Proverbs for the Hard Headed

     This message is brought to you by that precious moment in the day that I fondly call the witching hour, which is, as you know, when even the best of mothers feel the beginning of exhaustion start to set in and the children, smelling weakness, prey upon her sanity. And Proverbs 19:21-

Many are the plan's of a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails.

     We were home and there were potatoes in the oven for dinner. The kids had been snacked and were either working on homework or playing. All was going according to plan.
You see, I had a plan. Dinner was planned, baths were planned, and then books and off to bed, after which cleaning was the plan. The vanity of it all.

They are laughing at my plans and
conspiring against me. 

     There was a nasty smell about and I snagged the youngest and took him to the changing table. Some of you are cringing expecting this to he where the 'fun' begins. Not yet, but it's coming.

     All went as expected, but even though my youngest was clean enough I felt that, it being bath night anyways, it was bath time.

     Ah, the feeble plans of men.

     I turn on the water and immediately am assaulted by a crash and a scream or two. The older two sprint past the door, fleeing the scene of the crime, and I grab them to get an account of what was destroyed, mauled, or on fire.

     Putting them both in time out for touching the blinds, that is what the crash was, I head that way to asses the extent of the damage.

     I pause by the bathroom to turn off the bath water and discover it is as cold as ice. Yes, I checked that I had the right handle on the faucet on, and, thank goodness, I was not yet so far gone as to have turned on the cold by mistake.

    Therefore, my only conclusion was that there was no hot water, and that there was a problem with the hot water heater.

      I call my husband, and text my landlord after looking in the closet to see if there was anything obviously wrong, as in something had expolded or was leaking. Nope, and that exhausted my level of expertice, thus the text was sent.

     So my landlord says he will be here in 10 min. and I frantically try to make sure that our dirty underwear is put away and that we don't look like total slobs, while trying to boil water to make use of the bathtub full of cold water that I still really need to put a child into, meanwhile, the little prince, was running around diaperless because he was about to be put in the tub... you see where this is going, right?

He likes shoes...
 maybe too much.

     Well, he peed in my shoe... like you do... and pooped in the laundry room... because... I don't know. He had just had a poopy diaper, I thought I had a few moments at least.

     So, small child to the now coolish, not cold tub thanks to a pot of boiling water, rinse the shoe with cold water because that's all I had, towel for the pee, bleach to the laundry room, a few more items into the useless dishwasher, other items with bodily fluids stuffed unceremoniously into the useless washing machine, but hey they aren't in the walkway, and then I remember to go to see what the big kids are up to.

     No idea when time out ended. Not my most consistent parenting moment but, there was pee in my shoe and poop on the floor, sometimes you have to prioritize. And at some point in my panicked hurrying I had shooed them to the other end of the house so that I was only cleaning off one child. Disaster adverted. Ha!

     In the middle of the floor lies the broken blinds in a crumpled heap. I stick these back up as best I can while growling threats to confiscate all their money to the end of time if they touch them again.

     Once I turn and actually look at them I grab the bubbles that they were in the process of getting out (so not allowed in the house) from their already sticky hands, tossing them in the trash because all mercy left when the poop arrived and I set the wayward older children to cleaning the living room.

     This, being their favorite thing to do in the whole wide world (feel the sarcasm), leads to much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

     I am in the process of chewing the oldest out for whining and arguing, and calling the sneaky middle child who had slipped away while pretending she was putting something up, and of course the doorbell rings.
   
     Landlord is here.

     I escort him to the hot water heater, telling him what I know and then run off to the other end of the house to rescue the screaming baby in the once again icy tub.

     The baby was dried and diapered... I'm a quick learner... and my husband arrived to get the older kids to finish picking up the living room.

I took this right before we left
the house. I earned this crazy.

     Turns out that the storms last night tripped a breaker, and since we have never lived in a place where storms trip breakers not to mention that our last hot water heater was gas, it hadn't even occurred to us. Still we feel a little dumb for not trying that before we call.

     So we apologize to our very kind landlord and set about putting together dinner in a frantic it's a school night and my husband has somewhere to be in an hour sort of way. Yep, the meat was still frozen and the potatoes weren't done after over an hour...

     Before I had even had a chance to internalize this and begin to break my wise husband bundled all the kids into the car and we all went to Chick-fil-a...

     ...where the playground was closed...

     ...because it's that kind of day.

It's a hey your not all that, you still need me, up here, God speaking, so listen up, I've got you, love you even though your hard headed, sort of day. And I had a lovely dinner with my beautiful children.

In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.

Proverbs 16:9