Children are a treasure...

There are some days when having children is a blessing. Days when you get to wake them up from their beds and they're groggy and smell like sleep and they smile at you. Days when you get to teach them something new and watch the wonder in their eyes. Days when you can just relax and watch them happily play at a park, without a care in the world. Days when you watch them accomplish something great and days when you realize you're doing a great job raising them.

Today is not one of those days.

Today is one of the days when I wonder what I was thinking when I allowed myself to get pregnant once, and twice, and thrice.

It begins with the sinus pain brought on by seasonal allergies. Today they were so bad that my teeth hurt from the pressure and I had to just lie down and close out the world. Children don't like to be closed out, though. There were nerf gun fights and Munchkin's ear piercing screams when she got shot in the eye by a nerf dart. Seriously, how do 10 year old girls even make that high pitched of a noise? There were children searching in vain for kittens that didn't want to be found and fighting over them once they were found. But eventually, some twist of fate smiled upon me (it's name was Claritin) and the pressure subsided allowing me to rise from the darkness and attempt to take on parenting again.

After a couple of hours of child neglect, I was confronted with milk filled cereal bowls and general mayhem around the house. Nothing had been done. No homework, no chores, nothing. And when I expressed my discontent, I was greeted with whining and gnashing of teeth. Being a mother is a thankless job.

Bug is overwhelmed with his homework and wants all of us to know all about it. He goes from maniacally throwing papers to the ground in an angry rage, to crying, to just plain ignoring the fact that he even has homework. If one of his siblings gets near him while he's attempting to do it, he threatens their life. I don't really know how to help him and I wonder if it's time to take him to a doctor to prescribe him something. We've cut out almost all preservatives and artificial colors, aside from what he gets at school, but it doesn't seem to have been helping him with his anger issues. The homework will always be hard, but his inability to deal with it in any sort of normal manner is the real problem.

It's always difficult to know how to make the best decisions for your children.