Schedule Adjustments And Clueless Salesmen

So. I have this thing on the wall that controls my life. No, it doesn’t call me Dave or sing any songs about Daisies.

I mean I have a weekly checklist that takes the place of my oozing brain when I’ve had just a little too much “fun” with the girls and I still have work to do.

I looooooooooove my chore list. It makes me look organized. Or like an OCD control freak.

Whatever. It means never being surprised by the lack of clean underwear first thing in the morning when hubby’s rushing off to work, or by the trash truck flying glibly by our sad empty curb (no HOA means random trash days for everyone! Wheeee!).

When I’m really organized, I fill out my dinner plan for the whole week. As you can see, this week is really more of a one day at a time kind of week…

… because my husband’s employer recently shifted his work schedule two hours later. Ugh. So we’ve had to shift our family run from the late afternoon to the early morning. Fun fact about me: I AM NOT A MORNING PERSON. Deceptively so! I rowed on the crew team in college. Anyone who knows crew knows what that means about practice schedules. Practices take place at the butt-crack of dawn. Others erroneously assumed this made me a morning person. No. This made me a die-hard crewbee. I went then because that was when AND ONLY WHEN crew was.

Yay! Early morning run! Who wouldn’t want to crawl out of their nice warm comfy bed after an all night teething/nursing marathon to haul their post-partum baby weight around the spider and mosquito infested neighborhood trails with two whiny little kids? You just don’t know what you’re missing!

FYI, it seems 3.5yo CE has inherited her mommy’s NOT-A-MORNING-PERSON-ness.

Well, the checklist is pulling me through today (that’s what tiny little x’s are for, right?). But we did hit a slump. I mean, I did. That is, I, uh, slumped. Over. In my chair. …What? I was tired.

I figure, it’s nap time for us all. Time to change the baby’s diaper before I put her down.

She’s gotten to that perfect age, where she’s too small to cooperate properly, but big enough to make keeping all four of her limbs out of the way while preventing her from flipping over and crawling away (with one hand) while removing the old diaper, cleaning her backside, and fastening a new diaper (with the other) seem like a magic trick you could take on the road as the pre-show for The Illusionist.

Keep in mind how tired I am here. All of my concentration is going into this diaper change. I had just removed the old diaper and cleaned her.

This is, of course, the perfect time for the doorbell to ring unexpectedly.

I look up as The Curious Pup starts yapping his head off, and the Helpful Toddler (CE) runs for the door. When I look back? Baby pee. Everywhere.

Worried that the Helpful Toddler would helpfully let strangers in, I grab the baby from her changing table and run down the hall, crack the window next to the door (to which CE is clinging, thankfully wearing pants this time), and ask the young man on my porch as calmly as I can over the incessant yapping if I can help him.

He took one look at the toddler and yapping dog framed in the window, with me standing there holding a half-naked giggling baby with pee dripping down my arm…

… and then asked me if I would like a roof estimate for free.

I figure the first door-to-door lesson he learned was something like “confidence is all it takes” because he then wanted to know if it would help his case to come back in 20 minutes, so that he could presumably ring the doorbell just after my kids have gone to sleep.

It seems to be one of the unwritten rules of life. Crew only takes place at the butt-crack of dawn, and doorbell-ringing door-to-door salesmen only show up during nap time. Aaaand, if you’ve followed me at all, you know that nap time is actually called MOMMY BREAK TIME.

Ask me if I want to give up MOMMY BREAK TIME for a free roof estimate. Hmmm?