Chocolate Makes The World Go 'Round

We had a romantic Valentines Dinner out, Larry and I and the 6 kids, at a local burger joint. After yelling at the children for 3 hours this morning in order to get the house ready for the party, I was too wiped out (lazy, really) to make a decent meal. And since I hadn't fed the kids anything but candy and cake all day, I wasn't able to rationalize feeding them that crap for dinner also. I haven't sunk that low yet. Give me another year.

Anyway, now Brian feels sick (but not in a stomach way, thank goodness). For some reason (that I really do not want to think about at all), the boys' room still smells like puke from the bunkbed vomiting incident 4 months ago. You would think that even if I had missed some vomit in the clean-up(s), the leftover stuff wouldn't smell anymore. Or maybe you don't think about things like that at all. Maybe that's my own particular hobby.

I should just turn this problem into a homeschool science fair experiment - we could call it How Long Does Vomit Maintain Its Ability to Offend the Olfactory Senses? That would look great on a college application, now wouldn't it?

Valentine's Day is a No Weight Watchers Zone, by the way. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gotten out of bed this morning. I mean, what would have been the point? The house was a veritable dieting minefield, filled as it was with Rice Krispy treats and cookies and the big heart-shaped box of chocolate given to me by my loving but misguided husband. Tomorrow, I will climb back on the points-counting, healthy-eating wagon; but for another hour or so, everything edible here is fair game. And, since the kids are finally in bed, it's mine, all mine!

I broke my bedtime rule this evening, and boy did I regret it. By 8 o'clock all the kids were running around and screaming at each other. Rachel touched Susie's balloon; and then Susie took Rachel's puppy (the one from Santa), because she likes Rachel's puppy with the pretty red bow around its neck better than the boring brown doggy that she got from Santa. Brian was crying that his feet felt funny, and Anna was pitching a fit in the kitchen because she had to load all of 5 dishes into the dishwasher and turn it on.

So I spanked them all soundly and sent them to bed. Well, I wish I had, anyway. What I really did was wrest the puppy out of Susie's fat little hands and watch her big brown eyes well up with big fat tears, which damn near broke my heart. Then I gave Brian Tylenol and told him to lie down and recuperate in his vomity-smelling bedroom. And I left Larry to deal with the overgrown tantrum-thrower in the kitchen while I lay in bed with Susie and read a book until she fell asleep over an hour later.

All of which explains why I am downstairs at close to midnight eating my Valentine's chocolate and feeling cheated out of my evening , rather than upstairs giving my husband the rest of his Valentine's present. In case you were wondering....