TheWRITEaddiction.com

Remember that episode of “A Different World” when Debbie Allen plays a therapist and she tells Whitley to “Relax, Relate, Release”. Remember them shrugging their shoulders into a different positions as they repeated each word.

That’s me. Every. Single. Day.

First day of the week. I still haven’t figured out our new weekly schedule. I’m making minor adjustments, so I decided to give the children their baths early yesterday. I was extremely pleased with myself, as the oldest was already clean and dressed in her pajamas. I run water for my boy, and tell him to get ready for the bath. He goes to the bathroom and comes out only half-naked. It only takes me three tries to tell him to get in the water before i hear the first splish-splash. A few seconds later, I walk in and find him completely submerged, with his shirt still on.

Relax.

I get him dressed and ready for bed. I run the water for baby number three, only to have the oldest knock on the door. She has to use the restroom and is refusing to use either of the two available restrooms. It’s fine. It’s just a minor, relatively common, delay at our house. So I give her the room, while i go to check on dinner. A few minutes later, she emerges and asks why the baby is undressed. I explain to her, but loudly enough for the boy to hear, that people generally take their clothes off before they bathe. My big girl makes a face. Umm…Then she explains that she drained all the bathwater. Again, not a major setback, but the baby was running around nude for a few extra minutes, which led to what she calls a “spill’. I believe the rest of us would call it peeing in the middle of my dining room.

Relate.

So the new schedule was going swell. Hubby was able to get some reading in. I got dinner on the table at an almost reasonable hour. And all that would be great…except Micro-me curled up in a little ball next to her daddy and went to sleep… at 6:35 … so she slept through dinner…again a very minor setback in the grand scheme of things. That is, until she hit that magic number of seven hours of sleep, at just about 2 in the morning. So in the wee hours of the morning, we were watching the Comedy Central shows on my DVR. After that, we watched a couple of episodes of Law and Order. I got her back to sleep thirty minutes before my alarm clock went off.

Release.

I’m tired. I will likely be that way for a long time. This is my life now. But with all the shoulder shrugging I’m doing, I might be releasing some of the tension that is stored there. I’m barely holding on to anything, including my sanity, Maybe I should let it go, too. I mean, after watching Frozen for the umpteenth time this week, it almost sounds like a good idea.

Mama Radford