oh grow up

I've just been making a great long comprehensive list of everything I need to do in the world in order to be allowed to take a holiday later this summer. It includes things like Coping with the Basement and Throwing Half the Contents of the House Away because there's no where to put it. I've already completed some of the tasks--End of the Year Reports for the Government, Getting the Babies off of Drinking Out of Bottles since they're not actually Babies Any More (a fact brought home to me this week while trying to talk to people after church only to find two large girls, my own I realized, lying on the floor screaming and shouting in a way that was not cute or funny but was loud and Too Big)--but I went ahead and wrote everything down so as to be able to cross some things off right away.

But honestly, the reason I'm planning a holiday is because I need one--more and more than ever as the stupid list lies there on the table,

 

taunting and laughing at me while I try to muscle my way through one task after another. It seems like this would be what it would be like to get ready to die. If I had warning that I was going to die, I would feel like the house needed to be super clean and everything put away. I wouldn't be the person who said, 'Oh Whatever, I'm going to die so who cares anyway'. I would say, 'Oh No, I'm going to die and the house is not clean'. 

Without descending into morbidity and sorrow, I look cheerfully at death on this bright sunny day, which, though evil (death, that is), resembles in many ways a holiday, a welcome rest. That may be because we have had two successful days of two little girls drinking out of cups, although with so much anger. They are angry, not me. I am so happy. It's possible my happiness is contributing to their anger. And yet, my cloud of happiness is shattered by the screaming and the tripping over these large little girls flinging themselves down in my path in an effort to get bottles of milk out of me. My shins are a mass of contusions. However, because it has already been crossed off the list, I will not give in. They will have to settle, once they stop screaming, for sucking sugar water out of those little plastic tubes, or gnawing on frozen smoothie, or drinking warm sugar milk (Tea) out of their little mugs. What a misery their lives are, stretching before them in one long bottle-less wasteland. Clearly, they would rather die than live this way.