highs, lows, bests, and worsts

Sometimes you just have to stop and asses the quality of your domestic and parental endeavors both for the sake of additional laughter and learning in the realm of the wife and mother world. Enter highs and lows, bests and worsts.

+ This summer has been as sorts of busy with things that normal, fun parents do for their kids in the summer that I have never brought myself to do out of sheer laziness, one of which is the ever-so-necessary SWIM LESSONS!! This is a best and a high for me because I am DOING it. I am getting them there, they are learning to swim, I am fulfilling my motherly duty and they are much less likely to meet their maker during an otherwise fun and uneventful beach trip. It's good. But then today it was also a...

+ Low and worst. Because! I was in the locker room getting dressed in one of the stalls after instructing Bernadette and Lucy to sit tight while Naomi and I dressed. It was then that I heard Lucy ask in her typical loud and nasally voice as to the color of some one's skin. I held my breath and almost breathed a sigh of relief when I didn't hear anyone answer back right away and hoped beyond all hope that she was simply asking Bernadette about someone she had seen and NOT asking an innocent bystander if they "had very black skin???". But then my relieved sigh turned into a guttural gag when I heard the poor woman answer Lucy with a very gracious "yes, I have darker skin than you" and then proceeded to even more graciously laugh out loud about "how much Lucy was staring at her" (cue every mortified, horrified emoji there is in the whole world!!!). I promise we do not only have white friends, I just have very tactless kids and I am not the best teacher-parent.

She'll figure it out one day and so will I.

+ I have become very aware of how horrible I am at getting to commitments on time and last Tuesday found me running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying not to be late again to our second swim lesson and sprinting into the building only to discover that lessons were actually canceled that day due to an accident in the pool. I was not about to have all of my efforts at getting so many kids clad and in the car be in vain and decided to make a quick run to Old Navy to return a few things purchased on a gloriously kid-free shopping stop a few days prior. Need I even say more about why this was a major low/worst? 4 kids in Old Navy with lots of tweens and college aged people with zero kids and open-mouth stares and all those mannequin in the front of the store. It made for a really fun, tantrum filled trip complete with appendages falling off the mannequins and Lucy riding the fake Old Navy dog. She flat-out refused to leave the store because she had claimed the dog as her own and I walked out with a confused baby on one hip and one screaming toddler on the other. I made the firm resolution then and there to never do that again. Or at least not for a few weeks.

+ Ok, how about a high or best. It's 2:30 p.m., 2 kids are "napping" and I am drinking coffee out of a Guinness glass:

Elmo says "at least it's not Guinness". A high and a low if you ask me.

How about you? Share our goods and bads, I am all E-Ears.