White Out

Yesterday morning I was kind of a bad Mom, the rest of the day, I was a pretty good one and then right before supper - I took the plunge from mediocrity into suckness and then crawled back out and up and braved a blizzard to get a present for the upcoming birthday this weekend.

AL and I got into it yesterday morning when she was supposed to be picking up her room, a five minute job before breakfast. Instead she kept trying to come downstairs to get her toy box, because without it, she said, she couldn't clean up. Since her toy box has never been kept in her room, I know that she didn't need it and told her so. This annoyed her. A lot.

So a few minutes later when I was talking to her about how if she picks up her room for a few minutes before bedtime instead of waiting to do it till the morning - then I don't get grumpy from tripping over stuff and stepping on library books and we can have a nice friendly good night instead of the other kind.
She cut me off and was quite rude to me both with tone of voice and facial expression.
I didn't respond well. And we were into it for the next fifteen minutes.

When faced with the possibility of not having game cube time because of it all, she did come and ask me plaintively "I don't understand why you got so mad at me?".
We talked it out. It was good. I also apologised for telling her to get her "princess butt" downstairs (after she initially ignored me than refused to come) and praised her, in front of the other kids, for coming and working the problem out.

Then I hustled out of the house with TG, my oldest daughter, and over to the Medi centre to see the insta doctor and confirm my suspicions that she had yet another urinary tract infection which she does. That took over an hour.

Raced back, picked up rest of kids and took them to bowling, got prescription for TG filled and tried to buy a Nintendo DS Lite handheld game system.
This is the toy at the top of the birthday gift list.
There wasn't one in the entire mall I was in. One of the salespeople told me that there weren't any in the city. I felt concerned but not overly and took the kids home for lunch, then to park.

Alert husband to the lack of game system and ask him to phone around to find one.

On way home from park, driving through heavy traffic, I am thinking out loud about having sandwiches for supper (because if I have to figure out what to have for one more meal and then prepare it - I may just scream) when OK cuts me off in order to tell me that he doesn't like one of the sandwhich meats that would be on offer.

Now I'm already feeling a bit under siege from AL.
Ten minutes earlier she had asked if she could have three people sleepover on her birthday on Saturday.
Right away I knew I had to say NO and I knew she knew I had to say NO - I could see it on her face that she knew - and that upset me. The whole thing. Not only that it was last minute.

She knows that our basement is in the middle of renovations (and there really is no other place to fit four kids for a sleepover at one go) and even if that weren't happening that her birth grandma is supposed to come for a visit (this hasn't been confirmed yet but we are expecting it) and that AL has already committed to going and visiting her older bio brother in, ah, um, locked custody.

Another small piece of info? Yesterday was the first day that she actually knew all three girls names and could keep them straight.

So it played out like I knew it would.
She was upset and I was upset because she was upset etc. etc.
It didn't get any better when I found out that she had already asked the girls and their mothers before talking to me about it.

Pick up husband, find out that his search for the game system has been a bust.
Get home, phone one place he has not phoned. The Source by Circuit City.
They do not have one in the city - but wait!
There is ONE in small town 50km away, do I want a hold put on that.
YES! (I do happy dance! I may not let her have a sleep over and I may yell a lot but at least I can get her the bday present she wants!)

Decide parents will go together to pick it up. Should take an hour and a half, kids can make their own sandwiches and play game cube, they are all happy with it (oldest kids are in on WHY we are going, youngest just knows it is an errand).

We leave slightly before six pm.
We get home at ten pm.

In between we have:
- scary whiteout conditions on road (of course this is far enough away from home that it would be worse to turn around than to continue)-felt like we were driving inside an egg.
-been in a creepy shell of a mall that was deserted and looked like something out of a zombie movie (it had been killed by Malwart). Literally no one was there, most of the storefronts were vacant and dark, like empty eye sockets, there was grafitti on the glass entrance doors.
-were caught in an impromptu parking lot on the highway just outside our city as we waited for rescue crews to cleanup a long stretch of accidents including a tipped over tanker truck, two or three tractor trailer rigs jackknifed into the ditch on either side of the road and about ten munched up cars.

Fortunately we had our cell phone and could keep the kids up to date on our progress and to remind our youngest ones that just because we were late didn't mean we had run away.

I am almost afraid to ask what today will bring.

But....there is a white Nintendo DS lite hiding in my oldest son's closet and the collective, secret glee of five family members is quite heady.