I woke up this morning at about 6:00 and realized something was missing. My husband. I bolted upright in bed. Oh no!, I panicked, is this the day we were supposed to escape over the Berlin Wall?! But then I remembered that the wall came down. And we don't live in Germany. So I sank back into my pillow, feeling much better about things.
Friday mornings have a way of being more disorienting than usual. I think it's because Thursday is like the Boston Marathon of music lessons. And I'm like the runner who started training for it two days ago. After school Sophie has her lesson with the world's greatest piano teacher, whose permission I have not yet obtained to discuss her life in detail, but I just want to say she's from Uzbekistan, I adore and venerate her, and I have NEVER seen anyone dissect a single measure of music the way she can. She takes Mozart down to the molecular level.
Afterward, I take little Izzy to her lesson with the world's greatest violin teacher, who also has not given me written consent to divulge her most intimate secrets, so all I can tell you is she's amazing and Isabella wishes she could have a lesson with her every day. Which is why I run a lemonade stand on the weekends, selling drinks for $200 apiece.
By the time Izzy and I get home from her lesson, it is almost 9:00 p.m. and all I want to do is curl up in the fetal position and go to a safe place somewhere deep within myself. Bear in mind, I have also practised a total of 2 1/2 hours with the girls earlier that day, and can I just tell you that 2 1/2 hours of practising musical instruments with one's children is the equivalent of doing 6 hours of housework? Not that I would know from experience, mind you, but I think the numbers bear themselves out.
Instead of finding my sanctuary, I am confronted by three screaming banshees who cannot seem to just take the cap off the toothpaste and get the job done, who are begging for bedtime stories and full of outrage at one another for whoever spit on whose hand during the dental hygiene fiasco, and I think to myself: How do I help these girls understand that after 8:00 p.m. my maternal instinct is less Ma Ingalls and more that of the tortoise who lays eggs on a beach and then shoves out to sea, leaving her young to be picked off by seagulls?
And all this blathering is my circular way of telling you that I HAD another post ready to go for today, one that I created on Thursday night after martial law had been established and a 30 second version of Little Red Riding Hood was relayed. A beautiful, coherent post in which I simply showed you some of the lovely things I've been admiring on Etsy lately...which Typepad led me to believe they would publish for me at 7:00 this morning, but which they gobbled up the minute my back was turned. And this leaves you, me--all of us--to wonder how differently your day might have played out had you'd been spared this unplanned detour through my mind.