The Dead Zone

You know that time of the day after naps and before bedtime, well that's our dead zone. I don't know why but these four hours are the longest of the day. Mornings are hectic, someone always beats me out of bed, and therefore there is always some mess or another that I begin my day cleaning up. Like Monday when Peanut decided to fix breakfast for himself, a well intentioned thought, but not exactly helpful since syrup is never a good substitute for milk on cereal. Then there's last Tuesday when Walnut decided to let me sleep in and tackle Little Red's morning diaper himself, too bad he doesn't know all Red's morning diapers are poopy.
Needless to say by the time I get myself out of bed, I hit the floor running. After cleaning up whatever surprise my little shakers left for me, we eat breakfast, change clothes, make beds, fix bottles, change diapers, and dress the twins. Seems like before I even get any breakfast for myself it's time for lunch. So I fix lunch, feed the twins, change more diapers, get the babies down for naps and try to get a jump on the laundry. As the afternoon drags on I get out crayons and paper, vacuum the floor, fix dinner, put a video on for the boys and pay some bills. By the time that magic hour approaches I'm spent, just as the clocks hit 4:00PM, my mind and body click off, and the children literally come alive, some scream, some throw tantrums, some whine endlessly for something I can't make out, and one turns into "Superman" and runs as fast as he can from one end of the house to the other yelling "suuuuuper faaaaaast" at the top of his lungs.
At this point I begin to count the minutes until 8:00PM, BEDTIME! It's just from now until then that I have to survive, it seems easy enough, I have plenty to do. It's just that for these exhausting four hours I can't seem to keep up, the kids are literally bouncing off the walls, and the best I can do is to summon up enough energy to wrangle them all outside. The warm weather has been my salvation lately, on afternoons nice enough to play outside the kids can run and play and I have a really nice lounge chair that I've been making good use of. But on days like today I'm going to have to prepare myself it's too cold outside to play and the dead zone is approaching. One way or another we make it to bedtime and after TOWW tucks the big boys in bed and I get the twins down, I take a deep breath and am so grateful to have survived another day.