Hit Me Baby One More Time!

Monday's are the worst. I think that God decided to make Sunday a day of rest because He needed to mentally prepare for the upcoming Monday which He knew was bound to be a bummer. Sure enough, Adam and Eve ate the apple and the s#@t hit the fan. Well my Monday's aren't much better. The girls eat dinner at Yiayia's house to give me a solid couple of hours to study and listen to lectures, but this means my only real time with the girls before they go down and Gina heads off to teach is the crabby hour where we bathe, change, drink our milk and brush our teeth. Lately we've been trying to move toward one nap a day so "crabby" has kind of morphed in to "furious" and "hell bent" by the time we get to the end of the day. Last night when I went to help everyone in from the car I was greeted by Gina yelling (she will argue she was merely conveying a point in a loud and firm tone) about a missing knee brace so I grabbed Arianna who started screaming at me, passed her off to Gina to calm down and picked up Genevieve, who also promptly starting screaming at me. We moved in to the house where everyone continued to scream at me culminating with Arianna actually hitting me when I tried to console her. This is the first intentional hit that I've received. I've been smacked by flailing arms before, but this had wind up, aim and then the evil stare afterwards to let me know she was serious. I don't know what you do at one. I told her 'no' but to be honest I was more saddened by everything than mad about it. I only get about 45 minutes on Mondays before they go down and I have to return to monotonous legal lectures so I like to make the most of it, but when I'm getting beat up and screamed at it makes me want to slink off in to a corner and whimper like Karma does when she's in trouble. So instead I skulked off to the bathroom to start running the water for a bath. As I moped around in there I suddenly felt a tap on my thigh. As I turned around I saw a sheepish grin and a naked Arianna standing there. It may not have been an apology per se, but it was enough for me to forgive and move on. Of course the furious hour continued once everyone was in the bath, but I didn't take it personally any more. One little smile is more than enough to get me through the rest of the night.