It's a "Day Off"!

I was actually looking forward to today. Mondays when school is closed are good Mondays, as far as I am concerned. I don't physically have to crawl out of bed until my husband leaves for work, excepting the thirty seconds when I get up early and take my reflux medicine. There is no insane drop off or pick up from school schedule, nobody argues over what I packed for snack, and there is no threat of bloodshed over who walks out the door in front of whom. What's not to love about days like today?

It turns out that I forgot something major. I'm fairly certain it is even in the stay-at-home mother's guidebook. (What? You don't have one of those? Yeah, me neither. There should be one though.) You see, when the kidlets are off from school, Mom does not have a day off from her work, too.

All day long, it has been one long chain of my usual chores (laundry, ironing, washing dishes, vacuuming, cleaning, preparing meals, making beds, and so on and so forth) but with the added bonus of the kidlets trying to undo all of my hard work. Mom vacuumed the living room carpet? Awesome! It's time to play with Legos there then. Mom just brought all the laundry downstairs to wash? Great! It's time to go change outfits for no real reason, or even better, to spill something on the pile of clean clothes she is trying to fold. Mom needs us quiet for five minutes so she can handle a phone call about a bill? Yeah, right. We'll use this time to start World War III. Mom has her hands in the middle of the naked bird she is trying to wrestle into the slow cooker? No problem for us. We'll use this time to color all over our hands with makers, "wash" our hands, and get some really cool colors all over the freshly hung, formerly white, towels in the bathroom.

None of that time even includes when the kidlets ask Mom to play with them, or when Mom crashes the kidlets' playtime.

Yeah, Moms don't get days off when the kidlets are home. Oh, and for those who think stay-at-home mothers get days off when the kidlets return to school, you are sadly mistaken. That's when we do everything we can't do with kidlets present plus make up for all the work the kidlets managed to destroy when they were home. It's a good thing we love those kidlets as much as we do.