MyColdCoffee.com"I don’t have a problem with caffeine. I have a problem without caffeine!" -Author Unknown

The coffee is not working anymore!  My house is a wreck as usual, the laundry is piled up as usual, the kids are fussy as usual, and they aren’t sleeping as usual!  You’d think I’d be use to the insanity but instead I just feel overwhelmed.  That is such a powerful word, isn’t it?  Overwhelmed.  Let’s see what good ol’ Mr. Webster has to say about the word.

“Entry Word: overwhelm

Function: verb

Meaning: 1 to subject to incapacitating emotional or mental stress <just the thought of how much work there is to do overwhelms me>

Synonyms carry away, crush, devastate, floor, oppress, overcome, overmaster, overpower, prostrate, snow under, swamp, whelm

Related Words deluge, drown; confute, defeat, refute; demoralize, distress, disturb, rock, shatter, stagger, unman, unnerve, upset

2 to cover or become filled with a flood <that spring the massive runoff from melting snows overwhelmed the valley> — see flood”

That is a powerful definition and pretty much exactly what I’m feeling!  Wow, ‘incapacitating emotional or mental stress’!  Nice match!  Didn’t really know it was going to be hard raising children!  They are these helpless individuals that need you for guidance in all aspects of their little lives.  They look to you for the answers to all their questions, the big and small ones.

As parents, we tend to forget that our kids look at how we handle every situation in our lives.  They see how we react to certain problems and they start imitating our reactions!  We are the ultimate teachers in our children’s lives.  We are responsible for helping them express and control their feelings in a positive manner.  We are their role model, want it or not, it’s what we are to them.

I guess that’s why I feel so overwhelmed.  I always question myself as a mother, whether I made the right decisions, did I say the right thing, did I pay enough attention, and did I do something wrong?  I think I am the hardest person on myself and I need to keep in mind that all parents make mistakes!  That’s how we become better…learning from those mistakes and leaving them in the past! Maybe once I put my own words into action I won’t be so overwhelmed!

I love my husband!  He is a wonderful man who supports me in every decision I make, puts up with all my moods, and has given me two beautiful amazing children.  On the other side, he is the “third child”!

It all starts in the morning! Pretty much every morning, I get up with the kids to find my husband passed out on the couch with his laptop in his lap and the remote in his hand!  I have to tell him, usually more than once, to go to bed.  The dishes that he used that night are very rarely in the sink, if they are in the sink, they are not rinsed off!

The most annoying thing is the trash!  He will leave his trash on the counter instead of putting it in the trash.  He will not get out a new trash bag, even though I have showed him repeatedly where they are kept!  I have to remind him several times to take the full trash bag out to the can.  Now, I don’t expect him to do any house work around the house except for the trash!  That is the only responsibility in the house, take the trash out and take the trash out to the road when it’s trash day.  Why do I have to keep reminding him that trash day is Wednesday?  It’s been Wednesday for four years now, thought he would get it by now!

Waking him up is a whole other ball game!  He hates waking up!  I have to wake him up, even though he has an alarm clock that he actually uses.  I still have to go in the bedroom and tell him the alarm is going off and tell him to get out of bed.  Now, this is a process that can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes!  Not joking!  If I am going to be out of the house when he needs to get up, I have to alternate calling his cell and the house line to wake him up!  Normally, he doesn’t hear the phones ringing fifty million times!  It drives me crazy!

I love helping my husband, don’t get me wrong.  And, I know his co-workers know when I am not home before he goes to work because he has no idea how to dress himself!  He will put the strangest clothes together, I really don’t get that!  I pick out what pants, shirts, and socks he wears to work because I want him to look his best.  He could care less if he looks like he slept in his clothes!

Oh my husband!  He is a great husband and father!  He is so great with the kids!  If I could just get him to take the trash out, put his dishes in the sink (rinsing them off), get out of bed when his alarm clock goes off, and figure out what shirt goes with what pants!  Love you…smooches!

The number one house chore I absolutely despise is laundry!  It is never ending in this house.  No matter what I do, I cannot keep ahead of the dirty clothes!  It’s like someone takes an article of clothing off and it multiplies by three!  It drives me nuts. There are days when I wish I could be Mary Poppins and snap my fingers and the laundry would all be finished with a spoon full of sugar!

The biggest problem I have with laundry is the amount, but what really bugs me the most is the socks vanishing into sock land!  We all take two socks off our feet, but somewhere between us taking them off and them coming out of the dryer…there is always a few missing pairs!  I have an entire drawer in each of our rooms that is devoted solely to incomplete pairs of socks!  Now, that’s crazy!

None of the members of the house really understands the laundry process.  All they know is they wear it, take it off, and it magically appears back in the closet or drawers.  They don’t understand the sorting, the washing and washing, the drying, the folding, the putting away, the hanging up, the sock dilemma.  All the time involved in the actual process!  Oh well, they will not understand it until they are responsible for their own laundry.  Now, that’s a great idea!  If only I could trust my two year old with the washing machine!  Oh, I can see the mess now!

No, this is one job I have to suck it up and get it done.  I have to realize that the socks are happier in sock land, and the mountain of dirty clothes will only go away when the kids go off to college, and I will never be anything close to Mary Poppins!  “Snap, Snap”, nope still doesn’t work!

The sweet little angel in our lives.  My daughter loves to argue.  She has to have everything her way and if it is not done to her exact specifications, then she will go ballistic on whoever is in her way!  She has argued over the color of the sky and, I am not joking about this, she has argued about what a stop sign means!  And she believes she is right with every fiber in her little body and she will argue until you give up or accept her opinion!

She is a wonderful and smart child.  She is so intelligent it really amazes me sometimes.  With her intelligence come frustrations.  She gets frustrated so easily.  She has a very short fuse and anything, especially her brother and me, can set her off. God forbid her brother has a toy that she wants or takes something that is hers; she will get so mad and so out of control.  There are days when her and her brother can play for hours in her room somewhat peacefully.  Then there are the days when she doesn’t want anyone in her room except for her and if someone sets a foot in her room, oh man you better watch out for the wrath of the four year old!

She’s a girl after my own heart though!  She loves drama, she loves accessories, she loves shopping, she loves money, she loves driving the boys crazy, she loves getting her way, she is bossy and loud and fun and there is never a dull moment when she is in the room.

She’s got a great personality but with that comes the side of her that makes me cringe when I think about her as a teenager.  OH MAN!  If she already acts and talks like a teenager at four, what is she going to be like when she’s thirteen?  She’s smart and conniving.  She will tell her Daddy that I said she can have a piece of gum, when the truth is I already either told her no or she would have to wait.  She will try anything to get her way!  It’s so scary how she’s already using the techniques I perfected as a teenager and again, she’s only four years old!  My husband needs to be very worried!

The case of the missing sippy cup!  Once again I’m writing about my two year old.  He is horrible when it comes to his sippy cups.  He has become an expert hider of the sippy cups.  The problem comes when he can’t remember where he hid the cups.  He will cry for more juice but he won’t look for his cup, and he wants me to find it for him.

There is no telling how many sippy cups are hiden around our house.  I had three Lightning McQueen cups, now I have one.  We had two Spiderman cups, now I have none.  We have cleaned out the playroom several times and still haven’t found the missing cups!

So, I thought about attaching the cup to him somehow.  Maybe use a string or clips or a combination of the two so the sippy cup always stays with him and I will know where to find them! Seriously, because I’ve tried to make him keep the sippy cups at the table, but that doesn’t work because I can’t stay at the table all day long.  I have tried to keep the cups in the kitchen, but he can find chairs or some toy that will enable him to reach the cups on top of the counter!

So, what do I do?  Take the cups away completely and only allow him to have juice/milk at meals and not allow him to take them away from the table?   But, what about snack time, or movie time, or picinics in the middle of the living room?  This boy and his sippy cup!