stir crazy

I've been taking lots of pictures lately. It's just about the only way I'll remember the happy moments, because this past week was just saturated with the kind of explosive, miserable, suffocating memories that are impossible to forget. It has not been a Glorious Parenting Week.

I can not find a creative and gentle way to get my screaming, intractable, dimple-faced son to understand that when it's winter, we wear winter jackets, mittens and hats. We fight about it every day, sometimes many times a day. It is against human nature to withstand any of the irrational, primitive, witless rantings and ravings of a two-year-old child.

A six-year-old holding a scream festival in her bedroom because her sister won some awards and got chocolate is not captivating either. She doesn't win any points for whining about her Halloween costume for a week, then whining about each successive alteration to that costume while igniting a battle over who gets to draw the design on the pumpkin.

The big sister, self-appointed Sister-In-Chief, raises everyone's blood pressure with her pompous corrections and reprimands; but she is the most helpful and intuitive of the three. She can smooth things over quickly and move things along before the MomBomb explodes.

Really, they're all just reflections of me, since I'm intractable, whining, pompous, reprimanding... especially when we get to these last few days before their dad gets home. They do as I do, not as I say, and I know losing my patience does no good... but I'm not the kind of human who should be single-parenting.

Throw in The World's Most Incredibly Shedding Dog Who Eats Snotty Tissue and Steals Loaves of Bread...