Not a Jellyfish Bad Day

This morning Zach read me an e-mail forward I'd heard before. A guy told his sister her bad day at work wouldn't seem so bad when she heard what his bad day was like. He was a deep sea diver who, instead of getting just the usual warm water pumped into his suit, got a jelly fish in there, too. It stung his rear, which he unthinkingly scratched and ground jellyfish into. It took 35 minutes AFTER the sting to decompress and get back to the surface where he proceeded to not poop for two days because his bum was swollen shut. We were laughing pretty hard as Zach read the end of the story- "So if you think you're having a bad day, just ask yourself- is this jellyfish bad?"

An hour later, dashing madly about the house to find the Ancient Egypt book for the preschool lesson I've been planning for a month, and ultimately not finding it, I was pretty bummed. Not to mention the fact that during my mad dash I forgot to put the Egyptian Palace Bread in the preheated oven, so by the time I remembered, it only had ten minutes to bake and ended up very mushy. My sweet husband was helping me look and load the kids into the car, and when I finally got out of the garage I was thinking, "Definitely not jellyfish bad."

I traded the twins for one of our preschool girls and we headed to preschool on the most aggravating street in the US. You go from 40 or 45 mph to 25 right before a slew of stoplights every 100 yards. When I got stopped at the twentieth or thirtieth light, just 100 yards from the street I needed to turn onto (yes, I'm kind of exaggerating) I sighed loudly, and Mia's friend asked what was wrong. I tried to explain how stop lights work when you're late, and as I gunned it to get through the next light a policeman stepped out into the road in front of me and motioned me to pull over. Did I mention I was the ONLY car getting trapped at every light? So it was very easy for me to cross both lanes and pull onto a side street.

As I watched him approach in my rearview mirror, my eyes focused on my eyes. "Oh, crap." He didn't even give me a chance to explain that my outrageous eyeliner wasn't an homage to Amy Winehouse. Maybe he saw the plate of soggy "palace" bread and the sheet cut into long mummification strips on the seat next to me, the two three-year-old girls on the seats behind me, and figured it out...

or, thought I was as crazy as I looked.

"Not jellyfish bad," I told myself as I pulled away, eyeing the shiny new ticket on the seat next to my Egyptian gear.

The lesson went okay- nothing like I had planned- but what can you expect when you're a ditz trying to teach little kids who are inherently ditzes simply because they're little. My cut-up sheets made a huge mess after our "mummification," so Mia got some unsupervised playtime while I vaccuumed. She wasn't too happy to become supervised again just to be told it was time to get off the trampoline and go home, so I packed the car while she went in time out and thought about different approaches to handling bad news. I guess I sounded pretty pissy putting her in there, because the grandpa who had been watching some of the kids while I vaccumed wouldn't even look at me as I passed him in the doorway. Great- ditz and mean.

"Still nowhere near jellyfish bad," I told myself as I pulled away.

And drove VERY slowly.

The twins traded back again, we were about a half mile from home, when Mia piped up from the back seat. "I was choking Mom!" I looked into the rearview just in time to see Mia throw up all over herself. Apparently she doesn't know what "choking" means. Or when to stop jumping on the trampoline.

Sigh.

"Not jellyfish bad... hmm- I wonder if this is what jellyfish smell like..."