Bad Wife!

I spent much of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday doing a yoga workshop with Kino MacGregor, an amazing woman, and if yoga happens to be your thing, and she is doing a workshop near you, GO. GO TO IT. Even if it happens to coincide with a holiday for your baby daddy. It was a fabulous weekend, and I think I lost about ten pounds of water weight from SWEAT.

Isn’t she gorgeous? Please ignore the beads of sweat all over my face.

Of course, it was Father’s Day weekend, and so I felt vaguely guilty about spending so much time away from the house – Happy Father’s Day! Now, take care of the kids all weekend. – so I tried to assuage my guilt by making this cake:

Isn’t it pretty? Those are chocolate covered strawberries, and the cake itself was chocolate, so it was pretty delicious, believe me. I also tried to overcome my guilt by insisting that he golf after he dropped the kids off at school on Friday, which was the first time ever he had done the drop-off; I had to deep breathe and remind myself that he is not actually an idiot, and no calamity would occur, and the kids would make it to their classrooms. I think I have some control issues in this area. I also insisted he golf Saturday night, which ended up being a hilarious comedy of errors.

You know when your kids pass out of a certain stage, say the stage of having meltdowns and tantrums, and so you are not actually used to a meltdown or tantrum, and then one occurs? Well, it so happened that Saturday was the boys’ final soccer tournament, which meant they played two one hour games in the suddenly gorgeous sunshine. I stopped by to see their second game on my lunch break and also happened to come across the soccer mom/coach from hell, which is a very long story and one for another day. It was a busy day and apparently a very tiring one for Jake, because shortly after dinner he started to lose it. Here is what the boys’ conversation was like for approximately one hour:

“MARK’S NOT LETTING ME HAVE A TURN!!!”

“Jake, I said you could have a turn. You’re having a turn right now.”

“BUT IT’S NOT A VERY LONG TURN! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

“Jake, you can KEEP having the turn.”

“BUT YOU SAID WE WERE LOOKING FOR LIONS AND I WANTED TO LOOK FOR MONKEYS!”

“Okay, we can look for monkeys.”

“I WANT TO LOOK FOR PENGUINS!”

And so on. Lather, rinse, repeat. Finally I decided to end whatever looking-for-exotic-animals-in-the-yard game they were playing and give them a bedtime snack and story. Everything was going wrong for Jake; he couldn’t spear blueberries with his fork without them squishing, he couldn’t decide on a story, he wanted to take toys into the bath but didn’t know what toys to take, he decided to take some superheroes and the entire box of superheroes slipped out of his hands, contents scattered on the floor. Then, while he was bathing, I made the grave mistake of letting Mark practice his reading with a Cars book. I heard a bloodcurdling scream from the bathtub and rushed in to see. “I’M MISSING STORIES!”

Sigh. When he finally got into bed – about 45 minutes earlier than normal – he passed out in seconds. I felt like I was out of touch with the tantruming world, I forgot what an overtired preschooler could be like. Do you know what I mean? Fortunately we are not having any more babies. I was using parenting muscles that I forgot I had; those muscles were sluggish and weak, but thankfully, as I discovered on Saturday, they are still there.