Urine Trouble, Mister ...

Wonder if anyone would clean my litter box for pancakes?

Anybody know where I can get a good maid's uniform?

No, not the kind with the booty-baring ruffly skirt and the low-cut top. Don't nobody wanna see all that (trust me. I think I'd have issues with my boobs hanging lower than the skirt). I mean the kind that actual housekeepers wear.*

*At least on TV because I have never seen a housekeeper up close in my entire life which is why my house kind of looks like a tornado picked up a Toys 'R' Us and a pet store and then dropped all that crap in my living room.

I'm just a servant lately. A cleaning, cooking, fetching-and-delivering, butt-wiping, sanitizing, laundry-doing, yelling and cranky servant. It's spring break, so I've got all four of my dudes home with me all day, every day. And since they've been sick, we haven't been anywhere. Like, nowhere. Needless to say, everybody is a little stir-crazy, and that's a recipe for bickering and overreacting and tantrums and shenanigans.

The sickness has pretty much meant I'm at everybody's beck and call. I don't agree with waiting on my kids hand and foot, but y'all? When there's the threat of vomitus in the house - or more precisely, on the sheets you just washed - unless you direct someone to the toilet pronto, you kinda tend to "snap to it" every time someone yells, "Mommy!" from the other room.

(As an aside, why do kids feel like they need to tell you before they barf? It's like ... just go do it. Don't waste precious puke-free seconds alerting me and then risk ralphing on the carpet on the way to the bathroom.)

Anyway, now that the threat has passed (knock on wood), I am beyond tired of jumping up and running to whoever bellows for me. The boys have gotten used to it and now they're yelling for      
things they could damn well get up off their butts and ask me for to my face. And that is not happening!

So today after the very first caterwauling "Moooo-ooooooooooom!" I heard from elsewhere in the house, I put my foot down.

"Okay!" I announced in my most authoritative voice. "I'm no longer answering to anyone who yells at me from another room. If you need me, come and get me."

They acted like they understood, so I took the baby and some crackers and went into Colin's room (it's the only place with a desk) to write ...

... only to be interrupted like ten thousand times. Seriously. For every time they would've normally yelled, they bothered me in person at least twice. And the conversations typically went like this:

Cameron (wailing): Moooommm-myyyyyy! Colin says I can never play the Wii again!

Me: And? Does Colin have the authority to tell you that?

Cameron: ... *sniff* No ...

Me: Okay then.

So yeah. My grand idea backfired in a big way. I mean, I might've gotten a decrease in yelling, but the tattling seemed to multiply.

After the fourth tattle in, like, two minutes - this time because Colin was "making scary noises" at Coby - I called them all in front of me for a lecture. Which I ended with, "And Colin, stop provoking your brothers."

Everybody nodded and ran out of the room ... except for Cameron. "Mommy, what does provoking mean?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "it means bothering someone until they do something they probably shouldn't do." What I meant by "something they probably shouldn't do" was lose their temper. But Cameron took it a different way.

"Ohhh, so Colin was provoking me to pee in the litter box?"

... cricket, cricket ...

I thought there was something odd when I scooped it out this morning. I thought one of the cats must have been seriously thirsty at one point.

Okay, so my plan may have failed at bringing me any peace, but it did bring me some new-found knowledge.

Not that it's anything I wanted to know.




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