My children drive me crazy. That should probably be the name of my blog.

I’m not sure I’ve figured out what I'm doing yet.

They are not angels.

I tried all morning to clean my house, which basically entailed picking up the enormous amounts of toys and clothing – both of the children and adult variety – sippy cups, more toys, random stickers that have been stuck all over the floor, that pile of mail I forgot about, oh look!  Another pile of toys!

What made it even worse was that I basically only took one day off of all of this clutter management.  Or maybe two.  But the point is that it took entirely too much time to do, so much that my children became raging, food spewing monsters. 

Or at least one did.  The younger one.  The older one just rolled around on the floor wherever I was trying to work, whining about who knows what just to get a reaction from me, which was basically “Quit whining before I lock you in your room!”

But the younger one is where most of my problem came from. 

You guys.  All morning!  ALL MORNING!  She spit or dumped random bits of food all over the house.  First it was her little cup of strawberry applesauce that I gave each of the kids to eat – IN THE KITCHEN – while I brushed my teeth and put on deodorant.  In that amount of time, unbeknownst to me, she took the cup to the living room and dumped it on the couch.  STRAWBERRY APPLESAUCE.  AS IN PINK.  By the time I saw what she had done it was all over the couch, her, the carpet, the kitchen floor, the table and she had tried to wipe it up with a white bathroom towel that I saw her take but just figured she had spilled a little on the table and wanted to clean it up. 

And then it was my black coffee that I’m 85 percent sure she took a drink out of before spilling it all down her shirt, pants, socks and THE LIVING ROOM CARPET.  Now, in my defense the coffee was in a commuter cup with a lid, so I didn’t think she could do as much damage as she did.    

And then it was the milk that she spit out all over the back room shoe storage box and carpet. 

And then the orange that she ate most of and then decided that the last bite was just too overwhelming and so chewed half of it then spit the rest on the carpet in the living room.

And then her lunch of cut up spaghetti that instead of actually eating, while I took a second to pee she decided to dump it all over the floor, table, herself, to the point that I’m pretty sure I will be finding noodles until she’s a grown up.

And then, of course, more milk.

I just don’t know.  I need to clean the house and I am always with my children, so at some point I have to clean around the children.  I don’t want to spend all of whatever break I get when Adele is not-napping in her crib mopping the kitchen floor. 

So what do I do?  When do the children learn to play by themselves without you and without television?  Adele will usually wander up to her room and read books, but Sebastian still wants my attention all the damn time and will absolutely refuse to play in his room.

Part of me feels like both of my children are sick, and that’s what is making their behavior so much worse than normal.  It’s been about a week since they got off their antibiotic for strep, and I actually took them back to the doctor last Friday because I was sure that they had it again.  Everyone looked at me like I was nuts when I said they hadn’t had a fever, they hadn’t been eating all that differently.  They were just acting like jerks, which is how I know they don’t feel good.  My kids don’t actually seem sick other than that.  They don’t lie around, they don’t get feverish, they don’t stop eating (KNOCKING ON WOOD, KNOCKING ON WOOD).  They just get really, really annoying. 

And what made it worse was that their regular doctor was only open half a day and was completely booked up and so I took the kids to Care First, where we had never been before and where the copay is double what we normally pay, and while we were waiting this woman came in with three young kids, the very youngest of which was a little girl who wanted the ipod Sebastian was playing with and wouldn’t leave him alone and kept grabbing his arm and trying to push him and take the thing away.

I overheard the mom telling the receptionist that they had been passing the flu around her house.

Shit.

So I don’t know.  I feel like the kids are sick but the doctors say they aren’t and also implied that I was an idiot.

Or maybe now everyone has the flu.

I do feel a little achy.

But at least most of my house is de-cluttered.