Out of Sorts

After a couple of gloriously sunny and temperate days, it’s raining again, and I hate blog posts that start with the weather, but I am out of sorts today, and that’s the first thing.

Since the boys have been home from school this afternoon, I had the door slammed in my face when I complained that one child had only cleaned up part of the mess he made when he knocked over all of the cookbooks; I know I should have been thrilled he got them all put away and swept the knocked over catfood into a pile, but the pile remained in the middle of the kitchen and I didn’t use words like “Thanks for cleaning up the mess, would you mind doing just one more thing to finish?” but, as I said, I am out of sorts today. I argued with another child whose homework assignment was to write a “tall tale using lots of adjectives and adverbs’ that two sentences about a smartly clever boy who invents a machine to change his evilly evil mother into someone kindly nice just didn’t cut it, which resulted in wailing and stomping. I am writing with a three-year-old in my lap because he and his brother got into a fight while playing in their room, and he was crying, probably just because his brother was mad at him, but his brother is now crying the cry of the outraged that his brother is getting lap and comfort while I am not dealing with him. Maybe I am not the only one who is out of sorts.

I woke up this morning happy because it is a violin lesson day and grateful that remembering it is a violin lesson day is a happy thought. Right now I just want the boys to be civil by the time Brian shows up to give them a lesson — fear scaring him off with the sort of howling that has marked this afternoon.

We are slowly getting back into a routine which has got to be a good thing. We enjoyed our first all of us home and hanging out together weekend this last weekend. We’re even finally dealing with that joy of home ownership and handyman skills limited to exactly the changing of lightbulbs, and waiting for a plumber to install a new kitchen faucet since the old one has produced only a feeble dribble for the last week or two… one of those things I didn’t want to deal with while Raven was out of town. But it has made washing dishes so frustrating that I have just thrown in the towel and gone with eating out every night for the last six nights, and I miss real meals at home, as tricky as it is finding anything that pleases five out of the six of us.

And being out of sorts is not so bad because I know it won’t be forever and I am relieved to realize that when everything and everyone is irritating to me, I still really like the man I married, which is sort of a testament to the foresight I showed in marrying him.