Ooops. It’s my day to blog and I forgot. I had something planned a week ago, but then my daughter asked if she could please, please, please have a sleepover party on Saturday to celebrate her 9th birthday. She reminded me that I had asked her to help with the dishes three times and only called her younger brother stupid once. Even though her Dad was going out of town to a conference I said yes. He was coming home that evening. The girls she invited couldn’t have been nicer. I just didn’t realize this one thing—nine year-olds don’t sleep when you pack them into a single room like that.

So Sunday was a blurry mess.

Monday is the day I make all the official phone calls—the ones for doctor’s appointments, car repairs, and other stuff. I spent the morning on hold at about five different places and when I finished I noticed my blood pressure had risen so I walked the dog. I hiked farther than usual.

When I came home, my husband was bouncing around opening and closing doors trying to figure out what he was going to do on his first day of vacation and now that he had finished his big conference presentation. My husband de-stressed is pretty manic. We talked about trying to see Robin Hood and who could babysit and how he wanted to fix the gutter on the side of the house and whether or not I thought it was a good idea to retile the upstairs bathroom.

At the end of the conversation he reminded me that my in-laws were coming to visit at the week which meant we had to worry about unscrubbed and uncleared surfaces and legos on the floor too. While I settled in to vacuum, the bus pulled up and my kids hopped off. My daughter opened her backpack and waved a piece of paper at her Dad. It notified us that head lice had been reported in her classroom.

Oh no, I realized.

I had been hoping to prepare something wonderful about the habits of an efficient author for this blog, but you know, lice got in the way.