Rainy Day Woman

It's a cold and rainy day in Durham, and it looks like it's going to be a long one.

When my baby monitor rooster (aka Addison) woke me up this morning, I was still tired because Ella had woken up with about a million reasons (all of them absurd) to come into our bedroom last night. It was hard to get my eyes open, and not just because I was tired. Both of my eyes were gooped shut by the lingering effects of some sort of crazy swollen goopy eye thing that I woke up with a couple days ago and that caused me to look like Forest Whitaker, only a little less black. But I digress.

Anyway, after I degooped my eye I fetched Addison who was jumping up and down in her crib and squealing (it must have been an inside joke because there isn't anything even remotely funny in her room). When we went downstairs, Addison started going... well, bananas over the bananas she could see on the counter, so I gave her one. I watched her take a bite to make sure that's what she really wanted, and then started boiling some water in the microwave for my coffee. By the time I turned around, she had smashed that banana on the floor and was busy squishing it in between her fingers. As I was cleaning it up, Ella had come downstairs. She decided she wanted some oatmeal for breakfast, and that sounded really good to me, too, so I got to fixin' our last two packages. Addison saw what I was doing and began urgently crawling up my leg to get to the oatmeal which she decided she wanted, having smashed her first breakfast. I dejectedly put both bowls in the fridge to cool off and resigned myself to some plain old shreaded wheat for breakfast. The boiling water I had set on the counter for the coffee I still hadn't had a chance to make had long since cooled off, so I grabbed the pyrex cup and put it back in the microwave. I took it out when it started to boil, but by then Addison was downright mad about her lack of oatmeal, so I got her situated before getting out the French press. Now that it had cooled off, Addison made it her mission to try to dump her oatmeal all over the table. Not to be thwarted by the fact that gravity seemed to have no effect on the oatmeal, which continued to stick to the bottom of the bowl despite her having turned it upside down, she decided to grab it by the fist full and smear it all over the place. I really needed that coffee by now, so I hurriedly poured the water over the coffee grounds before running over to the table to stop her. Once I got within striking distance, she went after my shirt and smeared oatmeal all over that, too.

By the time I got everything and everyone cleaned up, enough time had passed for my coffee to be ready. I thought it looked a little light, but I pressed it anyway. One taste, though, told me something had gone incredibly wrong. Not only was it the coffee weak, it was cold. And absurdly sweet. Seeing the oatmeal that was supposed to be my breakfast being projected across the room had me so frazzled that I had grabbed the wrong pyrex and had poured into the press the sugar water I was supposed to be feeding Ella's class butterflies that we had the pleasure of babysitting over spring break. It was shaping up to be the type of morning where we definitely (and perhaps desperately) needed to get out of the house but, like I said, it was cold and raining so the park was out and Durham public schools are on spring break this week, so any indoor places of interest would be swamped. I resigned myself to doing some laundry while the kids tore up the house. Before I could make it out of the kitchen, though, the cat finally discovered there was a butterfly inside the huge habitat (seriously, Addison could fit inside of this thing) that has been resting on our kitchen counter since Friday (the first butterfly emerged from its cocoon yesterday). He started frantically swatting at it, and had almost pushed the butterfly habitat off the counter, thereby dislodging the remaining unhatched chrysalises that were perilously hanging from the top of the habitat, before I caught him and tossed him outside. That would have been a tough one to explain to a group of 3 yr olds.

Okay, then, to the laundry! Whites were the first up, and I got a pleasant surprise when I got to the bottom of the basket. The last time I did laundry was when my mom was here a week ago, and since then someone had thrown a wet rag in the laundry, upon which we had been heaping dirty clothes all week. The rag itself, as well as the clothes that were in contact with it, had mildew stains all over them. Gross. That's it--it's time to start taking notes for a story. As I write this my whites are soaking in bleach and Ella is screaming because she is in a sleeping bag pretending to be an unhatched butterfly but Addison keeps trying to get inside her cocoon. A quick look at my watch tells me they've only been up for an hour. Bloody Marys, anyone?