A life of glamour and papercuts. Well, no glamour and just one papercut.

I’ve been home for two days now and haven’t cooked a decent dinner yet.  It’s not that I don’t want to cook a decent dinner.  The problem is a lack of planning and time.  Tomorrow I am going to plop some frozen chicken breasts into the Crock-pot first thing in the morning (at the crack of 9 a.m.) so we will have cooked protein around dinner-time.  Maybe I will even transform that into an actual meal, complete with vegetables and complex carbohydrates.  Imagine!  But don’t get too excited because it might not happen.

Tuesday nights are complicated.  I work until 5:00 p.m.  My son has to be at football practice at 5:30 p.m.  My daughter has to be at soccer practice at 6:00 p.m.  Tonight, my husband came home at 5 p.m. (early!) to take our son to practice. (And see?  How could I provide dinner to anyone when I wasn’t even home until 7:00 p.m.?)

You should know that at 4:00 p.m., I said to my son, “Do you know where your practice pants are?”  He said that, of course, he did.  And then, at 5:00 p.m., he did not.  He.  Did.  Not.  So, I sprang into action, upending laundry baskets, digging through folded clothes, pawing through dirty clothes.  As a last resort, I ran into my own room and asked my husband:  “Do you know where Zach’s pants are?”

“They are in the bottom of that basket.”

And sure enough, they were.  Filthy knees, possibly stinky.  I didn’t sniff.  And off he went to practice in dirty clothes.

Then, at 5:50 p.m., I said to my daughter, “We have to get ready!”  We hurried upstairs so she could pull on her shin guards and cleats.  Except, of course, that the cleats were gone.  The shin guards were neatly tucked into her closet next to all her lined up shoes.  Minus the soccer shoes.

I began a frantic search for the cleats.  I was gone when she wore them on Saturday and had no idea where they might be.  I expected them to be in the closet.

I ran laps in the house, searching in all the obvious and ridiculous places (under the kitchen table, inside the dirty laundry basket, on her bed).  I was sweaty and annoyed and frustrated.  Finally, at 6:05 p.m., I called my husband at football practice.  “Do you know where Grace’s soccer shoes are?”

“Oh yeah.  They’re in the van.”  The van he had with him at the football field.

That noise you heard at 6:05 p.m. PST was me screaming.

So, while we waited for him to deliver the shoes, we sat in the car outside in the driveway.  I checked the mailbox and found a small stack of mail.  I stood by the car and sorted it, then opened the first envelope.  And that is how I acquired a large, painful paper cut on my index finger.

We arrived at soccer practice fifteen minutes late.  My finger was still bleeding.  What did I do to deserve all this?  (Besides not cooking a proper dinner for days?)