I guess I kind of gave up blogging for Lent.
But guess what?!?! HAPPY EASTER!
I took the kids to the Easter Vigil this evening, and it was an amazing experience. It took about twelve hours to get ready, and we were still twenty minutes late. But the liturgy was absolutely beautiful, punctuated only by an occasional cry from Donovan who "had to poop". Which apparently required an announcement on his part and extreme shushing on mine.
The service was about three hours long...wow. That's pretty long. I had the kids all dressed up, which was quite a feat after discovering an hour before we had to leave that half their shoes don't fit anymore, two of the boys lost their suit jackets, and three pairs of pants needed to be hemmed.
Going to mass as a "single mom" (or a married mom sans husband) is always difficult. Midnight mass, even if it does start at eight, is actually a pretty stupid thing to do. I started out wearing a pink T-shirt and the only problem with it was some teeny tiny skulls printed on it, but I didn't think anyone would notice. After carrying around three very heavy and very tired kids for two hours, the shirt began to have other issues that rendered the skulls even less noticeable than they had been before.
I finally rocked Donovan to sleep, and he only woke up a couple times to scream about needing to go potty again. Then, Emma wanted to be held, and began to fake a panic attack over being so tired. She was breathing all heavy and going "tired, tired, tired, soooo tired, tired..." I told her that being tired typically made people more calm rather than less, but she didn't agree. At that point, three of the others broke into tears over how incredibly tired they were and could we please just go home.
These are the same kids who stay up until at least eleven every single night of the year just to piss me off. They weren't tired, yo. Or if they were, I'm going to start taking them to church every night around seven and just leaving them there until morning, because they sure don't want to sleep like that at home.
After all of the whining and sleeping and holding and rocking and covering faces with jackets, and really really really needing sleep, they got into the car and wrestled and cracked up all the way home, and are even now -- an hour after leaving church -- talking in their beds wondering what the Easter Bunny is going to bring them.
Yeah, right. This Easter Bunny is off the clock, yo.
