At 8pm every night my little devil angel children are tucked into bed for the night. Then starts the 30 minutes of continuous crying for more kisses, trips to the bathroom (a 4 year old boy can pee up to 6 times in 30 minutes, and actually PEE), and sips of water. Between each kiss I walk down the stairs and back up again. Each trip to the bathroom requires me to pause my tv show to keep the little man from getting ‘distracted’ on the way to and from the toilet. Luckily the sips of water only require one trip up the stairs, down to get the water, back up to deliver said water, then back down again to wait for the impending trip to the bathroom once again. This is such the nightly routine that I don’t even try to climb into my own bed until 8:30pm in fear of being hauled out by beckoning children.

And so it goes, every night, with my clockwork children. I’m a full time student/work study so my kids go to daycare Monday through Friday and my bank account gets drained dry. Along comes the weekend, as it does every week, and we suddenly enter the realm of the unknown. What time will they wake up? How long will they nap? What do they eat for lunch anyway? It’s a never ending battle of the unknown. Hold that thought, and remember it for later.

BF works the midnight shift as a police/EMS/fire dispatcher Sunday through Thursday. He’s ‘supposed’ to sleep during the day and take a nap at night. What he ends up doing is playing Black Ops during the day, hanging out with us for an hour late afternoon, and then gets chased up the stairs being told to get his fanny to bed. There are some days that I am tempted to do this while yielding a broom or frying pan. He then lays in bed secretly tweeting for an hour or so. I’m going to take his phone away some day. He gets up and heads to work around 11pm as I’m crawling into bed. Day in, day out, this is how life in our little bubble goes.

It’s a nice happy little bubble of repetition until Friday night when it all comes to a screeching halt and I’m left standing in the middle of the hall wondering where the nearest exit is. BF is so tired he can hardly stay up as late as my kids let alone later so we can have some sexy time which is usually squeezed into trips to the bathroom and bringing laundry up stairs. On Saturday everyone is wondering why we’re eating cereal again if it’s the weekend and protesting even getting out of our pjs so we don’t look like heathens when BF’s daughters come over. By the afternoon I’m wondering what time nap time actually is because the daycare never tells me how to raise my children on the weekends. Which is bullshit, these little fuckers need instructions.

After all the chaos of Saturday and the well deserved ‘old juice’ for me and BF that night (after his girls have gone home and my hellions kids are in bed for the night) Sunday morning comes REALLY early. And there we are, comatosed on the couch until nap time, which I still don’t know what time it’s at. So at about 1pm I try to put the little buggers down for a nap. 9 times out of 10 this works out pretty well. They stay in bed, no crying, no additional trips to the bathroom, and no sips of water! Good lordy we have successes!!! BF and I wait about 10 minutes, just to be safe, and then rush to the bedroom and close the door. Clothes come flying off, sheets get ripped back, and a whole array of positions get explored. We only have 1 to 2 hours to get this shit done right. So there I am, on top, reverse cowgirl, and the door flies open. BF covers himself with pillows as I whip the covers up to my neck. Suddenly I look like one of those Weimaraners dressed in people’s clothing.

Me: Do you have to pee?

Theo: No.

Me: What do you need?

Theo: Nothing. *turns and walks out the door*

Fast forward to Monday morning. BF is at work and the kids are sitting at the table eating cereal. As I sit down at the table with the kids to drink my coffee Theo looks at me and says, “Mommy, yesterday you and BF were wrestling during nap time. There’s no wrestling during nap time, next time you’ll be in time out.”