Wednesday Dawns

It is the morning of a La Leche League meeting, and I am a Leader, and I am supposed to lead this meeting, but forgot that so have not planned anything. I have to take T. to preschool at 9am and get the house picked up a little before the cleaning person arrives at 9am. I call my coleader and arrange to go to her house and brainstorm meeting ideas after I drop off T. Meanwhile, D. wants to have lunch with me so I have arranged for my babysitter to pick K. up from my coleaders home at 9:30 (meeting is at 10am and I am meeting D. at noon). However, K. is sleeping late and I am not as ready as I should be, so it is apparent that this plan won't work. Then I remember that N., who cleans, is happy to have me leave a sleeping K. for a few minutes while she is there. So I call my coleader and cancel going to her house, and plan to just run T. to school, come back and get K. ready and have the sitter pick him up here. I quickly pack T. a lunch since she will stay for lunch at preschool today because the sitter is taking K. with her to a class she teaches for toddlers and won't be able to pick up T. when the preschool part of the day is over.

When N. arrives she can't get up the driveway so she walks up the long driveway in the deep snow, leaving her car near but not in the road. She is wearing an open toed tennis shoe because she had foot surgery last week. She is uncomfortable leaving her car in that spot and so cancels cleaning and departs. Now T. is ready to leave for preschool and so am I, but K. is asleep. I hurriedly get him up and fed, and the sitter picks him up, and we FINALLY leave for preschool at 9:45. I arrive at the LLL meeting at 9:59, but luckily my coleader and I had hashed some discussion ideas out on the phone so I feel somewhat prepared. We normally have 8-12 people at a meeting, but there were about 15 there when I arrived and over the next 30 minutes they just kept on walking in, giving us a total of close to 30! Absolutely astonishing! I left after the formal part of the meeting was over, and rushed into town to meet D. for a quick lunch, as he only had about 45 minutes.

The church had arranged for Mark Price to portray St. Joseph (the church's patron saint) for the kids at religious education, but Tuesday's RE classes had been cancelled due to the weather, and we were told that we could bring our kids to the performance he was doing for the Wed. classes. I loaded up my kids, waking K. from his nap, picked up I. from school and the 2 daughters of a friend who just had her 6th child a week ago, and went to the church. K. is a very sweet child, but only 20 months old and my most rambunctious toddler to date. He proceeded to get very loud, shouting all the words he knows, "Book! Door! Coat! Byebye!..." and all of our names, quickly escalating to shrieks of glee. The church was silent except for the voices of the performer and my dear child. After a few minutes it was obvious there was no hope of him quieting down so I tried to remove him, but I was carrying A. and he lifted his feet so I was now dragging him by one arm down the aisle. My older kids, mortified with embarrassment, were pretending they didn't know me. At this point our priest rushed up and grabbed A. so I could pick up K. and we took them downstairs to the nursery. K. played happily with toys until someone came to tell me it was almost over. We cleaned up the toys and went back into the church where a question and answer session was going on. Unfortunately the questions went on for quite a while, and K. resumed his earlier behavior immediately, so I handed A. to J. and removed him AGAIN. The kids loved the performance, so it was worth the effort.