Decisions, Decisions.

This past Thursday turned out to be a day for the books. It was plain awful. It was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

It started out innocuous enough. Jason let me sleep in as he was leaving to return to Houston around 10:30 am. I wake up around 9:30 to a house that looked slightly worse than it did when I went to bed at midnight. I'd stayed up late doing the majority of my last order of Christmas cards. The only thing I had left was to fold them (and deliver between 4:00 and 5:00 pm).

Jason goes off and I try to get the house in reasonable order but with a cranky baby and three other kids vying for my attention, this sounds easier in theory than in practice. (Sometime mid-afternoon, Mary Beth came up with a "hurt eye". Now I use quotes here because she's had no fewer than three hysterical illnesses since Jason's left, one of which was so convincing I'd called a babysitter for the boys and trotted off to the pediatrician.) But nonetheless, I usually really try to keep the house as close to neat as possible in case we get a call for a showing. But when 2:00 pm rolled around and the centralized showing office hadn't called, I figured we were in the clear. I'd finish all the housework that night after the kids went to bed and be ready for a potential showing tomorrow.

I get to work on folding the Christmas cards and realize halfway through the stack that I must have reloaded the printer wrong when printing the inside of the cards because the words were on the top half and upside down. (Insert expletive here). I hate when I make simple mistakes like this. It's absolutely infuriating because it usually results from me attempting to multi-task instead of focusing on what's right in front of me. And that had totally happened here. (I'd been facebooking while printing the inside of the cards and absentmindedly put them in backward.) (Insert additional, more detailed expletive).

I suck it up and get the cards reprinted, rescored, recut, reprinted and refolded and in the middle of all of this I manage to get dinner on the stove (taco soup) and cornbread in the oven. It's my turn to cook for Missy and Chelette and it works out perfectly because the Christmas cards are being delivered to that side of town. As long as no icky kid comes near the cards (they know never to touch Mommy's paper), I'm in the clear.

It's 3:55 pm by this point and I'm nursing Eleanor. The phone rings. Centralized showing office. (Oh yes, I'll definitely be cleaning the house tonight.) But wait. A realtor would like to show the house at 4:15! I glance up at the clock and realize that's 20 minutes from now and there's no WAY that's going to happen. The cornbread alone still has 20 minutes to bake. I do a quick mental calculation of what needs to be done in order to get the house in showing condition (it's quite different from say unexpected company because you can't just throw all your crap in closets. They'll be looking in your closets!) and request that they hold off until 4:45. It's a deal.

HOLY CRAP.

I won't go into all the details of what needed to be done around the house, but luckily it was just putting things away and not majors like mopping. I can tell you that it takes 35 minutes of running around like a crazy woman and enough sweat to soak your underpants to get a moderately messy house in showing condition.

At 4:35, the kids and I and the taco soup, cornbread and Christmas cards hit the road for our deliveries. Just enough to do to keep us away from the exit time of the potential buyers (5:45). Naturally, on the way, some ass pulled out in front of me and I slammed on my brakes to avoid hitting him, but in doing so cause the pot to SPILL TACO SOUP. And if that wasn't enough, after we'd dropped off the cards, I glanced in my rear view at the twins and noticed that Mary Beth's "hurt eye" was now swelling so fast I could actually see it swelling shut.

HOLY CRAP.

I get to Missy's and call my friend Shelley, whose husband is a doctor at an Urgent Care in town. He's working. Great. We'll do that instead of sitting in the ER all night.

Go to Chelette's, drop off the remaining soup, cornbread and the boys (thank God for Chelette for keeping them) and head out with the girls to the UC facility. It ended up taking me longer to get there because of traffic than it did to see Boo and get a diagnosis (conjunctivitis with an infection in her eyelids). But perhaps the longest part of the evening was waiting an hour for the $60 of prescriptions at CVS.

When I finally got home and got the kids in bed, I sat down and wept. It was all I could do.

So the decision ahead of us that certainly factors in the day that will forever be known as the "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day" is that Ruth's has offered to pay for a rental (or our mortgage, whichever is less) until our house sells. So while I swear I heard angels singing when Jason told me that, it also brings with it some serious deliberation and prayer.

Do we move temporarily into a furnished apartment, leave all our stuff here (except for non necessities like clothes) so we can all be together? Do we have Hayes switch schools and then switch again when we buy? Do we just homeschool him instead until we move? Do we just suck it up and live apart for the remainder of the time? Will TESI ever fix this **&%(*& lift station noise so we can sell this house?

What to do. What to do. Expect more blahging about this to come ...