Please Don't Tell My Wife...

My wife left early Friday morning for the wedding of her cousin Kyle Waford in Idaho Falls. Since then, I’ve been 100% in charge of 80% of our children (20% are with her, too young to leave alone with Dad). It hasn’t been pretty.

Please don’t tell my wife that:

• the kids forgot to brush their teeth this morning. And last night. And maybe tonight – but I took their word for it on that one.
• 2 out of 5 meals we’ve eaten since she’s been gone have been cereal. No complaints, but precious little nutrition. 2 out of 5 meals have been the meatballs she cooked before she left, but I actually cooked the noodles to go with them – yay!
• the fifth meal was McDonald’s (it may not be the last, depending on how tomorrow goes).
• Maggie couldn’t sleep last night, so she came down and sat in my office for 90 minutes waaaaay after her bedtime watching a biography special on Ray Charles with me while I pounded away on the computer catching up on 56 emails, 6 of which actually were important.
• when we finally went upstairs, she slept in Mom’s spot in our bed because she was missing Mom so much she cried twice.
• One of those 5 meals? Breakfast this morning? Uh, Will (the 9 year old) fixed it for the other kids because I wasn’t awake yet and they wanted to let Dad sleep in.
• I yelled at the kids because at one point they were playing too loudly and I couldn’t think enough to figure out the instructions on the McDonald’s Happy Meal game so that Maggie would play it and not cry again because she missed Mom.
• Max had a less than normal number of diaper changes – no problems, but holy cow what can happen when you’re not as attentive to that as you should be.
• I did contemplate trying to arrange a sleepovers for at least one of the other kids so the ratio would be more manageable, but decided that he was too much help to me with the other kids
• I put a movie on, locked all the doors, and mowed the lawn with my iPod on for a little “respite”.
• They’ve watched more TV in the last 36 hours than in the last week combined.
• And we’re watching another movie while I type this.
• Will’s new favorite song is “Mickey”, from the 80’s soundtrack on the digital cable music channel that I left on after making dinner – I’ll try to fix that one and erase it from his memory
• I decided instead of washing the sheets again for a wonderful homecoming for Mom, that I would just sleep on the mattress cover and put the clean sheets she washed on before she gets home.

At a baseball game today I told two other Dads of my Mr. Mom situation, and both gave varying themes on the same exact sentiment: “Man, it’s hell, but God, don’t let her know that – don’t’ let her see you sweat, brother.”

So if you see my wife, tell her you saw us at the library and I was reading to them while a Mozart symphony played in the background. All’s well. Really.