A Day in the Life...

The Beleaguered, Harassed, Bone-Tired Life, that is! *

How do you do it, everyone asks me.  How do you manage to write and hold down a full time job and take care of two little sea-monkeys and keep your honey bunny happy and keep your home from falling into rack and ruin?  The short answer is: I haven’t a clue.  The long answer goes something like this:

4:30 a.m.  My 11-month-old daughter, Megan, wants to breastfeed.  Not a problem, because she sleeps in my bed, but she’s no longer a helpless little lump that stays put where you set her down.  These days, when she’s hungry, she wriggles near and smacks me around until I get up.

5:00 a.m. Megan’s tummy’s full, so you’d think she’d roll over and fall asleep, and let Mummy grab a snooze.  Ha.  Megan wants to party.  Poke, poke!

5:25 a.m.  Okay, I give up.  No snoozing for Mommy.  I get up, get breakfast ready, and pack Riley’s lunch kit (Spiderman, of course, because without Spiderman, he’s not going anywhere).  Pack lunches for me and Rawle, too.  (Okay, take pre-packed lunches out of the deep freeze and shove them into plastic grocery bags and put them near to our briefcases and hope we don’t forget them).

5:55 a.m.  Grab shower.  Pull on rumpled clothes, or iron said clothes if they’re really, really rumpled.

6:15 a.m. Trip over Megan, who’s practicing her crawling.

6:17 a.m.  Dress sleeping, 3-year old Riley, wipe his face, brush his hair, and put him, still sleeping (how does he do that?) into his car seat.

6:22 a.m.  Put Megsie into her seat.  She spots her brother and squeals until he wakes up.  He immediately begins to demand his favorite beverage, “juice-in-box”, his Flintstones vitamins and his Froot Loops.  Also wants to hold aforementioned Spiderman lunch kit.  Cries when I tell him that a lunch kit is for lunch, and he’ll get his when he gets to school.  Thus begins our first fight of the day—but not our last.

6:26 a.m. Rawle starts the engine while I lock up, and we drive off. 

6:27 a.m.  We turn around and come back.  I collect forgotten lunches on counter.  Lock door again.

6:29 a.m.  Return for Riley’s sneakers.

6:31 a.m.  On the road to our jobs at Point Lisas.  Rawle and I work at the same company, the National Gas Company, which purchases, transports and sells natural gas on behalf of the government.  And no, we didn’t meet there.  He joined ten years after I did.  But that’s another story.  (It’s a Hot For Teacher story, so I promise I’ll tell you one day.)

6:42 a.m.  Riley wants to hold his sneakers while he eats his cereal and drinks his juice.  I tell him he can’t.  Fight #2.

6:47-7:10 a.m.  Fights #3-7 with Riley.  Give your sister back her stuffed lion, stop playing with the car window, don’t squirt juice on your sister, stop throwing cereal on the floor, and no, Mummy and Daddy can’t change the radio station to let you listen to rap (at age 3!) because Mummy and Daddy are listening to the news.

7:15 a.m.  Peace accord with Riley.

8:15  a.m.  Kids dropped off.  15 minutes late for work, but who’s counting?

8:15 a.m. to 11:47 a.m.  Work.  Like what I’ve been doing since I got up isn’t work.  Groan.

11:48 a.m. Sneak into the kitchen early before the noon rush to heat up lunch.

11:55 a.m. – 1:05 p.m.  Boot up trusty laptop, open current novel, and get to writing.  Thought I’d never get to that part, didn’t you!  With luck, I can eat with one hand while tapping away with the other.  On a good day, I can write 2-3 pages on my lunch hour.

1:08 – 4:10 p.m.  Slog away at my desk.  More groaning, laced with liberal amounts of self-pity and sincere promises to self to quit my day job and write for a living! 

4:12 p.m.  Reality check.  What about that mortgage, eh?

4:15 – 4:45  Shut down official work, open back up laptop, and squeeze out maybe a page and a half or so while waiting for Rawle, whose workaholism always seems to kick in late in the afternoon.

5:07 p.m.  Collect tile rodents, leave for home.

6:25 – 7:10 pm.  Home.  Play with kids while trying to do dinner.  Riley wants more juice-in-box, but I tell him no because it’ll spoil his appetite.  He opens the fridge door (yeah, he can do that now) and sucks down a few mouthfuls of Parmesan cheese straight from the tub, then swipes a yogurt.  He forgets the yogurt on the floor and picks up his plasticene, which he feeds his sister, takes out the crayons, feeds her some of those, too, and proceeds to tear his coloring book to shreds.  Meanwhile, Megan finds the yogurt, dumps it on the floor and rolls around in it.  Riley’s back in the fridge searching for God-knows-what, and over the next few minutes, fights #8-11 take place.  He wins all of them. 

7:11 p.m.  Having missed the most important 10 minutes of the 7 o’clock news, I bring in the dinner, forgetting how nice and slippery the floor is, and nearly bust my ass.  There are kids around, so I manage not to cuss.  Rawle gets his dinner, Riley gets his, and Megsie eats out of my plate, only Riley thinks that what’s on Mommy’s plate tastes better, so he abandons his and goes rooting around in mine.  With his filthy hands.

8:15 p.m.  Round up the posse for their bath.  To save time, I toss them both into the tub together.  Hilarity ensues.   They soak the entire floor and waste a few ounces of baby wash while I perch on the toilet seat and congratulate myself on their absolute adorableness.

8:35 p.m. Fingers are wrinkled, but nobody wants to get out of the bath.  Another fight.  Exasperated, I pull the plug and haul them out, and dry and dress them in tandem. 

8:55 p.m. At Riley’s insistence, I race through a third reading of The Remarkable Farkle Mc Bride (Thanks a whole helluva lot, John Lithgow!)  I kiss Riley goodnight.  He begs me to stay and I feel like a rat, but I have so much to do yet.  I put Megs to nap in the playpen in the sitting room for the time being, until I am ready to go to bed.  No way am I leaving those two together unsupervised!

9:02 p.m.  I set my clock for 30 minutes, to keep tabs on my housework, so that I don’t spend the next two hours scrubbing and buffing.  One must have limits!  Feed the dog, do the dishes, put away a wantonly large collection of toys, scrape all the plasticene, crayon, Parmesan, and ground-in crud from the floor, and mop up.

9:32 p.m.  Time’s up.  Whatever I haven’t done tonight will have to wait until tomorrow.  Rawle glances up from his computer.  “Kids sleeping?”  “Yep.”  “So, howzaboutit?”

9:33-10:10 p.m.  *Censored*

10:12 p.m. I set my clock again, this time for one hour.  MY one hour.  My single, solitary hour for the day.  Out comes the laptop.  I review what I’ve written at lunch.  Rubbish.  I edit, delete, rewrite and tweak until I’m satisfied.  With luck, manage to eke out another page on top of it.

11:12 p.m. Oh, God, I’m bushed.  I back up my novel, lay out whatever the kids will need in the morning and, if I’m lucky, take a shower.

11:35 p.m.  I retrieve Megsie gently from the playpen to transfer her to our bed, praying that she doesn’t wake up.  She wakes up.  And she wants boobies.  While she’s attached to me like a little limpet, having her late-night snack, I fall asleep. 

And that, my friends, is how I do it.

*This interview dates back to 2006.  Some parts of my life have changed, some haven't.  Will do another one soon.