It's been one of those days where nothing goes right, but, thankfully, it all just makes you laugh instead of go off the deep end and swear that the world's against you. And it's not just me. It's all three of us. Maybe there's a curse in our neighborhood. Maybe I should go check on Pam.

Here's how it started: oversleeping. Oversleeping gets the anxiety level around 9 or 10 in about two seconds flat. Haven't done that in goodness knows how long. Nell's wailing. The boys are all over me, wondering out loud what's happened now that they're awake before I am. All this makes us late to their doctor's appointments - an activity that's stressful and complicated without being super rushed. Well, I manage to get them somewhat ready to go (Don't tell anyone, but I have a reserve box of "Uncrustables" for these types of occasions. But, seriously don't tell anyone. And in this case...or in most cases "anyone" means Barb. She happens to, um, hate Uncrustables. I happen to, um, love them and sometimes, in a bind, yes, I let the boys split one. Not that big a deal. But please don't tell.)1

Get to the car, battery's dead. Can't find Nicki but leave a note explaining I had to borrow the 'Ru2 Get to the doctor's, there's a busted water main dumping gallon after gallon onto the street. Doctor's office is closed. Un. Real. So we head back home and finally exhale.

Then we have a wives meeting and I learn Nicki and Barb have, somehow, had similarly unbelievable mornings. Barb blows a tire on the way to the casino, calls Triple-A, and waits on the side of the highway for them to show up. They do, relatively quickly, but any time on the side of the highway is a long time, usually spent with your arms crossed looking at oncoming traffic, looking for that white pick-up truck that's coming to help you. Anyway, the guy shows up, puts on the spare...not a mile later, another tire blows. She had to get the car towed to a shop...the whole thing. She came home and is taking the rest of the day off.

Nicki. Well, Nicki spent the morning telling herself that she's "gonna have to call the fire department in the next two minutes," which was something she didn't want to have to do. But Wayne, well, Wayne wants to be a fixer like his Mama and when he saw her underneath the sink in the upstairs bathroom of Barb's house, he had to "get under the hood" himself, as it were. I have no idea what she was actually doing - besides fixing - but when she went back to her house for a different tool, she came back and Wayne was, himself, under the sink...but he was stuck under the sink, wrist-deep in a pipe he knew he shouldn't be wrist-deep in. So, Nicki spent the time that Barb was waiting on the side of the highway (the second time) and the time I spent in a flood-induced traffic jam on the bathroom floor trying to coat Wayne's arm and wrist with whatever lubricant she could think of. Soap. Crisco. Olive oil. Pam. Any- and everything. Butter. After about half an hour, right when she was about to give up and make the embarrassing call mothers don't want to have to make (Yes, it's not really an emergency, per se, but my child is...stuck in something.) Wayne wiggled free and after an intense gaze from his mama, he scooted out of the bathroom, across the yards, into Nicki's house, and up into his room. He's still there now. Kids self-imposed punishments are so much worse than what they're parents would give them sometimes…which is kinda cute and kinda sad, too. Nicki told him his lunch was ready, but he's not ready to eat, apparently. As he said he would do, he's "thinking about what he did wrong," however long he decides that should take.

And we, the mothers, are now sitting in Barb's living room, feet up, tea in hand, dazed by our day so far, but oddly calm. "The Price is Right" is about to end. Barb even kind of chuckled about it all. Maybe we're lightening up as we get older. Or maybe it's just that, at this point, you expect a certain level of chaos so the spikes in it don't really faze you as much. I don't know. It's 11:58 in the morning and I feel like we've each been through a war the past four hours. But now we're back at base, and we can chuckle about how bad it is out there. Thankfully, none of us has another mission for the rest of the day. I think we might even through in a DVD. :-) I should be reading, but I think my brain's too mushy right now...

1For those reasonable folks who, like me, love Uncrustables, try putting them in the toaster over for, like, 30 seconds. So good.

2What I call Nicki's Outback these days…because I can.