Thank you to everyone for the warm comments, calls, and words of support.  Thank you to my Mother, who in a time of change, feels the need to buy soap.  Upon hearing the news, she immediately went to the store and bought a boatload of hygiene products.  We may be out of work, but damnit, we’re clean.  When I peered into the shopping bag and realized I had just been gifted an entire aisle of body wash, I laughed so hard that I cried.  So actually Mom, thanks mostly for the laugh.  I needed that.

Like all horrible wife/mother instincts that should be ignored, I felt myself making a list of all the things Greg would need to know to survive a “day in the life” of Sara & Kelly:

1) If you don’t know how to read upside down, learn immediately.  It’s critical to afternoon snack time.

2) For some reason, Kelly still can’t digest peanut butter crackers.  Don’t even try it.

3) Never let Kelly use chalk.  Now that I’m thinking about it, Sara’s not so great with chalk either.  She tried to use it as a make-up substitute last week.

4) If Sara is quiet in the bathroom, she’s applying lipstick to her eyelids.

5) They’ll eat yogos morning, noon, and night if you let them.  Don’t.

6)  If a toy is up high, Sara has stashed it away from Kelly.  Pull it down and tell Sara to cut it out.

7)  Never, ever, ever store cookies within eyesight in the pantry.  Even up high.   If they disappear into the pantry with a flashlight and tell you they are playing “camp out”, that’s code for, “we think we can reach those cookies.”  Camp out always ends with someone falling, lots of crying, and everything being bumped off the spice rack.

8″) Keep an eye on the pump soap.  Between the two of them, they can empty one out in seconds flat.

9) Bananas stain carpet.  Seriously.

10) Not as badly as play-dough.  Play-dough is attracted to carpet by a magnetic force that sucks it into the fibers and glues it there for all eternity.

Sunday afternoon Mom took me to lunch, and Greg stayed home with the girls.  Upon my return home, I asked about their day.  I half-expected to hear something along the lines of, “We ate popsicles dipped in Nesquik for lunch, skipped naps, and played a game called Use This Ball To Break Something Fragile.”  Instead, after they all woke up from long naps, I heard, “Daddy packed a lunch along with our umbrella table and chairs and we had a picnic at the airport watching the planes take off and land.  It was so AWESOME.”  Kelly put her arms out screaming, “AIRPRANE!  AIRPRANE! VROOOOM!!!”

Really?  Wow.  Hmmm.  Wow.  I’ll be shutting my pie hole right about now.  Carry on Greg.  As you were…