Rants from crazytown

If you know me in real life and you know me well, you know that my tendency is to put up with something that irritates me until I just can't take it anymore and then I just sort of....snap. If you didn't know that, well..now ya do. 

Of course, after I 'snap' then I think a lot about how I need to improve my communication skills and figure out a way to be on a path that is much more even keeled overall. I mean, nothing shows you how annoying your own behavior is until you see it in echoed in either another family member or your own kid. And nothing is more annoying than be annoyed by your own behavior reflected back at you. And nothing gives your future teenagers more ammunition to crawl right up under your skin than spelling it out for them two billion times. AmIright? 

So yesterday, I went downstairs to do the four hundred loads of laundry that managed to pile up in one short week. Mind you, I did my and Robert's laundry mid-week, so we are pretty much talking about kids' laundry plus sheets and towels. So. Much. Laundry. I don't quite understand it. 

I'm having serious issues with low iron...again. I'm taking iron supplements, I'm eating tons of dark leafy greens and have added lean red meat back into my diet about 3 times a week. Still feel like s**t. I'm tired. I'm cranky. I'm impatient. I just feel very run down and awful. Yesterday, I didn't drag myself out of bed until almost 10 am, and even then, I only wanted to crawl right back in.  But alas, Tucker was out of socks and shorts so laundry duty called. 

I felt crappy on Friday which lead to skipping my workout so I thought, well, I'm going to be downstairs doing laundry for hours, so I can take Focus T25 nice and slow and get caught up. 

It seemed like a great plan in my mind. 

Ha! I had to keep stopping for breaks and backing up the DVD to make it through. So my two 25 minute workouts stretched into almost 1  hour and 30 minutes. 

Our downstairs laundry room smells like mildew this week and I can't figure out where the smell is originating. I have cleaned and mopped and bleached it repeatedly since the great plumbing backup of  May.  Gross. All of this plus endless laundry plus kids coming in and out wasn't helping my general disposition, which was super grumpy to begin with. 

Which leads me back to my original point. I feel like I have been harping on the kids to shut the door completely when they go either outside or into the garage for decades. The kids and I had three separate discussions about shutting doors just this week. So when I would hear someone coming in or out, I would call out.."Close the door please" as a polite reminder. 

Imagine my...disappointment/irritation/frustration/anger... when I start to take clean, folded, sorted laundry upstairs and find that the door to the garage is once again wide open. 

Seriously!?!?!?!?!?!?!!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

In the time it takes me to walk over and- I admit it - slam it shut to announce my displeasure, my irritation has bloomed into full grown, flat out, rage. I go into our bedroom to hang up the clothes I don't put in the dryer and I try to talk myself into calming down. The kids have a friend over and it's not his fault my two can't seem to shut a door so I walk around in the bedroom muttering to myself. 

It doesn't help. Obviously.

So I count to 50 and decide to go ask the kids nicely to go. shut. the. door. again. 

I hear someone say something and I'm walking down the hall about going outside (oh no they di'int!) and before I can actually use my common sense and logic, my mouth is saying "Tucker and Sara can't go outside because they are incapable, apparently, of being able to shut a door they open!" 

::crickets::

By this time I get to the kitchen and Robert, Tucker, and Sara all have this look on their faces like, "Oh boy...here she goes..." which of course only makes me more irrational. We send the friend home, and in all honesty, he was probably glad to get out of there. I know I would have been! 

Once it's just Robert and the kids, I start pacing back and forth through the living room and kitchen throwing my hands around dramatically and giving my 'why do we have to repeat ourselves' speech. it goes something like this: 

'The door to the garage was open. Again. AGAIN! I mean, did we NOT just talk about this THREE different times this week? I mean, I am speaking English, right? You guys do understand the words that are coming out of my mouth, correct? No one is hearing impaired in this house. No one is PHYSICALLY incapable of shutting a door. You seem to be able to OPEN the door just fine. Is there a force field or some sort of barrier that prevents you from closing the door? I don't get it. Why is it so hard? Every day we say the same things - don't jump on the furniture, no running in the house, pick up after yourself, SHUT THE DOOR!!!!!!! Can you PLEASE tell me WHY you don't or won't shut the door?!?!?!'

image from brittanyshiver.blogspot.com

::crickets:: 

I look over and both the kids have their heads down. Great. Now I feel like the ass - which I kind of should, actually. It's just a door. The open door isn't really the problem. It's just a symptom of a bigger problem which is, of course, that Robert and I have told the kids what seems like five MILLION times to do/not do the simplest things in the world....and yet....and yet......

ARRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. 

It makes me crazy. 

Please tell me I'm not alone in this. 

The one about displaying grace at church...

Last week was vacation bible school at the church we attend near Asheville. Robert and I really like this church (and our community) so we were excited that the kids would have a chance to meet more kids and hopefully make some connections.

I offered to help out, so several nights, I stayed and did whatever was needed. It was a lot of fun!

Wednesday night as the kids and I were leaving (along with everyone else), I opened my car door and started to get in. I had one leg in the car and was in the process of ducking down to sit in the seat.

And then my other knee buckled. So instead of just sinking down into my car seat, my head slammed at ear level into the top of the door frame. The recoil and shock from that resulted in my falling straight down onto the ground on my butt with my other leg still wedged in the car.

Also of note: when my head slammed against the frame, I *may* (and by may I mean totally did) have screamed out "SH*T!! because it really hurt and it just flew out of my mouth. Sorry, Jesus. :(



I clumsily got off the ground and into the car somehow and drove away quickly, really embarrassed by the fall and what I had shouted out. In the church parking lot. With lots of kids and parents around.

Mortifying.

The next day, I was completely prepared to go and face the music and apologize where necessary, but right before we needed to leave, Sara fell in the huge puddle that had formed in our downstairs hallway from an a/c leak and we ended up taking her to the ER to check for broken bones and the need for stitches - both of which she fortunately escaped. Needless to say, I didn't make it to vacation bible school that night.

On Sunday, we were visiting family so we went to church with them. Arriving just in the nick of time before the service started, we were hurriedly escorted to a pew towards the back of the church.

Whew! Safe!

Then came the first hymn. There was apparently a men's choir visiting and they were sitting behind us in the pews. When the music started, they used their outside voices inside. And while they had beautiful voices, it was kind of like someone had switched on a surround sound movie in the middle of the night at full volume with the largest speaker right behind my and Robert's heads.

 

It startled Robert and made me giggle. As the choir slowly filed out of the pew and towards the front of the church and the actual choir area, I was having difficulty controlling myself. The next hymn a few minutes later was then belted out by a beautiful soprano voice from directly behind us as well. And, it made me giggle. There was a gentleman sitting in front of us who had been way generous with the cologne and every time he moved, a wave of it would hit me right in the face. Normally, that wouldn't be funny. Normally. But apparently this was not going to be a normal day. Nor could I stop myself from staring at his toupee...which was not on exactly correctly.  Oh dear.

I thought I had regained control of myself by the end of the hymn, but then the first prayer was extraordinarily long and um...thorough. Normally, I would have found it beautiful and touching (which it was), but you know how when you are trying not to giggle somewhere really inappropriate that everything becomes funny?

Yeah, it was like that.

Finally, she finished and the minister took over. Only he was particularly impassioned about his sermon and kept stretching his words out at the end of his sentences with extra syllables. So 'watch' turned into 'wat-tttttttcccccccchhhhhaaaaaaa' and 'relic' turned into 'rellllllllllllllll-iiiiiiiicccccccccccaaaaaahhhhhhh'.

I was shaking horribly from trying to hold in my laughter and tears were streaming out of my eyes. When we stood up to sing again, Robert, who had been mostly ignoring me and paying attention to the sermon like a good Christian, looks over, sees the tears, and assumes I'm crying.  To which he says, "Are you CRYING?!?!" and I swear it bounced off the walls. I couldn't answer. I couldn't do anything but think about butterflies and weed pulling and deep breathing.

It. Was. Horrible.

After staring at my shoes for a few minutes, I felt like I was good to go. Until I looked up and noticed that there was a gentleman asleep at that very moment. So I pinched my hand really hard and concentrated on memorizing phrases from the bulletin.   It's the only thing that got me through.

This was SO not my week to be in church. Guess I'm really lucky this didn't happen: