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Chapter one
Low Blow
Iknowthatpinningsome money to your kids’ collars and sending them off to Nowhere Land is frowned upon, but just how bad would it be?
So help me God if I hear a child scream one more time before I take them to school, I’m going to lose my fucking mind. It’s the same routine, day in and day out. One kid gets mad and sets off the other one while the third and fourth kids watch it unfold, egging them on and making it worse. I’ve considered handing them each a tub of popcorn for the show.
The joys of motherhood, I guess.
I hate it.
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my kids for the world. But if my so-called “loving husband” would make an appearance at home every once in a while, maybe I’d have a few more layers of hair on my head.
“Mom!” Jenna yells from the bathroom. “My stomach hurts!”
“Your ass is going to school!” I yell back, knowing what she’s trying to pull. “You have Phys Ed today, so make sure you’re wearing sneakers!”
You’d think a nine-year-old would have some idea of what her school schedule was like, but I swear she’s as bad as Spencer, who is still in diapers.
“She’ll figure it out,” Carter says as he struts down the hall with his backpack slung over his shoulder. “And if she doesn’t, it’s her own fault.”
How did my eight-year-old gain so much of my attitude? I know my mom told me she wished I had a kid just like me, but I didn’t think it would come true three times with a fourth in training.
“Thanks, jerk,” I growl to my mother, who is sitting two towns over.
“What?” Carter asks, turning around and glaring at me. His shaggy dark hair falls over his left eye, making me fight the urge to laugh at his squinting. “Did you just call me a jerk?”
I run a hand over my face. Instead of arguing, I smirk. “If the shoe fits.”
He rolls his eyes and walks to the living room to wait for the rest of us. Jenna storms out of the bathroom, probably pissed off that she wasn’t able to skip school today, and slams her bedroom door as she goes in.
I put on my sweetest voice and tap on the door twice. “Don’t forget those sneakers. They’ll go great with your bubbly attitude today.”
She doesn’t say anything. She’s probably ruffling through the shoe box I found under her bed the other day, full of pictures of the family that I’m sure she uses to do those YouTube witchy rituals she watches.
Binding us from doing harm to her.
Or whatever.
I walk away and grab the other two to get them ready for the day. The four-year-old and two-year-old are the least of my worries. Although I did get a phone call from the pre-school to tell me Laura dropped the F-bomb by the monkey bars the other day.
Apparently, the correct reply to them wasnot“Would it have been better had she dropped the F-bomb near the swings?”
“Up we go,” I say to Spencer as I pull him from his purple bear crib sheets. He smiles and it warms my frozen heart a little. Not enough to thaw it, but enough to make me smile back at him. “Let’s go show your brother and sisters who actually wears the crown in this family.”
I grunt while I swing his weightless body onto my hip and head toward his changing table that my mother-in-law bought for us as a house-warming gift. I thought it would have been better as a baby shower gift, but I was told that you only get a baby shower with your firstborn.
News flash; I could afford the stuff with the first kid. It’s kids two through four that I needed to be showered with gifts.
I smell the coffee that’s brewing in the kitchen, but I know that I’ll only remember it after having pulled out of the driveway.
I chase the kids around for almost forty-five minutes before we cram everyone in the car and head for school. I drop off the two oldest at the elementary school and they go prancing into the building like they own the place.
They definitely got my attitude.
Laura is next to be dropped off, and the teachers swoon over little Spencer as he sits on my hip when we walk through the doors.
I swear, the teachers in Ithaca, New York are probably the only ones I know that will have the same excited expression to see their kids on the hundredth day of school that they did on the first day of school.
