somebody around here needs a good spanking

After work yesterday, I didn’t want to go home.

At my desk, I fantasized a little about driving to the airport for a flight to Vegas, then had some sort of Entourage-esque flash montage of my high rolling it with Adrian Grenier. Even my dreams have become more realistic these days, so I settled for considering a trip to the mall.

Which would have simply put off the inevitable. I don’t have money for shopping, and I hate window shopping. I would have come home empty-handed and depressed to the same house I came home to empty-handed and depressed, just an hour later. That extra hour would have been three extra dirty bowls in the sink, three extra mounds of Frosted Flakes ground into the carpet, and three extra friends shooed back outside at the warning sound of my car pulling into the garage. That’s the two older ones.

Next up:

Ehren is the crankiest baby I’ve ever given birth to and, although I may not be reproducing at Duggar-proliferation, I’ve had my share, so I can honestly say: Ehren stfu, by God. He hates baths, he hates car rides, he hates every attempt at soothing the crankies ever attempted. When he’s not teething, he’s constipated. When he’s not constipated, he’s congested. When he’s not congested, he’s over-stimulated. This has been going on since birth, and I am exhausted.

Send him away to Grandma’s, you say? He hates being away from home. He is not your most polite houseguest unless you have a Hershey bar in your hand, and I’m uninterested in parenting by diabetes.

Back to the older ones:

Before he could go outside, I told Jon Alex to clear his junk off the kitchen table and to pick up all the trash he’d dropped beneath it. After wiping the table lemony-fresh as Jordan praised it, he told me he didn’t like being treated like the maid. I nearly choked him to death. My palms started to itch and my shoulder muscles ached to reach up and out toward that skinny, lazy little neck of his and do that movie martial arts twig-snap thing.

I was agitated, but not enough for childocide. I didn’t even raise my voice (but every profane word in my vocabulary made a temporary appearance on the tip of my tongue). I explained to him what you’re assuming I explained to him, and reminded him that I don’t ask him to do anything around the house except pick up after himself. It’s for my sanity we have a cleaning crew, it’s not for his convenience. My room looks like Normandy Beach threw up on Mount St. Helens, it can be a holy hell wreck around here sometimes. If I can’t get my kids to throw away a g-d Lunchables package every once in a while, parenting may not be my life’s calling.

Think all this can be traced back to my no-spank philosophy? I think some spankins would have had my den clean by now.