Mom Hilariously Sums Up What It's Like To Be Home With Kids In Summer
It’s our kids’ world and we just live in it
Summertime should be a time of schedule-free, sun-filled days and carefree nights. That is, unless you have kids. Summer with children is three full months of bickering and noise and chaos. Parents spend hours upon hours trying to delicately balance screen time, activities, summer bucket-list items, and sports schedules.
And while it’s SOMUCHFUN to be a full time taxi driver, chef, playmate, and activities director, one mother took to Facebook to describe her afternoon in painstaking detail, leaving the rest of us nodding our heads in collective misery.
“How’s everyone’s summer going? Here’s an excerpt from mine so far, one that accurately depicts our day to day shit-show,” mom of three, Karen Johnson, posted on her Facebook page 21st Century SAHM.
Johnson was making grilled cheese sandwiches for her kids for lunch when her eight-year-old asked to go get the mail (which of course meant her four-year-old had to supervise). “I give them the mail key and out the door they go. How could this go wrong? Such a simple task,” she writes.
But then she remembered all her boys do is fight (because, duh) “All day. Every minute that they are awake. And sometimes in their dreams.” Johnson tells Scary Mommy her kids “argue over which show to watch, which couch cushion to sit on, iPad turns, and who won the race to put their underwear on fastest. It’s exhausting. Sometimes I walk away and let them duke it out, praying they don’t get blood on my carpet.”
We are so glad we aren’t alone.
Alas, it turns out the mail expedition would be no different. “As I am cooking their grilled cheeses on the stove, my 6yo daughter (the reporter of all things non-compliant) comes tearing into the kitchen, yelling, ‘They’re fighting at the mailbox! And then mail went flying everywhere all over the neighborhood!’”
And parents everywhere nod their heads.
Johnson says she “abandon(s) lunch and sprint(s) outside” to find “both boys scrambling around from yard to yard, trying to grab pieces of mail.”
Then, Johnson remembers her four year old is loose and near a busy road. “I am now chasing him, screaming his name, and also trying to pick up mail that is blowing all over the neighbors’ yards,” Johnson recounts. “But because he’s 4, refuses to walk anywhere ever, and is on an anti-shoes campaign this summer, my son of course runs down the street barefoot and falls. He rips open his foot on a rock or the pavement or whatever is in the road because THIS IS WHY WE WEAR SHOES.”
Johnson says she gets her “crying 4yo, a crying 8yo who thinks he’s in trouble because of mail-mageddon, and piles and piles of junk mail and flyers that I will never look at” home and then locks them inside and flies far, far away to a private island where it is illegal to bring or even mention the word ‘children.’
Fine, we made that last part up but it sounds like a charming place to live.
Once Johnson managed to get the kids under control, she remembered what she was doing before this whole shit show started – making lunch on a stove.
“So I did what any good mother would do. I scraped off the burnt parts, threw them on plates, and said bon appetit, kids. And I poured this beer.”
Cheers, mama. We feel you.
