If You Give a Mom a Milkshake

Sometimes, a bonus isn't a bonus, like when the first child begins coughing; and the second and the third echo.  When one kid says, "I don't like eggs." and two who always up to this point loved scrabbled breakfasts decide that they too won't eat them. 

In a family this large, cascade calamities are par for the course; one child forgets their lunchbox.  While you are dressing the three toddlers to put in the car to bring lunch, you spy a library book you know is due.  Putting together the diaper bag for the trek, you see the drycleaning and that gets added on.  While loading the car you notice one child left their trumpet in the car and they have music today. 

You then think, you will need their music stand and back inside you go.  The phone rings, and you are asked to go to the post office.  Since you're going to the post office, you grab the bills.  They will need to be addressed and you need a few more envelopes.  By the time you are in the car with all three kids, it is lunch time and you've moved approximately 387 pounds fifty yards. 

Once you drop off the lunch box, trumpet, and book, dry cleaning, and address and mail the bills, you will remember that YOU had a scheduled car appointment to get an oil change for free and decide since you're in the car, you must go.   While at the car dealership, you will wish you'ld kept the lunch box, trumpet and book, as they would have kept the minions entertained.  The other adults in the room want the TV on the news, so you spend your time keeping the three hungry toddlers from trying to play with display tires by bribing them with stale poptarts and a lemonade from the vending machine.  But since you used up the quarters and usable bills on the stale poptarts and lemonade, you get to go without the much needed diet coke and snickers bar that mock you from behind the plexiglass. 

Instead, you are hungry, tired and must somehow be entertaining to your offspring while suffering the cruel silent stares of grown ups who are also doing this necessary mundane task but don't want the distraction of children to keep them from feeling bored.

When you get done with the free oil change that includes replacing a filter for an extra charge you had not anticpated, you'll load up the car, and swing by to pick up the school kids.  You'll ask if the child you saved by starting this run liked his lunch.  He'll explain, he got the lunch box too late for lunch and that  he's very hungry but forgot his bag at school and can we please stop for a snack? 

Weary, beaten and irritated because you would have willingly eaten the lunch he forgot that you retrieved that he forgot yet again, you comply. When you get the snack and finally begin the trek home while hunkering down on a milk shake and burger, you'll finally pause to wonder, when did my life become "If you give a mouse a cookie?"