Sigh...

Oh man. I am a self-diagnosed wimp. I do not lie when I say this, though it is true that I elected to live in India--the land of sensory assault. I've learned to toughen up over the years. Being a stay-at-home mom will do that to one over time. Then again, living here for this short time has also given me, if not a leathery hide, exactly, then a cardboard one. And that's better than the gossamer one I had in college, no?

I only start with a paragraph of self-justification because I'm about to complain...You see, J is gone for a few days. I'm ok with that in principle because I ought to be. But after homeschooling in the morning, attending Hindi class for three hours in the afternoon, feeding the kids supper, doing the kid-shower assembly line, brushing teeth, reading a story, and threatening everyone to stay in their beds, I thought I just might be home free. I looked forward to some quiet time by myself.

But then, India could sense that and she couldn't let me be. The power went out for two or three hours, which made our incapable, feeble inverter fizzle out and start to scream. This made our kids leave their beds and roam in the pitch black night. This caused me to have to go visit the landlord upstairs by myself. Incidentally, the last time J did this, he caught the poor man naked as the day he was born, and a rather awkward interview ensued...

Needless to say, I wasn't super-excited to go up there and deal with the problem, but what was I to do? While I was upstairs, my kids prayed that the electricity would come back on. D told me that our middle son's prayer went something like this:

Dear God, mama says we have your cellphone number (what??) and we need you to fix the electricity. Amen.

Well, it came back on for a minute and our oldest son whisper-yelled, "It's a miracle!" I didn't have the heart to tell him that I knew for sure it would be back off in a jiffy.

It is.

I just feel crabby. Crabby, crabby, crabby. And muggy. Somebody please pray.