Right before church Anneliese walked into a door and got a huge goose egg.
During church Jesse wet his pants, and we had no back up pair. He ran out of church in purple tights (Apparently their ARE moms out there (with little girls) who pack these things)
 The outfit, coincidentally, matched perfectly with the purple ball gown Anneliese "insisted" on wearing. How does a one year old insist? It's a rodeo. A rope flings out of nowhere, fitting snuggly on the calf's neck. There's a second of absolute stillness. Just pull her in.  Then she balks, kicking, crying, stamping, snorting. The rope is slipped, the calf is free, show goes on. The jean jumper will slip the rope. Not the ridiculous purple ball gown.

Meal time has turned itself into a particular kind of nightmare. The timer is not a threat when your toddler asks for you to set it. And then has you dancing about setting three different timers at his request. Nor is the bedroom of any consequence when your son asks if he can go and sit in his room, rather than eat a green bean. Two hours restrained in the booster seat does NOT phase him. For the love of beans, (for which he has none) what do parents actually DO to get their kids to sample vitamin A?!? I find sanctuary in my well traveled thought-road " honey nut cheerios have everything a growing toddler needs" or " I'm sure one meal a day will keep him alive".
Dinner is dreaded, but dealt with.

On to bedtime. Thoughts of hot coffee push me out of the black hole of dinner and the next routine begins like clockwork. Drawing energy from the simple sound of percolating goodness, I fill the bath, plug it with a bouncy ball (the bath plug went missing months ago) and before the temp is set, one dinner-stained, naked toddler is vaulting into the tub, with his baby sister at his heels. I catch her, strip her, and then set her wriggling into the water- a naked guppy in her glory. My kids LOVE the bathtub.
The shower tiles don't. Like baby teeth, they started strong, but with a little wear and tear  they got loose, and then with  a lot more tear (literally) they have fallen out completely.  We've lost three, and  and it's now only a matter of time before the tile wall comes down.
Our landlord will have his hands full with the bathroom.

Every bath ends. This is known.  Yet it ALWAYS results in tantrums. We towel them, lotion them, diaper them, dress them, (quite deaf now by the escalated pitch of pissed offness) and then distract them from the fact that they are no longer pulling tiles from the walls.
 Parenting, I've discovered, is 90% distraction.

Post bath  is wind down time. Time to read a book, sing a song, get a sippy cup of something, then - stroke of genius- convince them that they should walk themselves to bed because they are just so tired. This works 10% of the time.
Once in bed, there is a perfect calm.
Never trust the perfect calm.
It precedes the storm of questions, requests, outbursts, general desperate attempts to get back out of bed because they have been duped into believing getting in was a good idea in the first place.

This is when I think two parents has never been more important. When resolve weakens in the one, the other is there to steer the course. "Don't give in!" "He's playing us" 'He'll get tired soon"- the verbal buttons we press on repeat while sucking back coffee because if we don't, we probably won't get to drink it while it's hot.
But then the trump card comes out, and there is simply nothing to do when it's played.

"I have to pee on the toilet".

What do you do with this? You lose every time. Don't let him go, do a load of laundry the next morning. Do let him go, and he might not have to, he just wanted to get out of bed and prove to you he could. And by this point, who is really winning anymore?

By 9:00, I let my breath out slowly, tension eases from the shoulders. The game is over. Anneliese and Jesse are simultaneously asleep, and until 11 (inevitably when Jesse tends to fall out of bed) there is a beautiful 2 hour window of opportunity to read and grow and learn and refocus on all the things I want to do in MY life. A selfish, important 2 hours. That's what I get in the day. I wonder sometimes about what life with babies has reduced me to. ( Reduced sounds like a bad word, but sometimes, it is the accurate word). Who am I to people anymore? Why do my blogs all focus around my kids? Where did James go? How did my demanding little kids bump him to the outer circle? Or do we both just have our noses to the grind and don't notice we are rubbing shoulders in the same circle? I think that's it. And I think that's why date nights are imperative with kids.
 James is here, marking papers and planning lessons. Our routine around 9 usually involves something coming up on the big screen and a snack of something and an hour of watching easy entertainment. Even with the kids asleep, bread and circuses live on. I don't know that this is a good thing, but after a day spent with min- tornadoes, it's  a needed thing.

So, this is a stage in life. A very real stage of life. At times it's my comedy, my tragedy, my history. But it IS my story, and I delight to tell it, exaggerate it, and find the humour in it (but only in the 2 hours of stillness does the comedy come alive.( eg. in the moment, a diaperless boy pooping on his chair holds no humour))

We don't always like it, but we may  love it, because God help us, we can't seem to help it :)