What I Did All Damn Day



What it would take to ask me what I do all day.


Note: This is a long-ass post because I have a long-ass day.

The other day my friend Hartley Steiner of the blog Hartley's Life with 3 Boys posted on Facebook, "if you're a stay-at-home mom of a special needs child, what do you tell people when they ask you what you do all day?"

If someone actually had the brass balls it would take to ask me that question, I would tell them I sit on my ass at Starbucks, chatting with my stay-at-home mom friends, drinking pumpkin lattes and eating those little cake-pop things all day.  Then I would punch them in the throat and return to scheduling therapy sessions and cleaning up other people's literal and figurative crap.

While no one has ever been stupid enough to ask me what I do all damn day, I do get a lot of emails to the effect of, "how do you do it all?" and the answer is, I don't. This week I have been wearing the same pair of (unwashed) jeans for five days straight. I am drowning in dishes, laundry, bills, unreturned emails, medical and educational appointments, therapy sessions, and fifth-grade math homework.

Here's just one of my days from last week:

5:00 a.m. Little Dude crawls into bed with me.  You think at 5 a.m. I want to have an argument about this?  Hellz no.  I fall back asleep and so does he.

6:00 a.m. Wake up. The Absent-Minded Professor is long gone, at work.  I normally make coffee, but this morning I was out of coffee, which is the most horrendous thing that can happen to any mom and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.  Yesterday I noticed that I used up the last of the coffee, but because I didn't type it into my phone to remind me to get coffee later, I forgot.  (F--k you too, ADHD.)  So instead I microwaved the old coffee that was still in the coffee pot from yesterday.  This is not a good start to the day.

Check my emails, and respond to the ones I can respond to off the top of my head.  Scan the news so that I don't become completely detatched from the world.

Get the kids' school clothes ready.  Realize that two out of four kids don't seem to have clean clothes.  Get wrinkled clothes out the dryer.  One child is going to wear pants that are tad too big and a shirt that's a tad too small, but she'll be in dress code, so I don't care.

7:00 a.m. Get the kids up.  This takes longer than it should.  Feed them breakfast, dose out medications.  Nag them to check their visual checklists to see what they're supposed to do in the morning.

7:20 a.m. I take a shower.  I am able to get entirely clean in five minutes.  (Cold weather = pants = not shaving my legs for the next few months = major time-saver.)  However, during that five minutes:  someone knocked and screamed about needing socks so he could "sock skate" in the kitchen; someone else asked me to sign her homework copy book; and a third person came in, used the toilet, and flushed the toilet, causing me to only have boiling-hot water.  Not to worry: that person also left the door open when she left the bathroom, so the cold air that came in kind of evened out the scalding.

7:25 a.m. Get dried off and dressed.  This takes me another five minutes, including combing my hair.  I take an extra minute to spackle on some cover-up over my stress pimples.  I'm high-maintenance that way.

7:30 a.m.: Check to see where the kids are on their visual morning checklists.  They're doing pretty good.  We also have a chore chart, which they were great about at first, but now the novelty has worn off.  Inform the kids that if they don't do their chores after school, I'm not going to do mine.  Which means I'm not making dinner or doing laundry.  So if the kitty litter doesn't get scooped and the trash doesn't get taken out this afternoon, they can make themselves some cereal tonight and wear dirty clothes to school tomorrow.  It seems like they're going to get back on track with the chore chart.



In the next forty minutes, we do the following: pack lunches, brush hair, brush teeth, apply hydrocortisone to rashy kids and give nebulizer treatments to wheezy kids.  I also dress Little Dude, which is not as easy as it

sounds, because his eczema is making his sensory processing issues worse than usual.  So there is some

screaming.  And flapping.  And running and wrestling and possibly pinning down a child and sitting on him.

Think I won't take you to school without shoes?  Try me.



8:10 a.m. Inform all children that I am taking them to school, whether they are wearing shoes or not.

8:15 a.m.: Drive the girls to school.  Our elementary school, which is the best elementary school ever, has parent volunteers who open the car door and help your kids out. 

8:30 a.m.: Take Little Dude to Kindergarten, where I have to park and walk him to the door.  I put his headphones on him before he walks in.  Today he walked in with no fussing.  We are there early, which helps, because it's visually less confusing to him when there's fewer kids in the auditorium.

8:40 a.m.: Stop at Wawa for coffee and a cholesterol sandwich.  I don't usually do that, but I need coffee desperately, and perhaps a sausage, egg and cheese sandwich will make me feel better.

It doesn't.

8:50 a.m.: Come home.  Drink coffee.  Sob for ten minutes because I'm so freaking overwhelmed.  Feel stupid for crying when, in the grand scheme of things, it was actually a good morning.

9:00 a.m. I have a two-hour window in which to get things done before I leave to pick Little Dude up from Kindergarten.  I use this time to write, run errands, and get stuff done around the house that's hard to get done with Little Dude around.  I also sometimes use this time to volunteer at the elementary school library, but today is not a library day.  Probably I would get more done around the house if I didn't do this volunteer work, but it's my only opportunity to see other grown-ups, and I like it.

I need whatever women were smoking in 1949.

Today I answer emails to the Pork Lo Maniac's teachers about her poor pragmatic language skills and email the school district on the status of them paying for an independent evaluation about that.  I research some issues for Little Dude's IEP meeting next week, which I have convened because there are some accommodations which I didn't get in writing the first time.  Guess what?  Accommodations you have arranged verbally are not going to be followed.  This will be fixed, but not without politely but firmly hassling a bunch of people.

I spend about an hour working on my blog and some free-lance writing projects.  I spend the other hour trying to get a few things done around the house:

• Throw in a load of laundry.
• Send emails and leave voicemails for various school district employees.
• Try to correct a bill from Quest Labs, but their system is down.
• Dump the other dry, wrinkly clothes from the dryer onto the couch.  Leave them there.
• Finally take the air conditioners out of the windows and put them up in the attic.  Probably this is something my husband should or could do, but honestly he works about a billion hours and I'd rather he spend his measly home time playing with the kids or doing the dishes.  Did you know that when you take an air conditioner out of a window, it might be full of water?  Which will spill on your jeans, the rug, and whatever toys 'n' crap are on the floor?  I did not know that, but now I do. 

11:00 a.m. Leave to pick up Little Dude from Kindergarten.  We spend about fifteen minutes playing on the school playground, until the dayare kids come a-screamin' out for their recess.  It's too many kids, it's too much noise.  We leave.

11:30 a.m. - 2:45 p.m. This is my time with Little Dude.  We work on his homework, we eat lunch, we read.  Lately he's been pretty stressed, so all he wants to do is sit next to me on the couch, stimming by spinning a Lego minifig in his fingers while he watches me play Lego games on the Wii.  You know he's stressed when he can't even play the Wii.  He can only watch.  It's soothing to him, so I do this.  I take breaks between each level to switch out laundry, wash a few dishes, or make a phone call.  While I do those things, he sits there and stims, until I come back.

Also during this time, I try to get Little Dude to use the potty.  He's doing incredibly well wearing underwear most of the time, and maybe once a day he'll pee on the potty at home.  But he's still not really using the potty, which seems pretty critical to the whole potty-training process.  Before we leave to pick up the girls from school, I put a Pull-Up on him so he can finally poop.  Then I put him in a fresh Pull-Up, because by this time he's kind of exhausted from the whole underwear scene.

I take him to the elementary school early, so he can play on the playground until the girls come out.  He even has a little friend there now, another boy who plays while waiting for his siblings.

3:15 p.m. The girls come out of school, and we play for a few minutes in the fresh air before going home to start homework.  Their homework needs more supervision and help than it probably should, but what am I supposed to do?  If someone doesn't understand something in their homework, I help them figure it out.  Sometimes I have to be there to keep them focused on their homework.  Sometimes we have to deal with anxiety meltdowns.  It sucks.  I hate homework more now than I did when I was a kid.  I try really, really hard not to let my kids know that.



This is what I use as a diaper bag.

 4:45 p.m. It's Thursday, which means the Peanut Butter Kid has therapy tonight at 5:15, a most awkward time.  There are no good times for therapy, though.  Therapy eats into your homework time, your dinner time, or your bedtime-preparation time.  You pick the time that the therapist is available, and work around it.  I pack sandwiches, fruit, and drinks for the kids to eat in the car after therapy.  I make sure the other kids bring their homework if it's not done, or something else to do.  I make sure I remember to bring a Lego minifig for Little Dude or else there will be hell to pay.  I also remember to bring a Pull-Up, and a potty seat in case Little Dude miraculously wants to try to use the toilet at the therapy building.  This is all to go somewhere for a 50-minute appointment.  Pretty much, any time we go anywhere, it looks like we're moving in.  During some of the appointment, I join in.  I add things like "make family calendar so kids know what to expect" and "schedule worry time" and "spend 15 minutes discussing the next day" to my phone calendar.

5:50 p.m. Eat peanut butter sandwiches in the car for dinner on the way to the next appointment. 

6:30 p.m. Cookie has an appointment with the pediatrician for asthma issues. 

7:15 p.m. Get home.  Assuming all the homework is done, there is now 30 minutes left to play a game or watch some TV.  Unless it's a shower night, in which case that has to start right away in order to get all four kids clean.  I used to stagger their showers and baths, but then I would forget who was clean and who was funky, so now we're back to just showering or bathing all the kids in one night.

7:45 p.m. Bedtime preparation begins. Dose out medicines, run the nebulizer treatments.  The Absent-Minded Professor gets Little Dude ready for bed and reads to him.  This is good because by the end of the day I start to run out of patience.  Wrestling Little Dude into his jammies might be the tipping point for me into complete insanity.  I do lie down next to Little Dude until he falls asleep.  I had gotten away from doing that, but then we moved, and that got shot to hell.  And now we're trying to potty-train and work on other stuff at school, so he's too stressed for me to change one. more. damn. thing. 

8:30 p.m. Little Dude is asleep.  I generally spend the next hour dealing with one or more daughter who is having trouble falling asleep due to anxiety issues.  By 9 p.m., it takes every ounce of control that I have to get through this without losing my patience.  Some days my patience feels so depleted that I'm seriously considering tattooing the word "patience" to my wrist as a reminder that losing my schmidt absolutely never helps the situation.

9:30 p.m. Scarf down some leftover Halloween candy while watching an old episode of Glee on Netflix.  (This is the closest I will come to sitting on the couch eating bon-bons.) 

10:15 p.m.  Play Words With Friends on my phone for a few minutes and then pass out.

This wasn't a bad day.  No one was sick; there were no calls from the school; there were no massive meltdowns.  I didn't even attempt to run errands.  I didn't lose my schmidt.  There were about a trillion things that did not get done: I need to pay some bills, I need to vacuum, I need to clean up some sticky stuff in the fridge.  I need to schedule dental appointments and I need to call my doctor to get a refill on my ADHD meds.

I did the best I could, and that has to be enough.

But there you have it.  What I did all damn day.  And tomorrow I get up and do it all again.