I have nearly walked off the job the past two days in a row. I think I must look a little like that cat.

I was watching "Law and Order" last night. A woman died, in part, due to stress-induced cardiovascular disease. The coroner was asked, "Did she know she was this sick"? "No, she probably just felt nauseous." So now I am plagued by the idea that all the stress that I've accumulated is slowly eating away at my arteries...

These days, aside from the constant "leaving the checkbook at the store" or "I know I had my debit card at the pirate restaurants...now, where did I go after that?", I seem to have managed to achieve a zen-like state about the stress.

But in the early days after the dotter came home, I remember juggling her and my clothes in the bathroom (she was at a stage where I had to have her in my arms or on my lap all the time), I managed, rather than putting my bra on, to dip it in the toilet...the memory is very hazy, all I remember is that when I emailed the story to my gals at work, they all laughed and said, "You're a mommy now!"

"These t-shirts depict a somewhat frazzled mom who manages to keep a smile on her face during all the different tasks of a mom's daily life -- whether she is a stay-at-home mom or balancing the responsibilities of office and home. "

So she's on drugs...

The rectal thermometer story had me laughing!

The stressed out pic was hilarious!

ROFLMAO

Love the stressed kitty. Too funny.

Can the T-shirt contest include pictures? Cause I'd like to submit this blog post:
http://enterthelaughter.com/blog/2005/07/14/to-dance-perchance-to-dream/

It's much more understandable with the visuals (isn't everything? LOL)

Thanks hon - great post!

As I was folding the weekly laundry, I noticed that I had only folded 2 pairs of underwear for my son. I gave him a short talk about hygiene and told him that I expected to see more underwear next week.

Next week, there were 12 pairs in the laundy, most of them unworn...

Moral: Be careful what you ask for!

This is my entry for most stressed-out moment.
My husband and I consider ourselves pretty hip and have always tried to expose our son, Spencer, to music, art, etc. Se took him to San Francisco when he was about 4 and one of our stops was SFMOMA, where they had a Magritte exhibit. Spencer took quite an interest in the surrealistic images and I was busy congratulating myself on having such a precocious kid. What I didn't realize was that he was leaning closer and closer to study one of these priceless paintings when he lost his balance. His head thunked solidly into the middle of the painting and there were gasps of horror from the other people in the room. I had one of those out-of-body moments of sheer horror as I jerked him away, imagining a nice head-shaped hole in the canvas. There didn't seem to be any damage, though, so I fled as fast as I could, dragging a clueless Spencer behind me.

Single dad chiming in... yes I know it's for a mommy shirt but you know how tough my job is and I need to vent...

Every day for me goes something like this:

I wake up at 6:30am and make my way down to the basement of the townhouse to wake up my 11 year old daughter. I force her door to open, much to the disagreement of the pile of clothes she’s left behind it, and try to convince her to get out of bed. I take the pile of clothes, and move it to another location around the corner where the laundry machine is.

Whites? Colors? How about just “clean or dirty”. Those are the two colors I can keep track of. I then make my way upstairs and throw a breakfast together for her. Somehow, I stumble out the front door with the dog for his morning constitutional. At this point, I’m standing in some variety of pajamas or shorts and a t-shirt or whatever I was wearing when I passed out the night before. My 8 year old son is usually awake at this point and standing at the door yelling something to me about pokemon while waving his nintendo ds in the air. I do my best to respond while trying to coerce the dog back into the house.

I attempt to make him breakfast, while feeding the dog, and putting coffee in the pot. Sometime around now, I realize that I haven’t put a gate up at the bottom of the stairs. My first clue is that my 6 year old daughter is in her room yelling because the dog is eating one of her stuffed animals. I pull another bowl out of the cabinet for her cereal and go to retrieve the dog, and the stuffed animal from the dog’s mouth.

I’ve set alarms on my phone to let me know when the kids need to be leaving to catch their busses, and the alarm is going off for the 11 year old, but of course, she can’t hear me yelling because she’s still drying her hair. So I go downstairs again to get her. The dog has attachment issues, and he follows me down, nearly killing me in the process. His attachment issues are overcome with his desire to play in the piles of laundry. No… not the dirty laundry… the clean laundry… which is now the dirty laundry.

I rush my oldest daughter out the door and go to get my coffee. At this point I remember that coffee making usually requires that one put coffee into the top of the machine. I pour the hot water out into the sink and decide to just stop on the way in to work.

Thank god my son doesn’t care about soggy cereal because he hasn’t removed his face from the nintendo ds. After a third reminder, he saves his game and starts eating.

The second bus alarm starts going off, and we all (dog included) walk out of the house, and then back in to get more poop bags for the dog, and then back out but a little bit faster. I nod knowingly to the other parents at the bus stop while my son and I talk about pokemon (still) and my daughter tries to sneak onto the school bus. She’s an afternoon kindergarden student.

After my boy gets on the bus, I drive my daughter to the baby-sitters house and then do my 2 hour commute to the glory that is the mixing-bowl in springfield virginia.

7.5 hours of work… and then another ~2 hour commute back.

It’s straight to the baby-sitters to pick the kids up, and then back home around 7pm. This is where the juggling really starts because I have to help 3 of them with varying degrees of homework complexity, and manage the dog, while cooking dinner. “If X is 9, and Y is 15, How many squares are there that rhyme with the word ‘dog’… STAY AWAY FROM THE SPAGHETTI.” Seriously… if I wasn’t watching the dog constantly he could climb the kitchen counters like a mountain goat. On crack.

This is actually our moment of peace. We talk about school and friends and work. This is worked out really well since I’ve banned the nintendo DS from dinner. Now my son actually looks at us while we’re all talking. It’s awesome.

As each of them finishes dinner, I send them one by one to take a bath. I try to lay out clothes and a towel for them before they head into the bathroom but my younger two have apparently pissed off the towel fairies because without fail, they are yelling from the bathroom that there’s no towels and they’re already wet and can’t get it themselves. I take a guess at which pile of laundry is clean and which is dirty and get them a towel. I’ve decided that the more interested in the towel the dog is, the more likely it is to be clean.

Things usually calm down after bath time, and for that last few minutes before bed, we all hang out together and watch tv or read or play games on the DS’s.

Pretty much everyone is asleep by 9:30. I pick a random pile of clothes that are either clean or dirty, and put them into the washing machine, load up the dishwasher, feed the fish, and then pass out.

So that’s basically the average, low-stress day. High stress days involve calls from the sick room at school, dismembered stuffed animals, being hated because I’ve banned the internet, calls from their estranged mother… “Frazzled” doesn’t really cover those days so I’ll save those stories for other venues ;)

The stressed moment as mother I feel that it was when my son was in Guatemala (I live in Venezuela) and he wanted to return to Venezuela because in the adventure in which he was, it had arrived at very ugly moments and they almost did not eat, did not bathe, etc. My son called to me desperate from Guatemala saying that it wanted to return and that i need buy an airplane passage to him. My son managed to escape of the adventure and arrived on the following day at the Airport of Guatemala City and after 48 hours of anguish, he managed to return to be with me

I can combine motherhood, air travel and poop for a stressful day, however I'm sure most mothers experience something like this at some point, so I'm not making any claims here.

My husband and I took our 2 girls, 10 months and 2 1/2 years old, to Cancun with us on a business trip for a week (don't try this at home). They immediately got sick and spent the whole week worshiping the porcelain gods, from both ends, to culminate in the most stressful air travel experience ever.

Most of the week the 10 month old was OK, until the day we had to leave. She spent the night throwing up, woke up with a slight fever and had diarrhea all morning. We managed to get everyone together enough to get to the airport 3 hours prior to the flight, only to find the line for our airline out the door and around the block. This was about the time that the Northeast was hit by a large snowstorm and all airlines were running behind schedule. (Plus it was spring break week, so we were surrounded by collegers). The porter took me, our luggage and the girls and set us up near the front of the line so that we wouldn't have to carry everything, while my husband got in line. My 10-month old was in a baby carrier, while the toddler sat in her stroller. The baby was hovering between clinging to me and sleeping and I was praying that we didn't have a diaper emergency in the lobby.

After about an hour, airline employees were starting to panic and herd people into smaller lines. One of them, bless her heart, noticed us and told me we could go into the 1st class line (no one was waiting there). I managed to flag my husband down (he was at the VERY opposite end of the airport) and we spent another 15 minutes waiting. We then managed to get to our gate 20 minutes before our flight was scheduled to board. (I feel bad for the rest of the people on line, but it was nice to get through). After getting the girls settled in at the gate, we managed to watch the gate assignment change 6 times by the time the plane arrived. This was the easy part. After finally getting shuttled out to the plane, got everyone on, fortunately baby fell asleep and toddler was semi-occupied. I thought we were home free. Then the on-board movie started - "Night at the Museum"-- decent movie, but horrendously scary for a 2-year old sitting RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE BIG SCREEN. Rest of the flight was spent trying to distract her from the scary parts, hoping she'd fall asleep, only to be hit with another bout of toddler diarrhea, which was fun to deal with in the airplane bathroom (all you mile-highers, think about *that* next time you go visiting the loo).

We managed to make it back to the US in one piece, with baby sleeping all the way back (thought that we got off scott-free there), only to get off the plane with toddler losing her pants and diaper as we're rushed off into customs. She was a little annoyed. At this point baby is starting to wake up, and not smelling pretty, so we hang back as the rest of the flight goes into customs. I immediately find a bathroom to change her diaper, change her, and then put her into the stroller while I changed her sister. As I'm changing the toddler, I hear what sounds like a frat house on free beer night behind me, only to turn around to the sight of a baby and stroller entirely covered with poop. We're now down to one emergency outfit, everyone else has been through customs, and the airport bathroom resembles a war zone. We flip a coin to decide whether or not to keep the stroller, but we kept it anyway. I hand one of the kids over to her dad and deal with some of the mess, we then go over to customs who give us funny looks because we're the only ones there and there aren't any more international flights in, but they let us through anyway. We spend the next 30 minutes searching for luggage and waiting for the parking shuttle until we can finally get into our car for the 2 hour trip back home. Everything gets fuzzy after that, but we managed to make it back home without any more mishaps.

Great site. It's refreshing to see that we can still be humorous when it comes to stress.