Salsa, presents, and wine

Cheers!  This is to friendship, motherhood, Santa Clause, baby Jesus, and happiness.  Raise your glasses for a toast...because I'm sure gonna.  Have you ever had one of those days where you just needed a glass of wine to make the night better?  One of those days where the kids spent the entire day screaming and running around like banchees?  All you nonparents...one of these days, prepare yourselves.  It takes nerves of steel to raise kids without rearing back and beating the living shit out of them.  No, it's not just me...this is based on well-documented research. 

Yesterday was just one of those days.  I was so excited to have my little girl home from school so that we could go shopping and bond and have some mommy and me time.  But was she with that program?  Of course not....best laid plans and all.  We spent most of our day arguing and fighting, me trying to get her to stop whining for stuff at Wal-Mart...(yes, we were there again, but that's a completely different story).  By the time we got back home, both of us had cried, yelled, and Mommy had sworn like a sailor and pulled my own hair out.  We had quite a day.  I got home to a dirty house and two cranky children, because by this time I had picked up my son from daycare.  And in 10 minutes company was coming!  Presents were to be exchanged, but where were the presents?   Oh, shit!  Not wrapped, of course not.  So I rush to the room, hastily (and I might add crappily) wrap the presents for our friends.  Not 30 seconds later the doorbell rings. 

My friends walk in with their two small children and we quickly get to the present swap.  The kids immediately begin to fight over whose present is whose.  I can feel a migraine coming on.

Dinner is almost done, so after getting the kids to come inside, we set up the table for our kids, and as my friends are about to go to dinner, their oldest decides she wants to stay.  Me, being the wonderful person that I am (haha), offer to keep her while they go out to eat.  They readily agree (who wouldn't??).  So we all sit down to dinner, and the kids entertain us with their witty banter back and forth, especially the two year olds who seem to be speaking their own language. 

There is a knock at the door.  Oh yes, another two year old!  I will now be the keeper of 3 two year olds and a 4 year old.  Because I'm either that nice, or that fucking crazy.  Did I mention that I still needed to clean my house? 

So, as the kids get down from the table and start to terrorize myself, the dog, and all of the poor stuffed animals in the house I pause for a moment to let the migrain intensify.  This is definitely going to be a wine night. 

There is still so much to be done, but at that exact moment I make an executive decision.  There will be no cleaning tonight.  I will purchase a nice bottle of red wine and wrap presents.  Yes.  That will be a wonderful way to end the evening.  And as I wrapped presents and stared at the growing pile of good intentions stacking up under the tree I smiled to myself.  I realized that the excitement of my children waking up on Christmas morning was well worth the craziness that the holidays provides.  Headaches and empty wallets are nothing compared to the joy that will be sure to come when my in-laws get to see the kids.  And although my days are overwhelming and sometimes I want to run away to the Bahamas where nobody knows me and I can have hot hate sex (thank you Kathryn Heigl) with random strangers, I would never actually do that.  A spoonful of vodka (or wine) makes the medicine go down.