Yes, Polar Bears Are Cute...But They're Cuter When I'm Awake

A couple of days ago, I was thinking of changing the name of the blog from Bad Mommy to something else. But this morning, I'm feeling like the title fits. I almost hesitated to post how I'm really feeling about my kids this morning, but if not here, where? If I'm being really honest, I'm not really liking any of them right now.

Let's back up a bit. Yesterday evening, we had a little family meeting to finalize the details of our San Diego trip, which is Oct 1st - 4th. We hadn't quite decided what to do on the 4th, and we had it narrowed down to either the San Diego Zoo, or Legoland. We looked at both websites, and we settled on the zoo. Steve's never been there, I haven't been there since I was about 10, and none of the kids have ever been there. It's cheaper, closer to the hotel, and they close at 5pm, which means we might actually get home around midnight. While looking at the website, we saw they have a few live cams, and one of them is the Polar Bear Plunge. Of course, when we looked at it last night, we couldn't see anything, because it was dark.

So this morning I'm peacefully sleeping, and I hear this little voice:

"Mommy, can we look at the polar bears now?"

I open my eyes and look at the clock...wow, 7:30...I never sleep this late. Danielle has band practice at 9am. I don't have to get up quite yet, except Kylie wants to look at the polar bears, and she's not going away. I tell her to get the laptop, which is right next to the bed, thinking I can turn the thing on and lie back down. Well, booting up a computer and finding website isn't all that easy with a child top of your arm. Is it bad that by this time I'm already annoyed? And that Steve somehow able to sleep through this? So I finally get the thing up, and since it's only 7:30, no bears on the cam right now. But now she wants to look at the other cams, and the kids area, and she wants to play the games they have on the kids section, but most of them require reading so she needs help with all of them, and it's Saturday morning and I'm still in bed, and I've been awake for all of 7 minutes, and she just won't stop talking. I swear, living with this kid is like a stream-of-conciousness novel. The amount of words she can say and the number of subjects she can cover in a 7 minute period is nothing short of amazing. And by amazing, I mean she drives me nuts. I always thought that having a child "later in life" would mean you have more patience, but I think I actually have less patience with her than I had with the other two when they were little. And by less, I mean almost none. I don't know why this is, I wish it was something I could change.

After a while, I go downstairs to find that the living room is a mess. Actually, it's the same mess that was there last night. I had gone downstairs last night to straighten it up, but when I started, Shannon looks at me from her permanent position in front of the computer and says, "Hey mom, do you want me to straighten up the living room?" Yes, I swear she said that. She is actually quite helpful when she wants to be. So of course I said "Yes, that would be great, thank you." I went in and loaded the dishwasher, and before I went back upstairs I said, "Shay, are you sure you're going to do the living room?" She says, "oh yeah mom, I'm sure." I think I probably asked her this a total of four times, and she affirmed each time. I didn't even ask her to do this, she volunteered! So I went down this morning, and everything is exactly the way it was when I went to bed. Cleats, socks, shoes, paper, crayons, toys still on the floor...soda cans on the computer desk (yes, my kids drink soda, again, bad mommy), and general stuff on the entertainment center that shouldn't be there. I looked around, and I was annoyed. I went up to Shannon's room, nudged her sleeping form with my foot, and informed her that she didn't clean up the living room last night, like she told me about 4 times she was going to do. Her reaction is "Oh my gosh, I forgot!!" Well, since this is her reaction to just about everything these days, it doesn't make me any less annoyed. The thing that bugs me is that I was set to clean the room myself, but then she told me she would, so I left it. Don't tell me you're going to do something and then not do it. Grrrrrrrr. Am I making too much of this? Probably. So now I'm in a mood, and so is she.

Steve took Danielle to band practice at 9am. She leaves this note on the white board: "Can we please get some dental floss? I don't like having my gums all inflamed, gross!"

Ok, we have dental floss. Can you tell she had her six month checkup this week? Why don't you just ask where it is? Ask your sister, she uses it, she'll tell you we have some. While I know you would like to blame your lack of flossing, and the subsequent lecture from the dentist on someone other than yourself, the fact is that we do have it in the house, you just don't use it. Grrrrrrrr.

To make my morning just a little brighter, I decided, as I do most weekends, to check out their grades online. Our school system has this thing where you can follow your kids' grades online. You pick the school, enter their ID number and a PIN, and you can see each class average, along with all the assignments and individual grades on each assignment. Shannon is getting all As and Bs, which is great. I pointed out to her a couple of her Bs are really high, like 88 and 89, and if she works hard this last week of the quarter, those could easily be As also. She's doing really well and I tell her so. Then I check Danielle's grades. This kid was an A student all through elementary school and jr high. Now, there's band and gospel choir and dance and the computer and texting on her phone, just a whole lot of distractions. It's not like she's failing anything, but she's not doing nearly as well as she's capable of doing. I look and see that she failed to turn in two math homework assignments this past week. We've already discussed that if I see a zero on an assignment, meaning she didn't turn it in, she's going to lose her cell phone and computer privileges. I also see that she's missing an assignment in biology, and two in Spanish, and that she got 40/90 on another assignment in Spanish. She was getting an A in that class a couple of weeks ago, now it's a C. So Steve has now gone to pick her up from band practice, and she's going to be informed that her cell phone has been confiscated. She's going to come into the house with a huge attitude, and I know I'm not going to handle it well. It's already not been a good morning, and I'm in no mood to deal with that. And we're supposed to go shopping for shoes to match her homecoming dress this afternoon. Yay. In fact, we need several things, so we were planning a family trip to Target, which is always guaranteed to raise my blood pressure, because of Kylie and her "Mom, can I have" disease. The answer is always no, but that sure doesn't stop her from trying. Oh, the books all say if you're consistant and don't give in, eventually they'll stop asking. Well, none of the people who wrote those books ever met Kylie. I know the sensible thing to do is leave her home with Daddy and just take the other two, but he's home with her four evenings a week and Sunday morning, while I'm at work, and I don't think that's fair to him.

Is there a patience class I can take somewhere? Because somewhere along the way, I've really lost mine. I don't know when my tolerance got so low, but it has. I need a vacation, and I don't mean one to San Diego with the kids. I mean one by myself, with a big bottle of Kahlua and the first three seasons of Beverly Hills, 90210 on DVD (my 90210 addiction is a sickness all its own...I love you, Soapnet!), somewhere away from here. Oh good....Steve and Danielle are home. Let the bitching commence. Sigh.