“I imagined sipping Arnold Palmers on the deck, casually thumbed through the newspaper we would obviously be mature enough to have delivered by then. What I did NOT imagine was me at 5:14 a.m., shushing children from my bedroom, shouting, ‘IN THIS FAMILY, CHILDREN DO NOT GET UP BEFORE 6!’ and shoving a small corner of my pillowcase in my ear. I think we can all agree that raising children isn’t exactly how we pictured it.”

‘Heaven forbid we decide to play hooky to visit Santa before our holiday break officially begins.’: Witty mom admits parenting isn’t at all what she imagined, ‘We haven’t breached the truancy threshold just yet’

‘We had a family movie night. Well, let me take that back. My family had a movie night, while I sat on the floor trying to match the right lids to the right markers and put books back into bins.’
“Then I got up and made brownies, because I felt like brownies would make my family happy. Then I did the dishes because, well, I felt like I needed to do the dishes. Then I served everyone the brownies. Then I waited and collected their dirty brownie dishes.”

‘Who are you?’ ‘We are sisters.’ ‘Who am I?’ ‘You are our mom.’ ‘Oh sh*t.’
“Dad is pretending he is asleep but I know he isn’t, because when we arrive next to his recliner, he is smiling. Not in a ‘Nice to see you’ kind of way, but in a ‘How was that quality time you just had with your mother?’ kind of way.”