Honey, I'm home...

So my kids came back tonight from a week at their father's. It's funny - the patterns you get into without really thinking about. When you have a baby, you could be sleeping three doors down the hall, but if the baby so much as clears its throat, you're so wide awake and on the job that you could do algebra. You relax a little over time, but that instinct to rush to your kid's side never goes away.

And it takes a lifetime of being with your kids to learn what they like and what they don't; how much of a disciplinarian you have to be and what you can bribe them with. This is where I feel sorry for non-custodial parents - sure, you get to be the "fun" parent and do all the things the custodial parent won't, but when the chips are down it's hard to gain the kind of knowledge of your kids you get when you live with them all the time.

So I was prepared for the kids to have a wacky week with Dear Old Dad. But in that same week, I let my base-level awareness slip: I didn't have to keep an ear open for a kid's cry in the night, so I slept like a log. I didn't have to make sure anyone ate their broccoli, so I didn't cook any. I didn't have to keep an eye open for instep-maiming toys left in the middle of the floor and I didn't have to make sure that people were slathered with SPF 50 suncream before we left the house.

It was glorious.

However, now that the kids are back all my new weaknesses are being exposed. While the kids were running around my nice, neat living room yelling "Cake! Cake! Cake!" I forgot to scan the floor for foreign objects, and a Happy Meal toy gave my instep a Vulcan nerve pinch. Swell. I cut up some apples for the kids - no way they were getting cake-cake-cake. But I didn't get a chance to give them the apples, because they had already bolted for the back yard, had found the hose and were squirting each other. Have you ever tried to get a hose away from a determined 3-yr-old? Even if you win, you lose.

So finally we all squelched back into the house and I announced that it was bedtime. Apparently the kids had learned, over the past week with Dear Old Dad, that "bedtime" was code for "30 more minutes of running around like wild monkeys." I don't know where the darling children I raised went; my best guess is that my ex swapped them out with some mutant hybrid wolverine-children that he engineered in some lab. (He's crafty that way.)

Alright, so once and for all, at 9 pm the kids were secure in their beds (with a little duct tape). Five drinks of water, two lost toys and three stories later, and all is quiet upstairs. That either means they're asleep, or they're cutting an escape hole in the baby gate.

Think Mommy better go find some cake-cake-cake of her own.