As I finished doing my hair for church, I remember thinking to myself, "Huh, your hair actually turned out nice for once! We should totally take a family picture or something so you can remember this rare moment."
With that happily vain thought in mind, I set about to getting the rest of the kids ready for church... which quickly made such fanciful thoughts flee without any chance of returning.
I don't know what the deal is, but I think someone added an extra part hyper and two extra parts grumpy to our water.
I'm not sure where to begin.
Besides all the craziness of bathing and dressing five children for church, there is also the great hunt for evil runaway shoes, and the doing of six different hair styles each before the children are happy. Not to mention the joy of everyone suddenly "starving to death" just as it's time to leave.
I swear hearing a car engine is a trigger. It seems to make my children think they are hungry... again.
On the drive down to the church, the boys were so hyper they were practically shaking the car.
Threats (loving threats of course) were left unheeded in the hype of the moment while the girls remained blessedly, however temporary, calm.
When we first walked into the chapel to sit down, the kids instantly scattered and decided to all sit in different places. So I hunted down each one and glared them into submission (lovingly... of course) until we had some semblance of order, however short-lived it was.
The hardest thing about having 1:00pm church is Claira, she's about 20 months old. It lands smack-dab in the middle of her nap time.
And it's brutal.
When she gets tired and upset, she's a screamer, and a hitter, and a biter. So yes, I am a little more lax with her at church. I certainly don't allow her to run around the chapel, but I do allow her to leave the bench as long as she stays near by.
Well, at the beginning of the meeting, all the primary children went up onto the stand to sing a few songs to the congregation. Claira decided she wanted to join her siblings.
It started out well enough, until her two brothers noticed her presence and decided it would be cool to pick her up, chase her, and generally just follow her around.
Soon the boys were playing hide-and-go-seek right there, on the stand, in front of everyone and were jumping up and down steps and all out acting as though they were at a park.
I just about died of mortification.
When the children were done singing, I took Claira out of the room... daddy took the boys.
Soon I was back on the bench with the girls but Claira wouldn't hold still. After climbing up, down, over, and under, she finally landed in the lap of some friends a couple rows back. At first she seemed perfectly content to sit there and eat their marshmallows, but once she was passed to their kids who wanted to hold her, she put on the biggest pout I have ever seen and soon started to wail.
Out I went again and ran into Hubby (not literally) and we traded children.
The first meeting went way longer than usual, by half an hour. Soon Alayna had ants in her pants. She just couldn't hold still any longer. At the end of the bench she was bouncing up and down and laughing out loud... very loud.
She was definitely drawing attention to herself, and consequently to her toes sticking out of her incredibly holey black tights. She thinks shoes are over rated.
She also took to announcing which lipstick colors she liked on women around the congregation. She was especially fond of the hot pink one girl was wearing.
Alayna is just a month shy of being four years old.
Heaven help me.
I hate to admit it, but I was down-right relieved when church was over that day.
I should have known better. The rest of the afternoon was filled with fighting, screaming, and crying. Even Hubby and I were grouchy at each other.
And so as I sit here typing this on the computer, I'm contemplating all sorts of torture (lovingly of course) for whomever poisoned our water.
The End.
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Serene is a highly imperfect mom of five children (born within 6.5 years) with baby number six on the way, who blogs humorously about all her parenting misadventures at Serene is my name, Not my life! She also has a severe chocolate addiction and likes to pretend she's stylish enough to wear high heels.