Was it agreeing to move the piano lesson from 8 am (painful) to noon, interrupting my work time and necessitating that Lily and Sam, instead of being with the sitter until 1:30 and the scheduled birthday party (which I wanted to attend) had to be picked up and transported various places starting at 11:30? Was it in deciding to go to the party at all (I really wanted to, but in glorious retrospect, today probably should have been a work first, play later kind of day)? Was it letting Lily get back in the pond at the party, delaying our departure by 45 minutes? Stopping at the grocery store for mushrooms and parsley for the mushroom and chimichurri quesadillas with guacamole I’d been planning all day (and that none of the three littles would eat?) Taking the ten minutes to return the glass milk bottles and get new milk, which probably could have waited until tomorrow?

Was it letting Rory walk past me without any kind of greeting when I came home, hurting my tender little feelings (I know, where do I get off having feelings?) Was it not calling her out on it, scooping it up and making it funny? Sending Wyatt to his room for spitting? Yelling at Sam for pasting a water bottle label to the inside of his car door?

Oh, I could go on like this. Suffice to say that I meant to get ahead to day, because we will be on vacation next week, and I failed. That I’ve been working hard at not letting the kids get to me, and I failed there, too. That on the 45 minute long drive from the birthday party with Sam and Lily needling each other the whole way I completely failed to tune them out, and instead internalized the whole thing, boiling it up with my rush and my sense of not putting my best work into my my day and my worries about the rest of this week and next into a spectacular soup of internal stress. That I’m really, really not happy with the way this evening turned out. That this is one of those nights when my sense that I suck at this, along with everything else, pretty much trumps any other emotion. We had a good weekend, but I can never seem to ride these things out.