The Cheat Sheet

Things to Remember for The Next Time This Happens:

1. When your eyes feel like two burning orbs threatening to launch out of your skull and into a bucket of ice water, you can be confident sleep is absolutely nowhere in your near future.

2. Never eat a Chocolate ice cream and Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard because you're stressed about your 3 year old's 103.6 fever if you are severely lactose intolerant. By the time your stomach is done making you it's bitch, your ass will be a ring of fire and it will be 2:00am.

3. 5:00 am. Cue the screaming, delirious toddler with a 103.5 fever (hey! it's down 1/10th of a degree!) who thinks the ceiling fixture comes to life during the night and tries to enter his ears.

4. 5:30am. After everyone is asleep, including the fixtures, crawl back into bed and shut your eyes because in 10 minutes the baby will start to wake--2 hours early. Get up out of bed, because he won't fall back asleep. You're not that lucky.

5. 6:00am. Say goodbye to The Mister, because he will have to leave on a business trip. That's just how these things work. Robbers, serial killers, and psychos, here's your chance. Kindly email for directions.

6. Resolve yourself to the fact you will get nothing done and everything your write will be crap. Oh, and you will look like Anne Ramsey from Throw Mama from the Train.

7. You will get into at least 3 fights with mom. But, she will bring over soup and supplies from the store and visit the boys even though she is mad at you because she's just better than you that way.

8. You will try to list ten things you've learned from this experience and you won't be able to think of anything that doesn't sound better with lots of bad words...

9. And bad words offend mom. Mom will call about the bad words and will let you know what she thinks of bad words and people who use them...

10. Which brings on fight number 4 and, hopefully, another store run. Thanks, mom! (Even though I'm 35 and I can say bad words if I want to. Just saying.)