A Case of the Mondays

Mondays are my absolute least favorite day.  There's the usual back-to-the-grind funk that settles over the house when Dan has to go back to work and Abby has to go back to school, but my Mondays are so much uglier than that.  Our weekends seem to pass by in a blur, and I never can quite remember what we spent 2 days doing...other than whatever it was, it did not involve my usual chores at the house.  I barely keep up with the clutter, mess, stink, dirt, and junk during the week--all hope is lost on the weekends.  We usually spend one day with my in-laws every weekend--Dan's parents live about an hour from us, and while we love seeing them and having the kids spend time with their grandparents, that one day does a number on the house and our collective psyches (mostly mine).  Maybe other people are way better at packing up for a day than I am, but for me, it usually involves throwing clean laundry out of laundry baskets onto the floor, digging through the pile for spare underwear, pants, and shirts for the kids, rummaging through the pantry and fridge for whatever snacks and drinks I need to take with us, and packing about 8.6 bags of various sizes full of all the stuff we travel with for the day...all while screaming at the kids to cooperate and at Dan to help in any way that doesn't involve reading the paper at the table while chaos breaks out around him.  So yeah, after that one day at my in-laws' (usually Sunday), it looks like a hurricane hit my house.  Welcome to the scene of destruction come Monday morning:

This photo doesn't do the mess justice because you can't see into the kitchen!

Not only do I have to uncover the house from the storm of the weekend every Monday, I also have to resume my normal day-to-day stuff...and I'm already way behind.  Today, the "normal stuff" includes tackling laundry--I had to strip the boys' bed sheets because they are both getting over some form of illness and could probably benefit from germ-free sheets, and one of them had an unfortunate diaper leak on their sheets last night...so the laundry was a first-thing kind of emergency project.  After stripping the sheets and getting that load started, I discovered that most of the laundry hampers in the house were full...I'm never quite sure how that happened, since as you could see, I haven't yet finished putting away the laundry I just did.  I'm certain I just finished the laundry--how could there be more already?

Here's the kicker to my Mondays, though--Abby has a short day at school every Monday.  Her classes let out at 1:30pm, and she gets off the bus close to 2pm.  Why is this a big deal?  Because both of my boys still take naps.  Every afternoon, from about 1pm to 4pm, those boys are snoozing.  So on Monday afternoons, I have to magically be in two places at the same time--home with my sweet sleeping boys, and at the bus stop picking up my big girl.  The bus stop is at the top of my street--it takes about 4 minutes to walk up there, and I can still see my front door from the bus stop...but it's too far for the monitor in the boys' rooms to still receive a signal, and too far for me to feel comfortable (or legal) leaving my kids unattended.  Abby is only 6 years old, so the bus driver isn't allowed to let her walk home by herself--if no one is there to get here at the bus stop, Abby must get back on the bus and be driven back to school until I can come pick her up.  Thankfully, that has never happened (my fellow bus stop parents have pity on me if I'm not there in time and someone has always vouched for her off the bus)...yet.  My neighbor will usually watch the boys' on the monitor for me (I have a video monitor) while I run up to the bus stop, but I still feel a constant source of anxiety about the Monday afternoon juggling act.  Sometimes my neighbor has things to do and isn't home at 2pm...what then?  I have had to run up to the bus stop before with no one watching the monitor, but I just really, really don't like to do that.  So I get anxious about how it's all going to work out as soon as I get up Monday morning.  I hate Mondays.

the ballerina with her welcoming committee  :)

In addition to this early-out day of school, Abby also has dance class at 4pm on Mondays.  This means that while trying to uncover the house from the weekend, catch back up on my day-to-day chores, and work out the bus stop run, I also have to manage to feed the boys lunch about 30 minutes earlier than every other weekday, so that they can get down for naps at an earlier time and therefore wake up at an earlier time...so that we can all pile in the car and get Abby to dance class by 4pm.  Her class is literally 4 minutes from our house by car, so it's not a really big deal, but I'm always the totally disheveled Mom dragging two reluctant boys in their pjs across the parking lot at the dance place while trying to put her daughter's hair in a bun...five minutes after the class has started.  Ugh.  The boys are still in their pjs, by the way, because Jake refuses to sleep in anything other than pjs (including at naptime), and I never seem to have enough time to get them back in their regular clothes in the mad rush out the door.  It's just kind of a miracle that I'm not still in pjs in the parking lot.  Abby's class is an hour long, but there's no real waiting area for siblings to wait during the class--her class is in an office building on the military installation, not in a dance studio.  There's a waiting area down the hall (meant for people waiting to be called back for appointments in the offices), but it doesn't have a door--and if you've met my boys, you know that a room without a door does nothing to deter them from running, screaming, into the offices of people working nearby...so it's not really an option for us to wait there.  When the weather is nice, I take the boys to a nearby playground and let them burn off some energy for 45 minutes--something we all enjoy.  When the weather isn't nice (like today), I let the boys watch a DVD in the car for 45 minutes--something I don't enjoy at all.  It's all over at 5pm, when I drag the boys across the parking lot again to collect our beautiful ballerina and head home...where I then have to figure out dinner and explain the still-disastrous state of the house to my husband when he gets home from work.  Between the bus stop run and the dance class prep, I lose my naptime quiet in the house to get anything done...so it's going to have to wait until Tuesday...when Jake has gymnastics and I'm not home to get anything done.  Maybe Wednesday, then?