The kind of day

This has been the kind of day where you wake up and then, suddenly, it’s 1:04 in the afternoon and you haven’t even washed your face yet.

Maybe you don’t have days like that. Maybe you always rise promptly at six o’clock, shower and dress and do fifty stomach scrunches, eat a bowl of oatmeal sprinkled with flax seeds while reading the Bible first, paper second, wash and dry your bowl and spoon, and then, because it’s seven o’clock, you wake the children and step into your day, smiling serenely, deodorant applied and bra fastened securely.

I’m not quite that organized. I do a lurchy dance most mornings: I attempt to hit the ground running, but instead end up crashing into husband, kids, and furniture, at least until the coffee I’ve been greedily slurping enters my blood stream. Then I hit my stride, running a straight race, even though I never washed my face and I neglected to eat breakfast, remembering only when I started to get the shakes, and then I quickly, before getting distracted again, wolf down a bowl of French chocolate granola and keep right on running.

Despite my unwashed face, I still managed to do a whole lot of other stuff this morning, such as straining and jar-ing the creme fraiche, mixing up and shaping a batch of bagels, boiling and baking the bagels I made yesterday, creating and baking sourdough hot cross buns, making a crockpot full of chili, helping Yo-Yo with his school work, baking a batch and a half of Dutch Puff for breakfast (Yo-Yo mixed it up the night before—a math lesson, though I didn’t call it that), and boiling eggs for Easter. I also yakked a mile a minute to some friends, one shoulder elevated awkwardly to keep the phone smashed against my ear, while shaping the buns and boiling the bagels and now I have a backache.

And then it was time to get the kids settled for rest time, and there I was, still in my pjs with scuzzy face and hair…