Girls Gone Childless

I had one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it weekends ... but ohhhh, was it nice! I traded my boys for girls. Curtis and the kids headed to Missouri for a visit with our families, while three of my besties from Missouri traveled up here for a girls' weekend with me, sans husbands, boyfriends, or children. And the weekend mostly consisted of eating, laughing, dabbling in makeup and hairstyles, and stuff like this:

The dog was all, "WTF?"

... Because even when you're thirtysomething twenty-two, you should still remember how to act like a silly little girl when the occasion calls for it. Which this occasion most definitely did.*

*And plus we were deep-cleaning my mattress at the same time. See all those dust particles we unearthed? So yeah. Practical.

It was awesome and amazing up until yesterday, when my girls left. Then I was alone for a period of like eight hours before my boys got home, and y'all? It sounds like a sweet deal but I literally wandered around the house feeling lost. I tried to take a nap, but wasn't all that successful. I did a little bit of picking up, but the house wasn't really all that messy since I'd cleaned it before my company came. I thought about blogging or drawing a new cartoon, but I felt so weird without Curtis or the kids around ... like I was missing pieces or something.

But I wish I had taken more advantage of it because I'd forgotten one important thing - which became disappointingly clear within five minutes of their return. When my kids come home from a weekend with their doting grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins? They come home with a (false) sense of entitlement. Because they've just spent two or three days getting and doing pretty much whatever they want. It's like they forget that there are guidelines, or people who will actually tell them no, and their pompous little behinds act like they've never heard of things like bedtime, picking up after themselves, and the no-dessert-before-breakfast rule.*

*Which does not, of course, apply to me. Because I'm the mom, that's why. 

What's worse, they celebrated Cameron's birthday while they were there. With both sides of the family. And there were Christmas presents they hadn't gotten. So they came back with a ridiculous amount of new stuff - with an even more ridiculous amount of little pieces that will almost certainly end up as sparts. (See? Here's a real-time update: literally just as I typed the "sparts" sentence, Coby came up waving this nondescript black tube that belongs to Wal-Mart-only-knows what):

So the weekend is over, now it's back to butt-wiping. And laundry. And cooking. And dishes. And school drop-off and pickup. And stepping on random crap (which sometimes, on my unluckiest days, literally is crap).

But it's also back to hugs and kisses and "I love you Mommy"s. Which makes everything else - even the sparts and the spoiledness - pretty much worth it.