A Mother's Musings and Mumblings

So today’s blog entry is going to be written as a tribute to my life the way it has been for the last two weeks while Thing 1 was in Norway because she left Thing 2 behind and then Iggy’s girls were here for two weeks as well and you see Thing 2 is 8 years old and she’s pretty hyper and would meet the criteria for ADD or maybe ADHD if WF and I would only take her in to be evaluated but we don’t want her to be medicated so we just kind of try to manage her behavior without anything and wait and hope and pray that she’ll just grow out of this phase and eventually settle down a bit but then I look at Iggy’s oldest and she’s going to be 14 next week and when I look at her I lose all hope that Thing 2 is really going to grow out of this phase because Dev is the typical teen who doesn’t end every sentence with “why” but only because she never really ends a sentence at all as she runs right on to the next one and then the next, often talking right over the top of her younger sister Elf (who is 10) while Elf talks in her high-pitched tweeny twang starting sentences with “Daaaady” while she competes for attention with both of the other two girls and you might have noticed by now that anything that resembles punctuation is missing from this entry because that’s the way my day has been including a trip to Staples to buy school supplies for Thing 1 and Thing 2 while also listening to a dialog about Elf’s backpack that she wanted but they didn’t have and so it had to be ordered and we needed to figure out if it would be here on time for when she got back next week because it really can’t be all that hard to figure out what day it would arrive if it comes in 3-5 business days while also sorting out how much the packs of 100 lined 3×5 note cards cost and if it would be better to buy the multi-pack or not all while listening to three girls who wouldn’t know how to pronounce a punctuation mark if their short little lives depended on it – which it might soon – and how in the world do they manage to keep talking like that all without ever taking a breath because I’m getting winded just sitting here typing like this and even if they’re staggering their breathing I swear there’s at least two of them talking non-stop at any given point in time and really I honestly can’t wait for Thing 1 to come home from her vacation on Tuesday but I’m sure she’s going to have a lot to tell me when she does and I’m scared that she might have lost her punctuation coming through security on the flight home so I really need to find a case of periods to give to her at the airport just so I can maintain my sanity because it seems less likely to get me reported to the police if I tell my 12 year old daughter that I want her to have a period than if I tell her that I want her to avail herself of the roll of duct tape that I’ve brought along with me or at least the part of the roll that’s left once I’m done with Thing 2 because I can’t duct tape up Dev and Elf but Thing 2 might just take most of the roll on her own anyway unless of course I want to try managing the other half of this equation and just get myself a pair of earplugs which could make other aspects of my life difficult but would allow me to smile and nod whenever I see a female under the age of 15 moving their lips provided of course that I didn’t nod too vigorously because if I did that then I’d give myself whiplash from the non-stop moving of mouths all around me and it would only get worse when Thing 2 started in with the questions because she might be waiting for answers at least occasionally when she stops for breath but as long as there are other girls here then I don’t have to worry about that because they tell her to quit and I don’t have to bother with an answer very often at all except when my brain starts to leak out of my ears and she demands to know if I’m okay and then she won’t let me off the hook even though the talking still keep going and going and going.

Look. A period. Pray that they’re contagious.