The Ballet Of The Absurd

It's finally Friday and it has been, as they say, A Week.

It was one of those weeks when someone was always wanting something from me and I felt pulled in a million directions. The house suffered from my lack of focus. The kids suffered from my lack of focus. In other words, I fell down on the job. A lot.

Jamie is working on two teeth right now and one of them is really giving him fits. During the day he screams and during the night he has trouble sleeping. He has an enormous blister on his gum where the tooth is pushing through. It hurts him so much that he even gets difficult about taking his bottles before naps and bed.

Wednesday was a particularly horrible day for long and boring reasons and in the midst of it all, I was unable to spend much time paying any real attention to the kids. I could tell that Liam was feeling it and he's been a bit clingy since. I'm hoping to spend some time with him this weekend doing some fun things to make up for it.

Anyway, I got through the day on Wednesday, got the kids fed at dinner time, and then sat down to have some leftover pizza myself. I was sitting at our kitchen table talking with Scot about the day while Jamie toddled around the kitchen getting into mischief wherever possible.

And then the chair I was sitting on collapsed.

It was just like you imagine. I had flung my arms wide in one of my grand gestures as I was talking, my weight shifted, and the next thing I knew, a leg was falling off the chair and I was being dumped to the hard tile floor of the kitchen.

Jamie started to cry because the whole thing frightened him. I started to cry because apparently I am now so corpulent that I break furniture. After the ridiculously stressful day I'd had that day, breaking a chair was just the absurd capper to it all.

In my defense, our kitchen table and chairs are over 100 years old and have been passed down through Scot's family. So, it was probably just that the chair was unstable and losing structural integrity to begin with. Still, it has delivered a blow to my self-esteem.

Here's to hoping that next week brings calm waters, tooth relief, and whole furniture. And let me just say that if Mother Nature doesn't start to curb her wrath it's quite possible that I'll be found running naked through the suburbs of Pittsburgh swigging vodka as I go.