The Final Straw

When your 2 year old has been sick with diarrhea for 9 days while your aunt is visiting, and then you get sick with a fever and diarrhea for the next 3 days, and you have emptied 2 bedrooms housing 4 boys and have to paint one and clean both before putting the beds and boys back IN the rooms, and everyone is sleeping on floors and couches, and you have two exchange students coming in the next two days to share the room you are painting, which of the following unexpected difficulties, all occurring on one day, will make you cry?

1) Finding out that the last of your three paint color stripes needs a dark primer or the color won't look right and definitely does not go with the half finished room so you have to buy the primer and apply and dry it.

2) Learning that you actually need 2 coats of primer AND 2 coats of the paint--applied and dried--to make the color work.

3) Having your son walk in to help with the painting, step in the roller tray, spill paint on the carpet, not realize he has paint on his heel, and then walk across the room.

4) Having your 6-year-old daughter walk in the room and say, "I have to go the bathroom but I don't want to because it hurts" and you take her anyway and she screams in pain and there is blood in her urine and you take an hour and a half off from painting to take her to the doctor and she has a fever and says she's been hurting for a few days but didn't want to tell you and you have to treat her for a UTI and continue taking her to the bathroom and hugging her tightly every 20-30 minutes throughout the day.

5) Having your husband pitch in to help with the painting, starting with removing the unremovable door stop on the wall, peeling away the top layer of dry wall so you have to get the spackling out and repair the wall before proceeding with the painting.

6) Pouring the potato-vegetable-broth mixture into the blender for an easy cream of potato soup supper and finding out that someone left the juicer spigot open and the boiling broth is spilling all over the floor and splashing on your feet and legs.

7) After cleaning up the broth, putting the blender on the base for blending, covering the top with a small plate to avoid splatters, but forgetting to put the top piece on the blender, hitting the "on" button and having boiling soup spray all over the counter, the stove, and yourself.

8) Sitting in the living room having devotions with your family when you hear a car's tires screech and a minute later you smell the overpowering, rank, unmistakable smell of skunk and find that it is splattered all over the road right in front of your open living room and bedroom windows and you have a fan in the newly painted room pulling the outside air into and through the house for increased ventilation.

Or finally,
9) Pulling off the tape that marks the paint line separating your last two colors and making it about 55 feet around the entire room and when you get to the very last inch and a half of tape the primer layer sticks and a very large thumbprint sized spot peels off and instead of a border of medium blue and dark blue you have an ocean sized spot of white.

For me, #7 was my meltdown point, the straw that broke the camel's back, when the tears finally came. I felt like Anne Shirley, "Oh Marilla, such a Jonah day."