Kids.

I was going to get on here and regurgitate. Just upchuck about how awful the afternoon was, how the moment the kids get in the truck after school, it starts - the whining, the complaining, the bickering, the unending demands. I was going to write about how lately the afternoons have been such a battle, how I am feeling completely overrun by the kids, how sometimes it feels like if they sense the slightest chink in my armor, they take full advantage of it. I wanted to say how awful that makes me feel, knowing how much it makes me sound just like my own mother, and how I detest that in myself. I was going to talk about how, after spending two hours repeatedly chasing the girls downstairs where they are supposed to stay when Finn naps because they can't be quiet upstairs, I remembered just in the nick of time that Kevin had an orthodontist appointment, so I rushed all the kids into the truck and made it there by the skin of my teeth, and how we spent an hour sitting out in the truck waiting for Kevin, and how it was non-stop with the kids - whining, and bickering, and not keeping their hands (or their feet) to themselves, and how when Kevin finally came out of the orthodontist office, it was too late to make dinner so we went through a drive-through, which made me feel guilty because I really don't like feeding my kids crap, and how the minute we got to the ordering microphone, Finn started screaming and was inconsolable for the rest of the way home, and how we got stuck in a huge traffic jam with Finn screaming bloody murder and how I felt like I was going to come apart at the seams. I was going to post about how I yelled way too much today and made my kids cry, and how awful it feels to complain about my kids because, after all, I chose this.

I was going to write about all that.

But then, Joey, my wise, tender-hearted 8-year-old boy, asked me to help him print the poem he wrote for school:


Kinda puts things into perspective.