Just Another Day: Highlights From A Typical “Five Things At Once” Kind Of Day

The first thing the little one does is look outside and notice mom’s car is gone. “Mom’s not home,” she says in a sad little voice. Then I tell her it’s Monday. She gets excited. “Really! Downstairs? Can I go and see?” We go downstairs. She immediately yells the same thing every morning: “Chocolate milk in blue cup!” Then she might want juice-in-red-cup. She’s very particular about her cups, sippy and otherwise. Don’t even get me started about her monkey plate. During morning juice, I usually put on the TV. We watch her favorite show du jour, which right now is Fireman Sam, courtesy of the Netflix streaming service. Thank gawd for Netflix.

“Fireman show!” she shouts.

This episode features guest stars Harry Potter and Jane Lynch from Glee.

We go back upstairs. She runs into her playroom and asks me to help her with the Mickey Mouse puzzle. She loves her puzzles. Each time we finish, she barks, “Let’s start over.” She has me shuffle the pieces and we do the puzzle again. We do this about a dozen times.

“Let’s start over,” she commands again.

“Let’s start over by getting a snack,” I suggest.

“No! Princess puzzle!”

And I’m starving. Kill me. Later, much later, we go downstairs for a snack. This usually ends with the little one tricking me into giving her some kind of treat. She’s already an expert in social engineering.

We get in the car to get out for awhile. Maybe run some errands. A simple drive to Target turns into a long nap drive, so I turn on the stereo. My one-day old beard gains about five more days worth of growth from the hippy mixed-CD my wife left in the car.

We end up going to the grocery store. Little one always gets smiles and greetings from the clerks and workers there. At our store, they hand out “Buddy Bucks” to all the kids. Little one loves them. She puts them in a special machine, which gives out little stickers with pretend points. I still don’t know what the points are for. During the drive home, she thinks it would be funny to put the stickers on her face.

In the afternoon, we go outside to play with her soccer ball and t-ball set. She gets mad when she doesn’t hit the ball far enough. Sometimes she just runs around in the grass and screams and yells.

When she gets tired enough, she sits down and asks for juice. She sips her juice “in the red cup” while we wait for mom to get home from work.

It’s hard to be a stay-at-home parent, but it’s times like these that make it all worth it. Forget about all the laundry and dishes and chores and such, these are the memories that one should hold on to.