On Sunday morning, my twenty-four-hour-escape near the coast came to an end, and I had to say goodbye to Sara and head home. After spending a whole day catching up, eating food (we both ate so much we actually felt sick), and watching reality TV in bed until we fell asleep. Our dogs, best friends since basically birth, played until they couldn’t play anymore, and both got to experience the luxury of sleeping in the bed (until they tried to start playing at one o’clock in the morning).
I started my three-hour drive home just after breakfast, and Ginger was passed out within five minutes. Like I said, she played hard!
When I got home around 11:00am, both of the twins and my husband were asleep. I had a lot of people ask how on Earth I was able to sneak away for a day, but truthfully, my husband loves staying at home with the girls. By all accounts they are “easy babies” (I hate that phrase, but the shoe fits), and he loved getting to stay home from work for a day and just hang out with them, read, and play video games. And since he’s a competent parent and adult, the house was spotless and everything that needed to get done, got done. Of course, I still felt a ton of guilt about doing something as selfish as taking a day off, so I was relieved to come home and find everyone rested and happy.
That night, we picked up all three of the older kids, and chaos resumed. Well, it never really stops, so maybe it’s more accurate to say that the chaos ramped up again. On Monday night, Thomas burst into tears because he said his loose tooth was hurting him. He had started complaining of his tooth a week ago, so I knew it was only a matter of time. I convinced him to let me look at it, and sure enough, it was ready to come out.
He was handling the tooth pain about as well as I did at the age, which is to say, he was in hysterics. Sobbing. Refusing to let me look at it. I don’t know how, but eventually, I convinced him to let me pull it. I was extremely nervous, because I had actually never pulled a tooth before! But it came right out, and then Thomas was thrilled, proudly showing off the gap in his smile to his sisters. He was elated the next morning to discover that the tooth fairy had paid him a visit!
The twins have really taken a liking to eating the past week or so. Evelyn will happily accept any bread she’s given, Emersyn loves the little teething crackers, and both of them go crazy for purées. They are now consistently eating decent amounts of food at a time, and it has been so fun to watch!
They also turned seven months old on Wednesday!!! Where has the time gone?! They must have known that I was extra emotional about it, too, because they both picked that exact day to start crawling. They’ve been scooting and flopping around for awhile, but on Wednesday, they were full on crawling, coordinated hands and legs and all. Evelyn quickly learned how fun it is to crawl over to the dog’s water bowl and splash around, while Emersyn found a fun pile of electrical cords on the opposite side of the house. So this should be fun!
The rest of the week was a blur. Wednesday, I took a day off of school and work to get caught up on all of the “life stuff” that had piled up since the start of the school year. Kevin’s car needed an oil change, I had to mail off my application to take the North Carolina Bar Examination (eeeee!!), I had to return a breast pump to DHHS, and other fun things of that nature. It was a productive day, but it meant that on Thursday, I was even more tired than I had been before my “day off.”
I was really in my feels about this all day Thursday. I feel like I’m behind in work and school, assignments are starting to pile up, I have a lot of anxiety about failing the bar or not being able to find a job after all of this hard work and money. It’s just a lot of pressure, and as is the case for most adults, it really does seem like it’s one thing after another, all the time.
So imagine how well I handled it when my husband calls me from the elementary school drop-off line and says, “Hey, someone just hit your car while I was dropping off the kids. Yeah, they rear-ended me, so the back bumper is damaged. I got to go, I’ll call you after I handle this.”
It’s the kind of event that makes you throw your hands up in the air and go, Of course that happened!Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, right?
Luckily, everybody in the car was fine (he had the twins with him so I was extra nervous), and the damage to the car is minimal. Ironically, this is the second time that one of my cars has been in an accident, but I’m not in the car. Still, it was a pretty sour note to end an already stressful week on.
By Saturday night, I was ready to crawl into bed and hide under the covers for a week. Sadly, that wasn’t a possibility, so instead, I asked Kevin if we should just do dinner at the park and get out of the house for a bit.
A little time outside turned out to be what everybody needed. The older kids got to run around and play and be as loud as they wanted to, without having to worry about any napping babies. Everyone happily enjoyed their Lunchable, adults included. And by the time we got home, everyone was readyfor bed.
This week might have had some tough moments, but sitting there at the park, next to my husband, each of us holding a baby while our three other kids ran around laughing and playing, I realized something:
We have each other, so we already have everything we need.
