With your Monday Oct 16, you get a side order of…

Included in today were:

Sleeping in
Making breakfast for 3 kids
Eating breakfast
90 minutes of peaceful driving while Gleek & Patches watched a movie (Link stayed home with Howard)
20 minutes of “When will we get there?” and “are we there yet?”
1 hour of visiting with my sister in law while Gleek, Patches, & Kiki played on a Mcdonald’s playground.
10 minutes of negotiation wherin Kiki tried to get me to promise to buy her a laptop for her next birthday. Or at least a portable dvd player. But she’d settle for an ipod or a Nintendo DS if she really has to. Her birthday isn’t until May and our budget is still tight, I made no promises.
40 minutes of peaceful driving while 3 kids watched a movie.
45 minutes of stressful driving in pouring rain while the cars in front of me sprayed up a mist so thick that visibility was uncomfortably short.
1 back seat squabble which included fruit snacks flying all over the car and two girls both howling as loud as they could.
45 minutes of driving with no rain, but lots of stop and go traffic because people in Utah don’t know how to drive in the rain. I personally passed one overturned truck with accompanying bulldozer to push debris off the freeway. I also passed at least 5 other fender bender type accidents. The radio traffic reports told me about at least two other overturned trucks blocking freeways.
Kiki declaring (5 blocks from home and as part of yet another squabble with Gleek) that she’d rather walk than stay in the car for another minute.
Me pulling over to let Kiki walk. Probably shouldn’t have done that.
Poop in pants which I had to clean up.
Kiki and I yelling at each other and both crying because we were both strung out, exhausted. We pushed each other’s buttons and hurt each other’s feelings. We are so much alike. Poor Howard had to put up with us both.
Snuggles with Kiki where we both apologized and made it all better.
More Kiki snuggles with a movie to watch.
Assorted crankiness from all the other kids for the duration of the afternoon. They were all sniping at each other deliberately attempting to annoy.
Too little patience from me.
The sudden death of the laser printer we’ve had for 13 years now and have used to print all of the Schlock Mercenary scripts. There was a power outage today which apparently killed it dead. It won’t turn on at all.
The purchase of a shiny new laser printer from Amazon.com. It’ll arrive on Thursday.

On the menu for tomorrow:
Preorders open.
Kids go back to school.
I run a church luncheon.
Kiki and Link have lessons in the afternoon.