Reasons Like Seasons

Dearest Reader, Tonight, I would like to amuse you with a long, detailed description of my near endless adventures with not one, but two steam-cleaners. Similarly, it would bring me great joy to regale you with my mis-adventures trying to make sense of the gluten-free print-out I brought with me to Trader Joe's. In the same vein, I long to wax poetic about the drama that unfolded as my husband came home, tired and over-worked, to find the boys using a bike lock as a grappling hook from atop our piled-up belongings (see steam-cleaning in sentence one). However, tonight, the best I can do is this lowly paragraph and a new page on my blog documenting my meager attempts to feed my younger child food that does not exacerbate his breathing and skin problems. Watching a child unable to breathe is torture of the cruelest kind. May my efforts bring him, and me, some relief. Sincerely, RL

5:05 Baby cries. Nurse baby. Baby sleeps. 5:15 Try to sleep. 5:20 Try to sleep. 5:25 Try to sleep. 5:30 Give up on sleep. Make coffee. Make lunches. Drink coffee. Check e-mail. Get dressed. 5:50 "Wake-up" alarm goes off. Make more coffee. Put lunches and work bag on stroller. 6:00 Get boy clothes. Change toddler. (Toddler remains asleep. Good sign.) Attempt to cloth Boy One. Boy One refuses to cooperate. Drink coffee. Regroup. 6:20 Peruse Facebook. Ponder the significance of my friend's post about which Disney Princess she is. Decide I would like to be Mulan. (That girl kicked ass.) 6:35 "Wake up the Boys" alarm goes off. Attempt to pry Boy One from bed. Resort to bribing Boy One to get up with promises of a yougart smoothie for breakfast. "I hate yougart smoothies!" Drink more coffee. 6:40 Toddler wakes, demands to be carried around the house. Boy One resigns himself to the day. Husband readies. 6...

I have a friend, a newly married young man in his early twenties, who's a Friday. When asked how much he loves the day, he replied, "I actually love Fridays so much that many times I prefer Thursday to Sunday." Great. He looks forward to the weekend like I look forward to arriving early at a doctor's appointment: when else do I get to sit quietly and enjoy someone else paying for my wi-fi? But I digress. When I get home on Friday afternoons, I am faced with at least a week's worth of laundry and dishes and two little boys who want to jump on all the furnature. Today, for example, I had the pleasure of washing six loads of laundry and digging under a giant pile of half-empty plastic children's cups in search of a fork that didn't require attention from a biohazard team. That was after I got to clean up the pound of salt Boy 2 dumped on the floor, but before the nightmare which was brushing Boy 1's teeth. I imagine my friend mentioned above went home a...