I paid $3.50 for a tube of Kids’ After-Bite bug-bite cream on a friend’s recommendation, and neglected to examine the ingredients. I now see the only active ingredient is…baking soda. This could have been less expensive.

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I vote for “proud to be an American” to be changed to “glad to be an American.” Applicable to all citizenships, of course. I would say that the word “proud” implies accomplishment, and works in situations where the accomplishment could be placed in either a “I’m proud that I ____” sentence OR an “I’m proud of you for ___” sentence. Math medal works: “I’m proud that I got that math medal” and “I’m proud of you for getting a math medal.” Grades work: “I’m proud that I got an A on that test” and “I’m proud of you for getting an A on that test.” Heroism works: “I’m proud that I helped put out that fire” and “I’m proud of you for helping put out that fire.” Military service works: “I’m proud of my military service” and “I’m proud of your military service.”

Things we’re born with do not: “I’m proud of having brown eyes” and “I’m proud of you for having brown eyes.” Citizenship does not: “I’m proud to be an American” and “I’m proud of you for being an American.” It totally works to be proud OF MY COUNTRY and all it has gone through to become and remain a country—but it doesn’t work to be proud OF MYSELF that I managed to be born here. It’s inappropriate to pat myself on the back for that, even if I pat my country on the back all the day long. (This is of course a different story for people who had to work hard and jump through a lot of hoops to become an American; I’m talking only about those of us who accomplished it via being born to or adopted by American parents—which, as some of us reminded our parents frequently during our teen years, we had no choice regarding.)

(Even “glad” has its problems, implying as it does a gladness NOT to be citizens of other countries—even though those countries might be very nice places indeed and we wouldn’t want to imply otherwise! Certainly not! But my guess is that other citizens of other countries would know what we meant, as long as they were likewise glad to be citizens of their own countries. “Liking home” is a sympathetic feeling.)

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There were a bunch of kids hanging out in the library parking lot being stupid in exactly the way kids hang out in parking lots being stupid. Characteristic example: one of them lit up a cigarette (which, they looked pretty young for that, but I remember there were freshmen in my high school who already smoked, so) and another one went SHRIEKING across the parking lot without looking to see if she’d get flattened, saying in a baby voice “GIMME ONE GIMME ONE GIMME ONE!!” and then when the other kid said, “You JUST had one” she did massive flouncy pout and said, “NUH UH NUH UH NUH UH!!” and then started screaming that she was “F**KING PISSED!!” and flouncing back across the parking lot, and everyone involved was talking way too loud and with high awareness of putting on a performance. Stuff like that. Plus: skinny jeans and silly hair.

And anyway, after witnessing that, I find I now feel depressed-in-advance about my children’s teenage years—and really about EVERYONE’S teenage years. This mood took a huge additional swoop downward when I came out of the library and Ms. Screamy Flouncy Baby said “HEY ROB!!” to Rob, and it emerged that she JUST FINISHED SIXTH GRADE, WITH ROB. She is smoking, and screaming obscenities in parking lots, and she is the same age as my firstborn. I was fretting about this to Paul, and Rob called out in a bored tone of voice from the living room where he was reading a book on the recliner (sprawled as if he’d been dropped there from above), “Think of it this way: I wasn’t one of them.” Well, yes. Not YET. It’s just that the Krazy has not yet infected his brain. I’ve told him over the years that the teenage years are dangerous because teenagers are temporarily insane but THINK they’re COMING INTO sanity. A few escape, but not many.

My hair is finally long enough to technically fit into a runty little 2-inch ponytail, with about half the hair gradually falling out of the ponytail during the day because it’s not quite long enough to be held firmly! Rejoice with me!

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Elizabeth needs her tonsils out. I’d been pre-fretting that it was going to be one of those Huge Stressful Hassle Money Referral Phone Call Situations where I would first have a huge stressful hassle of referral forms and insurance stuff and phone calls, then drive far away to see the specialist and pay a $35 copay, only to have him say, “Hm, why don’t we first have her come back in three months so I can look again, and then I’ll start a bunch of tests and trials that will require referrals and long drives and childcare arrangements and copays and phone calls and surprise after-bills from your insurance company but that in the end will give us no conclusive answers?”

So it was kind of good that he took one look and said, “Oh. Yeah. Those should come out. I mean, I get a lot of referrals where it could go either way, and so I have people come back in 3 months or try a bunch of other things first, but these are filling her whole throat.” And then he just launched into instructions for post-surgical care, including details about HORRIBLE PAIN and WET SCABS that…I mean, I was standing there with hands clenched in front of me in Classic Anxiety Pose, and he’s telling me that if I can’t force her to take fluids afterward I’ll need to check her back into the hospital for an IV drip. His frankness was both alarming and reassuring: evidently these horrors are completely routine.

I DO know this is a pretty routine procedure, and if one of you were worried about it I would be empathizing with your anxiety and telling reassuring stories of my own childhood tonsil-removal: “I mean, I didn’t want the greatly-anticipated ice cream and popsicles afterward because I felt too crummy, but other than that it was fine.” I wouldn’t be promising it would be fine with your child too because what am I claiming, that I can see the future? that by speaking the words with the tone of a prophet, I can make them true? BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO SOME PEOPLE, even when other people state confidently that they won’t. But I COULD say that it would LIKELY be fine—because it WOULD likely be fine. Statistically, bad things AREN’T likely to happen.

So I’m thinking all those things for myself, too, and also feeling glad that it’s apparently a clear-cut case and I don’t have to struggle much with the decision, but I’m also thinking that SHE COULD DIE ON THE OPERATING TABLE. Or they could make a mistake and she could end up losing her voice permanently. Or it could turn out later on that the key to longevity, cancer avoidance, and avoiding anxiety disorders is held in our tonsils. And also she will CRY and maybe be SCARED. And I will cry because I will see my tiny girl in a tiny hospital johnny going into the operating room, and it will feel like an episode of a medical drama and that sort of thing always makes me immediately burst into tears—but I will need to NOT cry because if I cry that will alarm her.

And anyway, I am a little stressed, even though I know it will likely be fine and that nothing on that list is likely to happen except the parts with the crying, and while she’s in surgery the medical staff will shoo Paul and me to the hospital cafeteria and I love cafeterias. And Elizabeth is greatly looking forward to the ice cream and popsicles, just as I was as a child…UNTIL I WOKE UP.

Anyway, this and another couple of stresses (glimpse of future with teenagers; second glimpse of future with teenagers; fretting about Edward’s SHRIEKING FLAILING SOBBING during swimming lessons; cat coughing up hairballs which I thought was summer shedding but now I see several large almost-bald patches; over a month late now to have Henry’s 4-year photos taken) were threatening to send me into A Grim Mood. There was a twinge here and a twinge there, and then more twinges, and it’s kind of like wondering if you’re coming down with something or not: “Is that just a sneeze, or is it the first of many? Is my throat a little sore because I slept with my mouth open, or am I getting a cold? Is that little flash of ‘what’s the point of any of this, really?’ just a little thought in the thought soup, or is it a portent of mood to come?”

When I realized a Spiral of Grim was indeed forming, I tried to nip it in the bud. Coffee seemed called for, but SPECIAL coffee. I had espresso discs for the Tassimo, but I didn’t want one of the creamer discs. So I microwaved a cup of milk, then brewed the espresso into THAT. Meanwhile, I put in some toast, because I wanted to eat some Nutella. Then I realized I’d forgotten to sweeten/flavor the coffee milk, so I sprinkled cinnamon sugar on top—if “sprinkled” means “kept shaking until I couldn’t see milk.”

Good call.

I just had a total FIT about feeling like I spend so much time cleaning up (1) messes I didn’t make, which (2) I would get blamed for. That is, if someone came to my house and saw all the CRAP all over the floor, they’d be like “*raised eyebrows* Not much of a HOUSEKEEPER, is she?” And yet—did I make those messes? NO I DID NOT. So which makes more sense: blaming ME for not cleaning up the messes? or blaming THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE MESSES? It is intolerably unfair.

This song is DOMINATING MY MIND:

And now it’s okay for me to like it (despite several nauseating phrases in the lyrics), because now I know it’s NOT Justin Bieber singing it. I don’t know WHY I thought it was Justin Bieber, but I was SURE of it, so I must have heard a DJ saying it about the PREVIOUS song or something. Anyway, every time I heard it I found it so catchy and cheerful/sweet-sounding—and yet listening to a 16-year-old sing about “only having tonight” and “the way you make love” made me feel like barfing. Then I looked the song up and found it was not by Justin Bieber but by The Plain White T’s. Now I still cringe at such phrases, but it makes such a big difference that everyone singing the song is LEGAL and doesn’t look like one of my son’s middle school classmates. (And as Annabelle pointed out when I complained about it on Twitter, such songs are WAY IMPROVED if you think of them as “long-distance relationship” songs rather than “one night stand” songs.)

Plus, watch the video a few times and see if you can figure out which band member is cutest. I change about every 10 seconds. Like, Tim Lopez (lead singer on this one) has a really excellent smile and is the obvious choice even though I am usually not drawn to blond guys and even though he TOTALLY looks like a guy who’d be successfully singing his one-night-stand love song at every stop on the tour. Mr. Eyes in the background there (Tom Higgenson) is another possibility with cute-Beatles-type charm (plus the aforementioned good eyes), and then Dave Tirio (blond back-up singer) looks like a sweetie but doesn’t get enough screen time for a good analysis, and we barely see De’Mar Hamilton (drummer) or Mike Retondo (guitar, hat, beard) at all. Well, it’s hard to choose. We’d need to join that fun-looking beach party (refreshingly low on beer-commercial-type people—it’s not that there are NO long-haired girls in bikinis, but there are also a ton of cute vintage tops, cardigans, hats, flower pins, skirts, headbands, and hair that looks like it could go into the water) and give each one a chance.

Ug, I had a Mental Turmoil Morning, waking around 3:00 to pee and then lying in bed suffering from weary mental churning. The dumb thing was, a lot of it was OTHER PEOPLE’S mental churning, a rehashing of stories I inadvertently tap into via stressy Facebook statuses and stressy Twitter posts—or, and this drives me a little bonkers, stressy RE-posts and RE-tweets. I like to keep up on the stresses and frets of people I know, but not with the endless endless crank-it-to-11 RE-tweeted fights and indignations of strangers. One re-tweet to spread awareness of the issue for people who would want to know what’s going on so they can get involved: SURE, of COURSE, I’m even GRATEFUL for that sometimes. But a constant re-tweet stream of EVERYTHING EVERYONE TWEETS ON THE TOPIC? No. NO.

I never know what to do in those situations when it’s chronic, do you? I don’t want to unfollow the re-tweeter, because I DO like THEM. But by following them, I’m also automatically following a bunch of other people I DON’T like and DON’T want to hear from, and/or hearing a ton about issues I don’t want to be involved with and/or have a strongly opposite opinion on but don’t want to argue/think about anymore. It’s a problem.

So anyway, that was one of the mental churning categories. Another is one of those pointless, can’t-do-anything-about-it ones, which is such a good use of sleep time. Our STUPID TOWN keeps voting for cuts in education expenses, and they toe the state line of Meeting Only the Absolute Minimum Requirements For Everything, which would already be annoying enough, except that this is the THIRD YEAR IN A ROW our school system has failed to pass state tests. But my GENIUS CO-RESIDENTS, most of whom are probably voting for education cuts on basis of “MY kids are already grown! Why should _I_ pay to educate other people’s kids?” (that’s right, I built that straw man right in front of you), keep voting every year for more cuts! because they don’t see the connection! possibly because they were educated in this school system! And what I would like to know is, WHY IS THE CUTTING-EXPENSES OPTION ON THE BALLOT?? “Would you like to pay MORE in tax money, or LESS? Your choice! Check box.”

*pant pant*

I also kept mentally working on a post I’m trying to do about how a nightmare about needing to run for our lives made me feel so so so lucky that we can just…live in our house and keep our things there, and go shopping for things we need without fighting off other looters, and not have to spend our entire day foraging for enough food to keep our kids alive, and not have to get in a knife fight to get an antibiotic. I don’t think the post is writeable, though. You know how you can get comfort by telling YOURSELF to be grateful that your life is so much better than if you had problems A, B, and/or C, but if someone ELSE tells that to you it’s just about the most pineholish move ever, assuming as it does that only the most miserable and worst-off person in the entire universe is allowed to complain (and even THEY should feel lucky they’re NOT DEAD)? So. That’s the trouble with the post: even though I’ve spent two days so far feeling wonderful feelings of relief that we have electricity and don’t have to reduce our belongings to what we can carry, it’s hard to tell YOU about it without sounding insufferably preachy and pineholey. PineHOLY, as it were.

GZUZFRK is a pretty clever license plate. (Jesus Freak. I spare you having to ask, if you needed to.)

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I have “Our God is an Awesome God” going through my head. I’m imagining God clapping along lightly with his fingertips and a sarcastic expression on his face as I hum it. “ORLY?,” he says. I reply by humming with increased cheerful vigor “He REIGNS from heaven aBOVE!” It’s CATCHY.

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“Recycle Your Memories” is not a good slogan for a consignment shop. I recoiled. RECYCLE my MEMORIES?? How about “Sell Your Sentimental Feelings For Cold Hard Cash”? Speaking of catchy!

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Things have been a little adrenalizing on the baby name blog this week: the mother’s mother doesn’t like the name, and makes it repeatedly clear—what would YOU do, and I mean in REAL LIFE where you’re talking to your ACTUAL ACTUAL REAL-LIFE EXISTING MOTHER, not in a fantasy life where you take your glasses off dramatically and then address the court with a dignity and intelligence that causes your opposition to fall back in awe?

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I have noticed that pretty much only thin bloggers show photos of themselves—especially full-length photos where you can’t just tuck knuckles under the chin and hope it helps. It’s gotten to the point that, in general, I can figure out a blogger’s size based on nothing else but the photos. Do they regularly show photos of themselves? Then they are thin. Is it never, or only with children blocking their bodies, and/or the knuckles under the chin? Then they are plump.

This is silly, and it gives us a severely skewed idea of what percentage of the people we know and like are thin. I would maybe like to meet some of you at a blogger conference some day without wearing a refrigerator box that hides my entire body. Here is a photo of me full-length, at an angle I feel is flattering (baby steps) to my Hip Width as well as to my Rear Awning:

My dad took this picture. In it, I’m taking a photo of Henry, and am not thinking about my picture being taken. As you can see, I am plump and I have cut my hair too short. Nevertheless, I appear in mirrors and in photographs.

Swistle: “I dreamed we were getting married.”
Paul, without glancing up: “You can’t trap the wind, baby.”

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Our yard is divided into little gardening plots. Without really thinking about it, earlier in the spring I flung the last of the winter supply of sunflower seeds for the birds out over an area that included part of Paul’s garden. When a whole bunch of little two-rounded-leaves plants that looked just like sunflowers came up in that area, I tried to cover my mistake by transplanting them to my own garden plot. Yesterday Paul asked why I’d planted peppers in my garden plot—and wondered why his own peppers weren’t coming up.

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I’m trying to motivate myself to do some sort of plan with the kids this summer. My mom used to do a Summer Regimen with us: we had a list of things to do each morning, including a couple of worksheets, some sit-ups and push-ups, a journal entry, and a cleaning chore. On one hand I hated the regimen (including the word “regimen,” which was pronounced with an exaggerated zh sound in the middle), but on the other hand it made the rest of the day feel so much more vacationy: it was like still having school, but only having it for an hour and a half a day with no homework.

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Paul’s mother’s estate is still not settled (it’s been one year and seven months, which I gather is not incredibly long in estate-settling terms). The last we heard, the lawyer said back in January that everything was just about all set, and that all that was left was for the estate to file the taxes so anything due/refunded could be handled by the estate. Silence since then is making me fret: WHO filed the taxes? It wasn’t supposed to be US, was it? We don’t have anything we’d need to file them; Paul’s sister is the executor, unwise a choice as that seems. Was it supposed to be Paul’s sister but she just finked out because she didn’t feel like it? Were the taxes filed by Paul’s sister or the lawyer, but the lawyer just knows that “several months” in estate time is like being on hold on the phone for a few seconds so there’s no reason to update us? Will we get a packet in the mail any day now because everything is going just fine?

Oh, yes, obviously we could ask the lawyer. Except it’s not “we,” it’s “Paul” who would have to ask the lawyer. And I suppose I could ask Paul to do that, but perhaps you can wincingly imagine how money-hungry and unfeeling it looks for a wife to casually inquire about her disliked mother-in-law’s estate. And although I AM curious if there will be any money, my main concern is the disparity between “when I thought this would be wrapped up and we would in no way be attached to that situation” and “now.” I KNOW estates can take a long time to settle, I KNOW they can—but the lawyer said all that was left was the taxes, and tax time is long over, so…PLEASE FREE US FROM THE HOUSE/SIL ALBATROSS KTHANX.

Today I planned to take Rob to a library event for teens. I was out on errands and forgot all about it, arriving home to Rob saying, “Um, the library thing?”—20 minutes after it had started. I was mortified: this taps into several horrors at once, including Horror of Being Late and Horror of Not Following Through (we’d r.s.v.p.’d) and Horror of Forgetting Something Until After It Starts. It was hard to decide which was worse: showing up late, or not showing up. I took him there anyway, despite my instinct to hide and cower and pretend it hadn’t happened. And it was great: the librarian said they were counting on late-shows anyway for some other reason, and Rob had a great time, and I felt so good about our decision.

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Another parent in Edward’s class called me to find out which teacher Edward had for 1st grade. But she didn’t say her child was in Edward’s class, because she didn’t know Edward was a twin, so she just said that “our kids” were in kindergarten together. So at one point, when she asked who the first grade teacher was, I had to say, “Oh, um…was your son in Edward’s class, or in Elizabeth’s?” and she said, a little confused, “…Edward’s.” And later I realized she’d at one point said the name of Edward’s and her son’s kindergarten teacher, so I could have avoided the whole awkward thing by a method known as Figuring It Out From Other Clues, if I hadn’t been so nervous about talking on the phone that all my brain function was concentrating on Not Dying. But she is probably not even thinking of that now, while I’m replaying it and cringing.

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Another parent called shortly afterward to find out the same thing, and I didn’t answer the phone because I was putting Henry to bed. I should have just called her back, especially after the relative success of the call I’d taken (it went really well except for that one awkward moment). But I couldn’t do it, so I found her email address and emailed her back. “Crutch” has come to be a disdainful word, but that fails to take into account its usefulness in the case of a bum leg.

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I took a writing job. Then, after I accepted it, a detail was added: it would involve talking on the phone. I spent two hours telling myself I am not totally unable to handle a phone call: look, I just talked to someone on the phone a few minutes ago, and I only made one blunder and it was of the sort probably she is not even thinking about now. A normal working person can occasionally handle working on the phone, even if it’s a corded phone that won’t reach to the computer. This is not impossible even if it feels impossible. Perhaps my mother could babysit all the children or something; I could email her and figure out a schedule, and then go buy a cordless phone.

Then I thought of the situation instead as one in which I wouldn’t be involved at all if it had mentioned phone work to begin with. Only one child was home when I took that other phone call, and even so it was a struggle to talk while keeping him quiet. And…I don’t WANT to take a job that involves the telephone, and that seems like an okay thing to choose, like choosing not to work in fast food. So I chose not to take the job, since it was a different job than the one I’d accepted. It’s hard to tell when something is “backing away from a fear” and when it’s “knowing one’s limitations / not accepting a contract that changed after it was signed.”

This started with Saly mentioning that she might color Lucy’s hair pink for the summer—maybe just the ends, for easy trimming-off before school started. That’s when I put the Manic Panic Cotton Candy Pink in my Amazon cart. When I’d had enough time to think/fret about it, I ordered it. It arrived in the mail yesterday, and Elizabeth and I started in on it as soon as she got home from school.

Ideally, hair should be bleached before Manic-Panic-ing. Not only does this let you start with a white canvas, it apparently makes the hair more porous and thus more willing to absorb and hold the color. But I didn’t want to bleach Elizabeth’s hair, at least not until we’d experimented with NOT bleaching.

First I washed her hair in the sink, using a clarifying shampoo and no conditioner.

Damp hair, checking out the jar of Manic Panic

I combed it and divided it first into two sections as if I were going to do ponytails, and then divided each of those two sections into two sections. Four sections total, if you follow me.

I took gloopy pinches of the color with my fingers and smooshed it into the hair. This is the step I would do better next time: I’d get a brush so I could paint it on, and I might put the hair into the baggies (or onto pieces of plastic wrap) FIRST, rather than trying to cram gloopy hair into the baggies post-glooping with my gloopy hands.

I used about a third of the jar, because I’d read online that people generally use one or two full jars on a whole head of hair, and I was doing just the bottom half of a child’s hair. I was glad I’d read that, because it encouraged me to make sure there was a lot of color on the hair.

When the hair seemed gloopy enough, I put each section into a plastic baggie (non-zip type) and then used a hair elastic to make a ponytail that included the baggie.

It’s hard to tell in the photo, but it was a surprisingly pretty effect—like a hair tutu

I’d read that heat helps to set the color, so I used a blow-dryer on the baggies until she complained about the heat—a minute or so on each baggie. We did this three or four times during the waiting process.

The jar says to leave the color on for 30 minutes, but apparently nobody does that: the people giving tips online leave it on overnight or even for a day or two. We left it on for about four hours, until bedtime. Then we took off the baggies and I rinsed her hair in the sink, and blow-dried it so we could see the color right away.

It’s SUBTLE, which was a little disappointing and also a relief. If it had been clown-pink, I probably would have felt alarmed. As it is, it’s definitely visible but I don’t think it would immediately catch the eye of a passerby.

This was super fun and I want to try it again and maybe do a streak in my own hair. I’ll be interested to see how long the color lasts, especially since she has swimming lessons most of the summer. I’d also like to try a Kool-Aid dye as recommended by Erica (here’s the tutorial Erica linked to: How to Dye Hair With Kool-Aid). We would have started with that, in fact, but our grocery store doesn’t carry the non-sugared-already Kool-Aid, and I haven’t quested for it at other stores yet.

Recently I’ve been trying to find ways to boost myself out of feeling overwhelmed. For example, I’ll remind myself of the many times I’ve had to learn that it can be so much easier to remove the source of overwhelmitude than to continue to be overwhelmed by it. Like when a pile of Christmas card supplies (admittedly a daunting pile of things that needed to be put away in places all over the house) got knocked off the table onto the dining room floor by a child (admittedly an annoying and unfair situation), and I let it sit there for literally MONTHS before spending (again literally) less than five minutes to clean it up. And then I sat there thinking about how that messy heap had oppressed me almost every day. What a bargain that was: probably hours and hours of oppression to save myself five minutes! which eventually had to be spent anyway!

So. Today I felt all motivated, ready to start TACKLING things instead of letting them fester. And I thought, “I have some time! I’ll clean the bathroom! It oppresses me many times a day!” So I started cleaning it, and I am continuing to be literal when I say that in the first five minutes of unpleasant cleaning (it was hot and stuffy in the bathroom, and of course I hate/resent cleaning it or else I wouldn’t be putting it off), FOUR CHILDREN knocked on the door saying they needed to go to the bathroom.

I gave patient “I’m cleaning in here—use the downstairs bathroom” replies to the first two children, but then made the classic error of dealing with a SERIES of individuals as if they are all the SAME individual (an example of this is when a clerk treats a customer as if that single customer needs something explained to them for the thousandth time, rather than being the thousandth person to need it explained), and I snapped at the third child and yelled at the fourth.

Later, the fourth child asked me if I was still crabby, and I said yes, but added that at this point I was more crabby about having been crabby: I’d had time to come up with and feel bad about the clerk analogy. But I was ALSO still PLAIN crabby: my goal was so reasonable, and the interruptions were so reasonable (though FOUR children needing to go to the bathroom in the same five-minute interval is not QUITE in need of the word “so” before the word “reasonable”), and yet together those two reasonable things caused a situation that felt completely unreasonable and impossible to handle, which is another way to say OVERWHELMING.

Although I’ve learned again and again from examples like the one where it was so relatively easy to pick up and put away the Christmas card stuff, I’ve ALSO learned again and again from examples like today’s attempt to clean the bathroom: it really WASN’T worth it.