Snowman Woes and Dinner Doldrums

As I was driving home from work today, I felt a little energetic. I had had a productive day and was ready to continue accomplishing things on the home front. When I picked up the kids, I made the uncharacteristic decision to actually play outside with them. I helped Hannah build a snowman... oh, wait - this is where the happy version ends.

I started to help Hannah build a snowman but apparently I was doing everything wrong as I was continually corrected by my master snowman critic. And not corrected nicely either. Eventually, I wandered back into the house to start dinner while the kids romped in the yard. Then Jacob's mitten fell off and he fell in the snow and couldn't get up because he couldn't put his bare hand on the crazy foreign substance of snow. I trekked out to help him. While trying to deal with raw chicken in the kitchen, I was summoned outside at least 5 times to rescue Hannah who was having snowman catastrophes that led to such hysterics they simply could not be ignored. At least not if I didn't want the neighbours investigating with phone calls to various officials.

By this time, I had Jacob back in the house since he was clearly not capable of navigating snowdrifts independently and Hannah was not strong to lift him out every time he got stuck. Needless to stay, in between cooking dinner and running outside to deal with Hannah, I watched as Jacob single-handedly emptied the corner cupboard, dumping cereal, crackers, and anything else with crumbs all over the house. He also cried a lot because I wouldn't let him have a granola bar.

When Hannah finally joined us in the house, she was experiencing PMS-like symptoms that led to a lot of crying over - well, I still don't really know what it was over. What wasn't it over? Then Jacob started asking for "milk/juice" and had a freakout when I gave him the wrong one.

By the time I had dinner on the table, I was ready to call it a night. The house was destroyed, my kids were emotional wrecks, and I could barely lift my fork to my mouth. So much for all that energy. My much-anticipated and long-awaited progeny sucked it out of me and left me with a deficit. All in the course of 1 1/2 hours.