I had a hearty laugh when I saw this gem at the bookstore.  Doesn’t it just make you think of all the things you have had to do as a mom, with only one arm free?  Or even a leg.  JD has learned that clinging to my pants and crying is a very effective way of communicating that 1) I have soiled myself or 2) I need milk desperately.

When you only have a baby, or a toddler, you have these fantasies of how things are going to get better, be easier, when they get a little older.

I now realize those fantasies were delusional in nature.  It doesn’t get easier.  Ok, maybe it does if you stop at one child.  Though I doubt it.  It isn’t in a child’s nature to become easier to live with.

Those rare showers that inevitably were had to the soundtrack of a crying baby?  Running water and closed bathroom doors will continue to be a magical lure to children.  Mom is in the bathroom doing something?  Oh, she must be having a large time, since we cannot see her.  Let’s fight and cry and beat on the door because we can’t manage to share this one toy out of the hundreds we own!

Phone calls are also not permitted.  Children who have been entertaining themselves quite well (blue moon occurrence, sure) will magically appear and have tons of things to update you on if you are try to use the phone. Oddly enough, this occurs with husbands too.

Online banking will be interrupted by a desperate need to visit the PBS Kids website.  If you want to blog or write an e-mail, you better pray you have an episode of a show the kids have never seen before, or fat chance.

Nothing revs up a child’s appetite like Mom cooking.  Oh, it doesn’t mean they are going to eat what you cook.  Heaven forbid!  It does mean they are going to act as if they haven’t eaten in days and cannot tolerate another minute without nourishment or they will perish.  They smell the food.  They know they are hungry.  They will vocalize that hunger.  Repeatedly.  But eat what smelled so good?  Ha!

I sit here, thanks to a Scooby Doo they had not seen, with the casserole in the oven.  It took twenty minutes to finally stir the ingredients and get it into the oven because the baby shat himself, then wanted a bottle, then wanted to nap.  Meanwhile, the after school snack was but a distant memory for the older kids.  They are starving, but most likely not enough to eat the casserole.  In the interim, we had hysterical crying over someone’s Lincoln Log house being knocked over and the retaliation for such malicious destruction.

It can be hard to live life with the use of only one arm, but we manage.  Living life as our heart aches with the love we have for our offspring, even as we want to run screaming from the premises and never look back?  That is a little more difficult.