My daughter borrowed “Peter Pan” from some of my favorite kids. After watching it one day during her rest time, she came over to me and said, “I’m going to call you mother today.”
I said, “Okay, Lacy Darling.” She loved being Lacy Darling, and she went out of her way to find different ways to talk to me -just so she could exercise the Mother word.
“Here’s a towel, Mother.”
“Mother, I love you.”
“Mother, look at my twirls.”
Yesterday, she took to calling me mother again. She also insisted that I refer to her as Lacy Darling. But Lacy isn’t always Darling, so sometimes I forgot. Like when she hit her brother about a million times yesterday. Like when she had to be asked a million times to pick up her things and STILL decided not to. Like when she yelled at her brother. Like when she threw a screaming FIT when we left the second birthday party of yesterday
By the time the sun went down and I had prepared and delivered both a FHE lesson, dinner, and a FHE snack and then gotten the kids bathed, dressed in PJs, and had family prayer… I was through. Wasted.
I sat down on the couch while Lacy “Darling” scurried to clean her room up in hopes of getting to color in her chore graph (it didn’t happen, by the way. She couldn’t stay up long enough to finish her room because it had been days since she’d cleaned it). Sitting next to me was my husband. I listened to the kids fighting in their room (“No! TRENT! GET OUTTA HERE! I just gotta CLEAN UP!”) and the sounds of Angry Birds coming from my husband’s phone, and I took a stand.
“I’m going to bed,” I said. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve gone to bed while the children were still up. But last night, I was at the end of my rope. I said my prayers, slathered my feet in lotion before applying my awesome arch support socks, and then remembered that I had forgotten to take my daily herb.
I went back out into the jungle and took it. As I walked by the kids’ room, they were both in bed watching “How To Train Your Dragon.”
“Goodnight, babies,” I cooed to them, and made my way into my room.
“MOM!?” Came the cry as crossed the threshold into my room.
“NOGOTOBED!” I shouted back, almost without realizing it. The silence that followed was broken only by a thundering laugh from my husband.
Apparently shouting after cooing makes me a regular comedian.
Or maybe just a regular mom.
