Community Voices for Health

By: Tanya Pimental

Today, I am tired.  My brain is struggling to make sense of the simplest of things.  Winter has held on strong around here but today the sun in shining and it makes me want to let the kids play outside but I just don’t have the energy. I am certain I am not the only mom longing for a power nap. And because that can’t happen, I instead share with you things that are reality in our house, hoping it may make you feel better about the less-than-stellar realities in your own life.

Every. Single. Day.  My kids take off all the couch cushion to build a fort.  They lose their minds and cry when it won’t stay off or the youngest of the bunch knocks it down in godzilla fashion. I silently pray that they will just leave the couches alone and in fact often request they not take them off.  But they don’t listen and instead do what they set out to do.  And today, I found a gross rotting apple core underneath the cushions. It had clearly been there a few days. Luckily it was so gross that no one wanted to eat it. Someday when I can buy grown up furniture, I’d like to buy a couch where the cushions don’t come off. However, I know that it won’t matter since that won’t happen until the days of fort building are long over.

The middle man in our house often asks to play on my cell phone.  I often oblige only to find that he has downloaded ten different apps and has not played with any of them.  Most of the time I monitor the activity by ear and listen for the appropriateness of what he is doing.  Today when I was unsure he was playing something ok for a 4 year old, he responded with, “Mom. It has baby zombies in it, that’s kid appropriate. They are not grown up zombies.”  Awesome.

Most days if I am not headed to the gym for a bit, I shower and get dressed in the usual jeans and a sweater.  Today I was on the fence about going because the baby has a cold, so I threw on my yoga pants for school drop offs. And instead of getting to the gym to make these yoga pants dirty with sweat, they are covered in several things that I can only guess at identifying.  I am pretty sure there is snot from two different children, peanut butter, ketchup, and whatever liquid I had sat in. These pants are like a piece of art work.

While I could continue to share in the delightful things going on here at the moment, I will leave you with the following scene.  C+C Music Factory is playing on my Pandora, I can see from the corner of my eye that crayons and markers are spilled all over the floor, and a pair of socks just landed in the toilet. And I know that my reality is that I fish something out of the toilet at least once a day.