Some days are like that ...

I had a day like that recently.

My big kids were finishing up book reports. Equals - not maybe as helpful as sometimes are.

Second tier big kids, well, daughter number 2 is a reader. I can pull her out of her book. With effort. In an emergency.

So I was down to kid-5, who is mostly extremely helpful, but is also mostly kid.

The weird thing was that the next 4 kids were missing, at a friend's house. You would think that would make everything easier. You would be wrong.

The 6-11 year old crowd are the go-getters. They're the ones you send to the bathroom to see what the terrorists are up to. They are the brute squad. They put babies in bed, hold crying infant while mom goes to the potty, tattle on whomever for whatever. They are important people. And they were gone.

All I really had was kid-5, who sometimes does a freakish hormonal downward spiral thing, and the smallest 5. I have 5 pre-schoolers. Five.

Kid-10 is the platinum curled, blue-eyed, snuggler, the manipulator. Kid-11 is my gorgeous, ornery beyond my wildest imagination, and makes a hobby of pushing k-10's buttons, and biting kid-12. Kid-12 is anal, uptight, particular, intense, and has me completely whipped. He is also a very easy target for k-11, especially since she bites and he is frequently naked. Kid-13 is pretty much standard issue 20 month old, climbing on tables and counters and throwing everything from them down to the floor. Kid-14 is a baby. Cute. Vulnerable. Nurses or cries or sleeps.

It was a long day. (I should mention that I did sneak out for a lovely lunch with some young friends who have been in my life for a long time.)

The middles arrived home just in time to leave for Awana. My plan (mastermind) was to leave husband at home to get work done and hook up with another mom while kiddos played. However, my friend got her hair cut instead (it looks lovely) and I was alone, in a small room with lots of toys which hurt when thrown but don't leave a mark. There is a little miniature playgroundish thingy in that room, which k11 and k12 decided needed repurposing, so, instead of going up the little steps and down the little slide, they jumped off the other two sides, under the rails, head first. Repeatedly. Screaming bloody murder. I wasn't really concerned about the concussive activity, just the screaming.

Well meaning adults kept peeking in on me, and walking away quietly with heads bowed.

Right about the time I had had enough, one of the three year olds winged a small plastic banana across the room, tagging me in the back of the head. I rapidly moved to deal with child and banana, and the other three yr old, as if on cue, from a movie script, made a one in a million shot smacking me in the face with the same flying banana. It was stunning.

I cried. Hard.

Then kid-12, who you'll remember has me whipped, takes my face in his little hands and looks in my eyes with his big blue ones and says, somberly, "Mommy, you be ok. It ok. You ok Mommy."
It was so cute, I decided not to murder anyone.

I said very few words on the way home. I did text my husband to insure he had gotten lots of important work done on the back of my banana beaten labor. He did.
I stayed up later than 42 year olds should reading about Islam in my kids' papers, was up during the night with the mostly sleeping through the night baby who went to bed with a less than fresh diaper, and was up early ironing a shirt for my man, because I am ironing pretty much day to day right now.

Treadmill? Ha! Eating healthy? No. Getting by? Yes indeed, and that will have to do for right now.