We’re Exhausted Here

It was an exhausting day.

This morning we had Tragic Shoe Drama, because J had a brand-new pair of sneakers, but she chose, instead, to put on the sneakers that I’m embarrassed for her to wear because they’ve suddenly fallen apart (admittedly, they were very old). This stealth drama was particularly irritating because she hadn’t made a peep about her Deep Emotional Attachment to her Sneakers when we were trying on shoes at Target the day before. If she had, perhaps I would have taken a look at the sneakers, noticed that they were from Payless, walked a couple of doors down, and purchased the Exact Same Model of shoe in the next size up. In fact, if that had happened, I would have been pleased to discover that they were on super-clearance for $3! Woo, hoo! Alas, because my six-year-old was silently sucking it up yesterday, by the time  she’d tearfully explained her problem and I had a chance to check with Payless, other fortunate consumers had cleaned out every shoe that was remotely close to her size.  Okay, maybe they would have been gone already. But this is a pet peeve with sweet J. At 6 years old I still have to tell her to use her words because even though I joke about being Psychic Mommy, I’m actually not psychic.

Once the girls were gone to school, I did some house cleaning. I have to say that having a gloomy day almost felt like a relief to me. We had a string of so many beautiful days, which was great, but I can’t bring myself to do significant housecleaning when it’s that wonderful outside in the spring. My upstairs bathroom was getting gross and my first floor was in dire need of vacuuming, but through all those glorious days I just kept going outside to do more raking or weeding instead. I knew it was wrong, but how can you look at that beautiful sunshine and go downstairs to organize the basement?

After school, J and her mangy sneakers were at a play date and birthday party, and M, who hadn’t been able to score a play date of her own, was left with me. That’s always dangerous, because it tends to mean Intense Grilling About All of Her Most Burning Questions (I know I’ve mentioned this before, like when she interrogated me about Santa Claus). Today, just to pick a few, she began with, “Why is Abraham Lincoln still such a big deal, when we’ve practically forgotten about most of the presidents?” and progressed through, “So, how big was Osama Bin Laden’s compound?” and continued into, “Now, wait, how many airplanes crashed on September 11th? And wait, they weren’t private planes?”  Some of it felt like too much information, but I’m just not going to lie, and I don’t even feel like it’s right to say that I won’t answer when she’s asking these thoughtful questions and processing the information. The most I’ll do is say something like, well, this part is pretty sad, and I don’t think you need to know the details yet, and if I do say that, she generally agrees.   But by the time she ran out of questions I was pretty much mentally and emotionally exhausted. I do have to say that I was particularly delighted when M jumped directly to feminist outrage when I told her about Hillary Clinton getting airbrushed from that photograph.

All of this was to explain why I’m really too tired to write a post, but would you look at that? I accidentally wrote one.