I hope my guardian angel is doing tequila shots right now

Because they deserve them.  Today I nearly killed myself, most spectacularly.

Granted, the roads were very wet.  And I was accelerating outof standing water.  But I KNOW better than to gun the gas in those conditions, INTO a turn.  Yet I did it- and as my car spun into the curb once, then away twice (yes, 3 360 spins- across five lanes of traffic)- they only thing that popped into my head was "Oh HELL no, I do NOT have time for this."

There was no flash of my life before my eyes, no worry about would the baby and I be okay, no crying out to God.  I'm pretty sure he was already aware of what was going on, from the colorful cursing of whatever poor angel is assigned to riding herd on me.  Once I coasted into the parking lot across the street (for an automotive repair shop- THERE'S some funny for you)- I stopped long enough to be thankful I had dropped off the Daredevil and Gollum (my youngest- more on him later) approximately five minutes earlier at school.  Alienbaby kicked in protest at the tightened seatbelt (good little Kia, that belt grabbed me like I was a hot date on saturday night), and I doublechecked to make sure that none of the oncoming traffic had suffered collisions.  Miracle- no one had.  I didn't even get honked horns and fingers shoved out windows.  Kentucky folks are nice like that.

The scary thing is- I didn't even think about how close I had come to being roadkill.  I just pulled back out into traffic and puttered off (slowly, with my nerves a little jangled) to school.  I called Mark- because who else would I call that early in the morning but my insomniac friend- and gave him the short version.  By the time I did that, I was at school, and a few hours of staring blankly at the busy-work on my screen settled everything into a numb sort of blur.

Mommies (and anyone else out there)- check your tires.  Check your brakes.  And if you ever get a chance to meet your guardian angel- buy them a drink.  They deserve it.

Before COFFEE?????

I have a research paper due this evening.  MOST of this paper is done- references, interviews, charts and all my sources and quotes have been pulled.  But the actual pulling of the strings into a nicely woven tapestry-not quite.  I mentioned the three kids and the job and the pregnancy and all that, right?

So, Mommy used her noggin, and set her alarm EXTRA early for a Sunday morning.  It's 8am, and I'm dragging my weary body out of bed, making my usual round of prayers to the porcelain gods (why is it that I feel FINE lying down, I stand up and turn into the chick from the Exorcist?), and booting up the faithful NetBook for a bit of composition.

This might be where I made my first mistake- I didn't LEAVE THE HOUSE.  For Mommies who are attempting to go to school and raise demons- McDonalds with WiFi is your best friend when projects are due.  They also have coffee.  And no children (or at least a play area to banish said children to).  Normally, on a Sunday morning everyone sleeps until at least 9.30am.  That gave me a little over an hour to finish the final tweaking on my paper and review it.  Not to brag- but I'm a dab hand at writing papers.  An hour was plenty of time.

But naturally, there was no hour.  When I crept from my bed at 8am, it was apparently the signal for everyone else in the house to wake up and make themselves known.  The children wanted to play XBox and/or watch cartoons at a deafening volume.  The boyfriend (who I haven't thought of a clever nickname for yet) has a man-cold, and had to come over and insist on my attention.  (Where DID I leave my cast iron skillet again?).  And of course,someone decided that early Sunday morning was the perfect time to want to buy the student violin I have had for sale since last week on CL.

Needless to say- my paper did not get written this morning. It got written during my afternoon shift at work, and typed up a few minutes ago.  I'm allowing my brain to cool down before I attempt to review it, for fear of missing something glaringly obvious.  Like profanity.  I'm sure profanity doesn't belong in a research paper.

Does it?