OMG, I love Mother’s Day. I used to think it was a totally bullshit holiday like Valentine’s Day and then I realized it WAS a totally bullshit holiday like Valentine’s Day. Blah, blah, blah, you should appreciate your mother every day, not just on Mother’s Day. Except my mother-in-law apparently reared her son right because he acts like it is a big deal. So I decided to act like Mother’s Day was actually Queen for a Day day.

You think I’m joking? Last year I don’t think I ever got out of bed. I can’t remember. This year, when Mason woke up at 4:30 and I wanted to go crazy, I realized I had been sleeping since 10:15 p.m. so apparently he DID get the memo about Mother’s Day/Queen for a Day day but he just couldn’t go without sustenance any longer since his belly is the size of a thimble. Or something.

Then I woke up again at 8 to the sound of my children coming up the stairs beating each other on the head with my Mother’s Day present, which was a really heavy filled pancake pan from William Sonoma. Then I knew it was Mother’s Day. My husband told me I did have to get out of bed to make the pancakes because he sure as hell wasn’t doing it. So I made pancakes and starting drinking champagne. I wanted a mimosa but I didn’t have orange juice. Let’s be honest, why waste perfectly good Piper with orange juice? It’s total overkill.

75 filled pancakes later (and one bottle of champagne), I got my husband to start moving furniture for me. It was Mother’s Day so not only did he have to do it, he had to act like he was HAPPY about doing it. I was delirious. Then again, I had an entire bottle of champagne in me, so that may have helped. The boys were screaming and yelling and Derek was trying to figure out what he needed to do to fix the double-paned window that the Middle Child had shattered on Friday with a broom stick. The boys were practicing this new game of jumping off the ledge of the window, onto the futon, onto the ottoman, onto the couch and back. I didn’t care. I had Ricky Martin on loop. In Spanish.

We hung art. On the wall. Call it a preemptive move since Nana is coming on Thursday. There are pictures on the wall in my house. It only took two years.

I’m not saying it was my best day ever but I am saying it might be in my top 10. Or five.

My mother called the other day to ask how Father’s Day went. She wanted to be sure I had properly honored the father of my children, my baby daddy, the king of the house, the primo rooster.

I was going to write my annual, beautiful, tear-inducing tribute to my husband on Father’s Day, but I was too tired. I was too tired because we spent Father’s Day doing what my husband wanted to do.

I spent two hours holding up a 60 foot gutter with my head.

First I would like to say, what the hell is up with the unigutter? I thought gutters came in sections. Sectional gutters. Pieces of gutter. And how did they get that 60 foot gutter to my house in one piece back in 1987? Did it come on the back of the truck with the rest of the house? When my husband asked me to hold up the gutter while he replaced the rotten wood behind it, I was all, are you crazy? Then Father’s Day rolled around and I had to do it. We put The Baby down for his nap, threatened The Boy with death if he climbed out the window and onto the roof with us and then we fixed that gutter.

That bad boy was heavy. I was holding it up with my hands but that was too hard. The Husband looked over and saw me balancing the 200 pound gutter up with my head.

D: Babe, it’ll take us 30 minutes tops.

30 minutes tops? 30 minutes. THIRTY MINUTES. I should have known better. I have done fix-it projects with his father. Time is suspended in this family. But I was all, it’s Father’s Day, whatever you say. I blame you, Mom. The replacement wood was 1/4 inch too long and suddenly I heard the miter saw revving up on the roof. My husband doesn’t mess around. Why carry those boards back down to cut when you can cut them on a 40 degree slope of a roof while your wife is holding up the gutter with her head?

My head now has a flat spot and I’m 3/4″ shorter. But by golly, that gutter got fixed for $16.27. I wonder if I could fix the A.C. for $16.27…

I heard The Baby choking last night. I ran upstairs to find him in his father’s arms. Choking. With his father holding him. I yanked him out of his father’s hands and started slapping him on his back.

Nothing came up.

D: I didn’t have another hand to try to get whatever it was out of his mouth.

Nice. The Baby stopped choking and looked at me. He had a little blood on his lip.

Picking up the phone and leaving a message with the surgeon FIL.

K: Yeah, WE were just wondering if The Baby ate something and then started to bleed, would that be a sign that he had perforated his esophagus or anything?

My FIL is probably thinking this is only a step up from the time I called him and asked his secretary to get him out of the meeting because I had a tick on me and I was sure I had Rocky Mountain spotted fever. That time he calmly reminded me that I live about 1800 miles from the Rockies so this should not be a problem.

The Baby then spent the better part of the night up.  And he was cranky.  He bit me excessively.  I almost threw him out the window.  His father finally conducted an intervention.  We were sent to our separate corners and he continued to cry.  I finally gave up and turned the light on.  He spent the next 1 1/2 hours climbing over me.  I am tired.

When we talked to my FIL today, he mentioned that if The Baby was constipated, we could always feel up his butt to see if we could unlodge the offending item. This surprised me because if whatever it was had to go the 7 miles through the intestines, it seems a little odd that it would just clog stuff up right before the final exit. Really.

It doesn’t matter because not long after, The Baby began to smell horrible. I changed his diaper and there, nestled in his nastiness, was a shiny penny. The kid craps money. What parent could ask for  more?

Back in the days when my job was at its worst and we were taking a minimum of 2 coffee breaks a day, I used to make threats that one day I would just quit the livelihood and get a job as a barista at the Big Coffee Chain where everyone from the office went to hide/catch some sun outside in the spring.  What better revenge than making your boss’s venti mocha latte into a decaf.  That’ll teach you for not awarding me Employee of the Year when I had the best year.  Go sleep under your desk like the rest of the government employees.

Fast forward 4 years later to today.  When, at 6:37 a.m., we got the crazy idea that, on the third day of my friend Danyelle’s coffee shop being open, we needed to drum up a little business for the new biz by running free coffee out to the people stuck on Main Street who were waiting for the train to pass. 

A total of 45 seconds.  I don’t know what was scarier.  A woman coming out of the shadows in the pitch black with free coffee or the fact that I was wearing this. 

Boy sold separately.

Because if I were the person in the car driving down Main Street in what appears to be the middle of the night but is actually the morning and then someone came running out of the shadows brandishing what must be an arsenic-laced coffee and similarly poisoned tea cookies, I’d be hitting the power locks and putting a hand on Roscoe.  I mean, what kind of crazy person is giving out coffee for Free 99?

And I would have missed out on the best cup of coffee within 30 miles. 

Dr:  So how do YOU feel like you are doing as parents?

K:  I think we have made a lot of mistakes.  Don’t you (turning to The Husband)?

D:  Nah, I think we are good.

Dr:  Well, Kristen, what kind of mistakes do you think you have made?

K:  I think someone (nodding in The Husband’s direction) teaching him how to use a drill was probably unwise.  He’s two.  Now you give him one of those play drills and he looks at you like you just handed him a toaster oven.  Without a cord, of course.  Because we all know how much he loves the toaster.  Kid would make toast all day long if given the chance.  Thank God for the ding on the toaster so you have some sort of warning BEFORE he burns the house down.  OK, bad analogy.  But you understand where I am going with this?

D:  (clearly now defensive) It’s not like I showed him how to use a drill bit.

K:  Yeah, cause this one is such a slow learner.  Two more times of watching you use that drill and he’ll have it mastered.

D:  So there will be a couple of holes in the wall.

K:  I don’t care about holes in the wall.  I worried about holes in the appendages.  I really don’t have to know the people in the new ER already.  And what about the time you were letting him use the jigsaw in front of my mother.  Like she doesn’t have enough to worry about.

 D:  He does great with the jigsaw.

I say all of this because yesterday he walked by with The Baby and The Baby was tightly clutching a Philips head screw driver to his chest.  And he was REALLY happy. 

D:  Well he really wanted it and he just grabbed it out of my hand.

Of course.  History is doomed to repeat itself in #2.  Let the games begin.