Marley and ...Us

Tell me if you have "one of those mornings":

So I was going to take 4 of the kids to have dental checkups today at 0900.  After a HUGE hissy fit the night before and crying jag that was TOTALLY out of proportion  (that was meant for someone who shall remain nameless-and I think you know who I mean, Kate ), and that I can only attribute to some massive teenage hormonal imbalance,  Kate politely declined to join us so she wouldn't miss any school.  So I thought, What's the big deal? I'll just switch one Johnson for another and take Asa in her place.  They'll never know the difference...heck, I don't even know the difference sometimes.

But the best part was, that I got to sleep in because the kids got to sleep in since we didn't have to get everyone around for school at 0' dark-thirty.  So when my alarm went off at 0530 ( I forgot to reset it), I just thought- as I lay on the sliver edge of my very own queen sized bed pushed to the brink by my bed-sharing 8 year old and restless-and-crying-all-night 10 month old-I thought I'll just turn it off and rest for a bit...I have plenty of time and I'm soooo tired.  I woke up when the clock said 0730.  Keep in mind I still had to get Bella and Vivi up/fed/dressed/teeth and hair brushed/lunches made/homework signed/shoes found/coats on/backpacks together by 0740.  I actually laid there for a minute thinking maybe I shouldn't even try; it's only elementary school; who cares if they don't make it to graduation because their mom didn't get out of bed. Then I FREAKED.

I ran screaming around, pouring cereal down their gullets, pulling clothes over their heads ("Forget about the arm holes, you can get them later.  Open the door with your nose").  Then I happen to glance at the kitchen clock and realized that apparently I had hit the wrong button on the clock in my fumblings this morning and reset the time ahead quite a bit.  It was only 0700.

  Still late, but much more doable. 

   

Anyhoo, I had enough time  to get everyone else up with Eli waiting until the last possible moment to get up and into the shower, picked up Sleeping Beauty with the Wild Kicking Legs that I had the pleasure of experiencing ALL during the night, but which for the last hour that I had been up appeared mysteriously still, hurried to dress and feed her so we could make it to the dentist on time.  I had Lulu on my bathroom counter attempting to clean her up a bit from the blackberry/cranberry breakfast.  As I was trying to tame her hair that she had rubbed into a fuzzball so bad from her restless night that she looked like a cottonwood  tree, and as I was trying to remove the dried-on snot that covered her face so much that her eyebrows appeared glued in a perpetually surprised  expression (YOU KNOW what I mean), I heard all this commotion and dogs barking in the kitchen. 

 I grabbed her off the counter, knocking off my good blush in the process and saw it shatter all over the floor.  I ran out to the living room and what to my wondering eyes should appear  but my  Bandit chasing a HUGE  dog around the house.  This dog ran into the house when one of the boys opened the front door and he was having a ball running pell-mell through the kitchen and living room  and back again.  It was chaos with everyone yelling, dogs barking, us all running to catch this dog.  I finally forced him back out the front door and the boys said they thought it was the next-door neighbor's dog.  They got dog treats out of the pantry to try to lure it into their backyard.  This dog was so huge it stood up to get the treat, put its paws on Asa's shoulders and was still a head taller.  THANK HEAVENS it was friendly, kind of like an overgrown puppy, as my kids haven't met a dog they thought would do them any harm.   Turns out it didn't belong to the neighbors.

   

  The boys came in and we had to go as we were now running behind to go to the dentist.  I went back into my bathroom to clean up  the mess, when I heard one of those Coyote's-Got-the-Kid blood-curdling screams from Greta.  I ran back out stepping in the blush on the floor and leaving blush tracks on my carpet.  The dog had somehow run back into the house and I guess had almost run down Greta in it's excitement to come back in and play.  Bandit was barking, the dog was running through my kitchen, stopping to put it's massive paws up on the counter and eat the baby's food and all the other leftover kid breakfast schmegma and oh YES I WAS SCREAMING AT THIS *#@^&^*% ANIMAL TO GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, QUIT SCARING MY KID AND EATING MY FOOD AND OF ALL THINGS MAKING ME LATE YET AGAIN FOR ANOTHER APPOINTMENT!  

I couldn't get him out of the front door this time so I pushed him out the back door and closed it, but he jumped up and scratched so hard I thought he was going to tear up my backdoor.  I figured he would either destroy the door on the outside while Bandit destroyed the house on the inside trying to get to him even though we closed all the blinds, or he would dig a hole in my yard trying to get through the fence.  I went outside and opened the gate and he ran out.  

By this time it was getting even later, and I told everyone to get in the van so we could go.  But my boys had unhooked the garage door last night because they couldn't get it to go down and now I couldn't get it to go up.  I yelled at them to "FIX IT!"   and Braden shimmied up the hood of the van and across the roof to get it hooked back up.  I nearly scalped him when I thought it was together and hit the button.  He hit the deck just in Spidey-Man time.

  

Anyway, hooked up  and everyone in, we opened the garage door to back out and that stupid dog ran into the garage!  I had to do some fine finagling to get him back out and the door down in coinciding time.  By this time, the kids had dubbed him Marley because he looked and acted like the dog in Marley and Me-only on steroids.  He kept walking back and forth right in front of my two front tires so close I couldn't see him but for a flash of tail every once in a while.  It took me FOREVER to back out of my driveway and out of the cul-de-sac.  I was trying not to run over him-not because of some higher nonsense about "all God's creatures" blah,blah,blah- but because I didn't have ENOUGH TIME to  clean up the mess!  I already have enough to do. Oh sure-think what you will out there in cyberland, but I KNOW you are right there with me, if you know what I mean.

Not only did it take us several minutes to get out of the cul-de-sac, but that darned dog literally chased my van 4 blocks down the street.  We were 15 minutes late already to the dentist, and as I reached for my phone to call them and apologize and beg them not to cut us out of our appointments, I realized I left my phone  sitting on my bathroom counter.  There was NO WAY I was going to go back for it... I was too afraid that crazy Marley wouldn't let me back out.

You should have seen the looks on the dentist's and his hygienists' faces when the kids came in telling them some crazy story about why we were late.  Sometimes, you just can't make this stuff up.

 

It was funny when we finally got home that afternoon.  Greta walked into the house and stopped just before the hallway.  Then she carefully peeked, sticking her neck way out looking both ways several times like she was getting ready to cross railroad tracks, before venturing very cautiously into the open.  I'm sure she expected to get plowed over,  thinking Marley had been waiting for us in our house, eating our Cheerios and watching ESPN  with the remote in its paw.

And people always wonder why I'm late.