Things Fall Apart...

...the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned...

Why yes, The Husband is travelling again, how on earth did you guess?

He's back in Canadaland again. I get so jealous knowing that his ingredients listed on his cereal box tomorrow morning will be bilingual.

And me? Halfway to Crazy Town, and it hasn't even been 24 hours yet.

I don't know know why things seem to go so swiftly and so immediately straight into the crapper. Goodness knows I used to do this all the time, juggling full-time mom responsibilities with full-time employee responsibilities. Just seems harder these days for some reason.

Probably because it's sporadic. After a few weeks of this, I'm sure everything would be running smoothly and we'd get into the groove. But when it's only a few days, we spend the entirety of it like those finches my younger brother used to have that my older brother absolutely hated. Yenno would wait until Chinkle Chapstick Lunchbox (note: these were their actual nicknames - and you thought Peitricia Mae was weird) wasn't around, and then he'd take a ruler and ram it repeatedly between the bars of their cage. Not to hurt them, but just to stop that constant cheerful squawking.

It worked for awhile in that there were a few seconds of silence, but then all finch-craziness would break loose and it was all flapping and feathers and avian rioting...

Today was still on the "okay" side of "how are you managing, you poor dear girl?" The Boy went to a crepe-making party after school (hee! I love French Immersion) and The Girl had a playdate. Then frozen pizza and off to swimming lessons.

Husband-less as I am, I told them we'd have to come home for our post-pool showers. They pleaded with me to let them shower there. Obviously: who wouldn't want to shower in mildewing, dim, damp open-to-everyone shower stalls in a crumbling locker room in a local high school when the alternative is our bright, clean, always-enough-hot-water-and-actual-pressure shower.

So I sent them, reminding The Boy that I couldn't go into the boys changeroom with him and he would need to ask for help to turn the shower on and off and to put his bag off to the side and to...

"Okay, Mom, I KNOW!"

(Yup, a healthy dose of belligerence today, too, for some reason. Must've been too many crepes.)

Ten minutes later, I was wondering if I should poke my head into the changeroom with my hand covering my eyes or ask the man next to me if he would be willing to go see if my son was okay when The Boy emerged looking rather worse for the wear and dragging his bag on the tiles.

"That was a BAD shower," he announced. "My towel got wet and my pajamas got wet and I HAVE NO UNDERWEAR!"

Well, he did have underwear. He just couldn't find it at the bottom of his bag. Because it was covered by his towel. Which was currently entirely swollen with about two gallons of water. Because he had brought the entire kit and kaboodle into the shower with him.

Who could possibly have seen that coming?

Ah well. Best get me off to bed. I need to cram 8 hours of work into 5 and a half hours in the office and working from home while the kids are awake is dicey, so the plan is to log in at 5:30 am and get through a couple of hours before I have to reach for bleary-eyed children and non-bilingual cereal boxes. Who am I kidding - the spirit is willing, but this flesh'll be lucky if it gets to the coffeemaker by 6:30.