Holiday season: part Two

We had it all planned out: our posse was going to split for a whole morning for the first time ever to allow the kids some privileged time with one parent. Our family says it is needed, our friends say it is enjoyable, parenting books say it is a must. So that’s it; we were going to nail this. We started to get ‘ready’ at 7am: breakfast, 8 changes of diapers, quick clean up, change of clothes etc. You do not know this but for the 5 of us to get clean by 11am it somehow requires 3 hours of hard work during which a restroom break could ruin the whole thing. Forget the nice shower, dude. Chop chop.

We had it all planned out: DH with the boys going to the local story telling session, P and I buying the Christmas tree and strolling down Upper West Side for some girly shopping time together. As I was drinking my latte I pictured what my blog post could look like and I thought of ‘le zoe musings‘, so clean, so perfect. Intimate moments between a mother and her daughter captured in an almost poetic way. I even selected in my head which outfits and shoes we would wear. It was going to be a brown leather boots and dark grey winter jumpers theme. Yeah…As if…Instead we barely made it alive. From 8am til 10.30am:
– we timed out the kids about 4 or 5 times

– I had to change P’s shoes 3 times because she threw a tantrum for each new pair which led me to throw a pair of toddler red Converse sneakers across the living room. Very mature of me.

– DH wore some huge fuchsia headphones to block out the kids’ screaming. Having DH looking and sounding like South Park’s Kenny was not helping.

My one-to-one time with P suddenly changed to a ‘let’s all go and walk down 40 blocks to Upper West Side, get G a haircut and buy a Christmas tree’  and then ‘OK, let’s time out all the kids and stay in’ to, finally, DH saying: ‘I want sausages, mashed potatoes and beer’. So, here we were,  the five of us, with our stroller aka ‘the military tank which terrorizes neighbors, friends and relatives’ (and it is getting worse as we keep adding accesories to make it even bigger; it now has a skate board attached to it), camping outside Bier, a local restaurant. After a while, they took pity on us and let us in. They were not officially open and the staff was still having their breakfast but they probably thought that it was better for their image to hide us inside from prospective customers. This is a fact, my family and I are nobody’s wish for Christmas. Call us The GRINCH.

PS: we did manage to get our Christmas tree done by the end of the week end…