I Am So Grateful to Be the Monkey Mama!

Boy. Did you ever have "one of those days..."? Today was certainly one of those days....

My "day" today started last night I guess you could say - around 11pm my 2yo woke up screaming and totally freaking out. While my husband and I were trying to calm her down, she woke the baby up. So, I went to try to nurse the baby back to sleep and she wouldn't go back to sleep. At all. Finally, around 3am I got her back to sleep and tried to take her up to bed, and she woke up as soon as I laid her down. I ended up dozing on the couch with her for about 45 minutes around 4am and that's all the sleep I got... finally around 6am I got my husband up and he took over [he had been up and down all night with the 2yo] and I napped for 2.5 hours and then got up because we had SO MUCH to do to get ready for the party.

My husband took the baby to the pediatrician while I stayed home and cleaned. It turns out she has a nasty ear infection - a really bad one on the left side. We all had a cold last week, and it looks like it turned into an ear infection for my poor little Monkey5. So, she is on antibiotics, for the second time in her short life [the last one was a very terrible double ear infection]. I fear she has inherited my horrible eustacian tubes and "bad ears", just like Monkey4 did. :( [The first 3 never had ear infections... I was sure it was because I was nursing them, but I guess not].

I worked like crazy both on cleaning and party preparations all day. I missed lunch completely and forgot to eat or drink all day. I had hired a cleaning company to come do a "deep clean" as a special splurge [the benefit of working so many hours lately... LOL!] and they were supposed to be here at 1pm. They weren't.

Finally at 2:30pm I called and the cleaning crew that was supposed to come to my house had just blown off all their jobs that day and there was nothing the owner could really do about it. She offered to come do it tomorrow, but we will have a party going on then.

At that point I just almost had a breakdown. I was *exhausted*. I was hungry. I was thirsty. AND, I'd had no caffeine all day long because I hadn't sat down at all to drink anything. [You know its a bad day when you don't have a second to stop and take a drink LOL!].

So, I start sobbing and feeling totally overwhelmed - I was supposed to spend the rest of the day making cool party food and creating Star Wars games while other people cleaned my house.

Instead, I just melted into a pool of pathetic-ness.

I decided to just take a break and eat. I sat down and had a coke and some chicken while my husband took some of the kids to Costco to pick up party supplies. Later he cut the grass [our lawn guy never showed up this week either - I can't even PAY people to help me LOL!].

Funny how coke and chicken will make things all better. :) Within a half hour I was completely re-energized.

I had a talk with myself about how this was just my PRIDE [again] causing me to feel so upset. And I reminded myself that the people who are coming tomorrow won't care if my house isn't perfect, if I don't have a ton of clever games completed, and if I don't have fancy schmancy food [which I won't now] - *I* am the only one who cares.

I felt so much better when I let it go! :)

And it ended up being a really great evening. Monkey1 and I danced around the living room, read Greek myths and then started cleaning bathrooms. She's getting really good at cleaning sinks, counters, and mirrors [her usual job] and today she decided she really *wanted* to clean the toilet [mom's usual job LOL!]. And she did a great job!

I got the other kids in on it too - I sprayed some organic cleaner in the shower and set Monkeys 2, 3, and 4 loose in there with scrub brushes. They had a blast. We cleaned all the bathrooms [always the hardest part of cleaning the house IMO] and then I vacuumed the upstairs - upstairs is ready to go now! [We figured that with something like 45 kids coming tomorrow, we better let them play upstairs too, so we had to get it cleaned up. I'm good about keeping downstairs pretty clean, but upstairs I tend to let slide.... lots of work to do up there!]

It is not perfectly clean. [In fact, I'm pretty sure the shower stall is worse off now because Monkey4 decided to smear and entire bar of soap on the shower walls and door instead of just scrubbing like she was told ... LOL!]. But you know what? It is *sanitary*. And I think we are going to have so much fun tomorrow, we are all excited!

And we got to stuff Darth Vader's head with candy tonight. How can it not be good night?!

Boy am I tired. I am off to bed now!