When you're a kid, summer vacation is the best. When you're a mom, it's a little bit different.
Karen Johnson, who runs a parenting blog called The 21st Century SAHM, drove that point home in a recent Facebook post about a particularly bad fight her two boys got into during one of these blessed days of summer.
It all starts off innocently enough, with a simple request from her eight-year-old to get the mail.
"Scene: I am cooking grilled cheese on the stove for the kids' lunch. 8yo asks to go get the mail (the box is a few houses up the street). Not to ever miss out on anything ever, 4yo pipes in, "Me too!" Okay, fine. I give them the mail key and out the door they go. How could this go wrong? Such a simple task," she wrote.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
But, she wrote, she should have known it would all go wrong.
"The thing is, my boys fight. All day. Every minute that they are awake. And sometimes in their dreams. So apparently a battle breaks out at the mailbox. (I still don't know the whole story.) As I am cooking their grilled cheeses on the stove, my 6yo daughter (the reporter of all things non-compliant) comes tearing into the kitchen, yelling, "They're fighting at the mailbox! And then mail went flying everywhere all over the neighborhood!"
"Shit," Johnson wrote.
As anyone likely would do in that situation, she left the grilled cheese on the stove and ran outside.
"I see both boys scrambling around from yard to yard, trying to grab pieces of mail. We live in Kansas where it's windy 364.5 days of the year, so that helps," she wrote.
"My 4yo is now approaching the corner where our quiet cul-de-sac meets a very busy street, and I know him. He'll think nothing of running directly into the street in order to capture that last piece of random junk mail that Mommy will be tossing as soon as we get home.
I am now chasing him, screaming his name, and also trying to pick up mail that is blowing all over the neighbors' yards. I finally catch up to him, prevent him from darting into the busy intersection, and we all turn around to head home, hands full of papers."
At this point, she and the boys have the papers and are heading back inside. The end, right? But no, it only gets worse.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
"But because he's 4, refuses to walk anywhere ever, and is on an anti-shoes campaign this summer, my son of course runs down the street barefoot and falls. He rips open his foot on a rock or the pavement or whatever is in the road because THIS IS WHY WE WEAR SHOES," Johnson wrote.
"So now I am half-carrying, half dragging a bloody-footed, crying 4yo, a crying 8yo who thinks he's in trouble because of mail-mageddon, and piles and piles of junk mail and flyers that I will never look at ever back to my house."
In all of that mess, no one could blame her for forgetting the grilled cheese...until she could smell it burning, that is.
"Once the papers are tossed and the bloody foot is bandaged, we all smell the sulfur of burning grilled cheese and I remember what I was doing before this all happened," she wrote.
"So I did what any good mother would do. I scraped off the burnt parts, threw them on plates, and said bon appetit, kids. And I poured this beer."
We'd say that cold one is very well-deserved.
Welcome to Mothership: Parenting stories you actually want to read, whether you're thinking about or passing on kids, from egg-freezing to taking home baby and beyond. Because motherhood is a big if — not when — and it's time we talked about it that way.
Read these stories next: