God Bless Single Parents....

...because I have no clue how they do it without losing what's left of their minds.

We are on Day One of my week of being a single parent and it is so hard. I don't know if it's hard because it's actually difficult or it's hard because the light at the end of the tunnel is about the size of speck of dust at this point.

My goal is to get out of the house every day, even if it's for something small. Today's mission was to take both kids and my very pregnant self to a birthday party for a couple of hours. Of course, it had to be a gigantic park that sits on the edge of a very steep bayou. And of course the park is not fenced so I had the lovely job of trying to chase around a toddler who seems to make a beeline for every piece of trash he sees and a four-almost-five-year-old who can seemingly run in fifteen different directions all at once. And since the park is so large AND adjacent to an interstate, shouting at either one of them was rather futile.

All the while, I'm lugging around our huge diaper bag that holds our supplies, my wallet and keys (since the park is not in the best neighborhood and I can't leave anything of value in the van) and simultaneously hiking up my maternity pants literally every two seconds since whoever designed the new "low rise" maternity pants obviously never chased two kids while 34 weeks pregnant. I'm thinking of investing in some suspenders.

Two pieces of pizza and one scraped knee later, I convinced Sydney that it was time to go due to her brother's fever (gotta love teething). And in those two short hours I managed to wear myself out (but not the kids, of course) and somehow strain my back (perhaps by lugging around a 23 pound toddler who didn't want to be held).

To top it all off, after making a casserole for dinner (that is large enough to serve as dinner for another night this week), I discovered that our oven won't light. So now I have to make it through the week without an oven. Joy.

Tomorrow's mission is to get all of us to church. We'll see how that goes. I do know that I won't be wearing those pants so at least that's one thing that can't go wrong. Right?