awake and he pooped," Payton announces as she trudges into my room at 7:00 with said poopy baby trailing behind her, diaper sodden and clamoring to get into bed with me.
"What's for breakfast?" she asks while I'm in the middle of changing said diaper. I reply, distracted, "I don't know yet sweetie." "Can you make pancakes?"
"I think Alex puked in the night," she informs me, all in the same transaction. We've gone from poop to pancakes to puke in less than two minutes.
Am I still sleeping??
"What?" I grumble, stalking off to the bedroom to check out the puke situation.
Well now I'm awake.
No puke, but still I had to dig through all of the bedding to check it out.
"What are we going to do today?" Payton asks, following me as I traipse into the kitchen, baby on hip, to make coffee. "Can we go to the Fun Factoy? Or the water park? Or mini golfing?"
"We'll see," I reply.

And honestly, you would think that I had never NEVER spent a moment of time with those kids in their lives. They clamor for my attention, all of it. I try to sit on the couch to drink my coffee. Immediately, Payton is on my lap. Her brother is right behind her, trying with some frustration to push Payton off of me "MY MOMMY" Then I have both of them on me. They're both trying to push the other off, both insisting that I'm their mommy and their mommy only. During the struggle, the coffee spills.
I get up to try to clean it up. Of course, the kids are right behind me.
Alex falls, starts crying. I pick him up, soothe him with a half hearted tousle to the head, while trying to clean up the coffee, which the dog has started to lap up. I try to hold her at bay with my right leg, while standing on my left leg, balancing the baby (still crying) and trying to mop.
It's 7:20 am.
And I'm already exhausted.
And my third child hasn't even woken up yet.
Fuck me.

Anyways. It's still good to get the time off. But it's hardly a day at the beach. In point of fact, even a day at the beach is no day at the beach. You have to get the kids sunscreened and bugsprayed and get Alex's Swimmers on him and go into the water with them and blow up their floaties and then they're crying because someone got sand in their eyes. And then one kid pees on the other kids towel and there's hysteria and then your beach neighbors pack up and move away with disgusted looks on thier faces.
True story.
Oh well.
It can only get better, I guess.
Right??

Unrelated matter. This week I stopped buying juice. Between the three kids they drink about two litres of juice a day, which has been costing me about twenty dollars a week. Not to mention that my kids have been getting their cavities filled at the same rate as...
there is no good simile for that. For some reason I want to say something about Keanu Reeves but I just can't make it work, as in "at the rate as Keanu Reeves making bad movies" but then, he hasn't made that many movies lately, has he??
Sorry. I'm all over the place.
But the point is I've stopped buying juice. We have water and we have milk, and the way I see it, that's a lot more than what three quarters of the worlds population has, so that should be good enough. The kids seem less enthusiastic about it. And also, possibly, slightly dehydrated. Between the three of them they've probably drank about eight ounces of water in the last two days.
Is that really bad??
OK. I just looked on Wikepedia and it is.
But hopefully they'll get used to it?? Alex seems to be taking it better. He brings me his juice cup, I fill it with water, he takes a sip, then chucks it at my head.
So that's progress.
I mean. At least he got that sip, right??