How do you pause this thing?

Well, my 10 loyal followers, it is Friday afternoon. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but feel happy.

Which is just stupid.

What’s so great about the weekend? It’s not like the children SLEEP LATER. It’s not like I get to sit around watching TV (I just capitalized that for emphasis in case you didn’t catch it). It’s not like I can hang with my peeps and get DRUNK.

On Saturday morning, Owen wakes up at 6:27 instead of his usual 6:41. Sam will pop up at 7:12 instead of having to be dragged out of bed in order to get to daycare on time. If Chris or I happen to be feeling particularly generous, we might allow the other one to sleep until 8:00, but we aren’t very generous people so that doesn’t happen much. And then we get them dressed and they look at us, all, “What now?”

“Ein shide?” Owen will ask in his elf voice. And since we don’t know what the heck that means, we will ignore him until he proclaims, “OL OUT!” And when we don’t get that either, Sam will interpret, “Owii said, ‘roll out.’” And then we can’t ignore them anymore, unless we pretend to be deaf which Chris is super good at.

Really, though, once you get past the waking up early part, weekends can be fun. We go grocery shopping as a family, to the zoo, the children’s museum (haaaate it – makes me want to punch people in the faaaace), the park, visit relatives. We do a lot of stuff and it’s pretty entertaining. But it is not exactly restful. And since the boys worked out a schedule wherein they stagger their naps so that we (the parents) could be supervised at all times, there is no napping for us.

It’s not that I’m tired, exactly. I really have gotten used to the hours I must now keep. It’s just that my life Never. Turns. Off. I’m never done, never really on a break, never really off-duty.

And that’s the hard thing about being a parent