When Dad is Gone

My husband travels for work quite often and is gone Monday morning until Friday night. Of course, when he comes home every night things run pretty smoothly and seldom go wrong. Inevitably when he is gone for an extended period of time at least one of the following goes wrong, leaving me to deal with the fall out.

When dad is gone two kids will need to be in two different places in two different towns at the same time. I am not magic and able to clone myself, which leaves me frantically calling around for a ride for one of them.

When dad is gone one or more child will get sick with some scary thing like high fever or violent puking, come down with some unidentifiable rash, or get injured requiring a trip to urgent care or the emergency room.

When dad is gone I will become on my death bed, incapacitated sick, making it impossible to be an effective mother. I am just hoping to live at that point.

When dad is gone the van will break down, sometimes leave me stranded with five kids, needing extensive repair. That leaves me with the responsibility of finding transportation, towing, getting a rental, and making decisions about the repairs.

When dad is gone someone will have an extra school project requiring eleventy billion hours of extra help from me, leaving all the other kids ignored and to their own devices.

When dad is gone there will be extra meetings or appointments I need to attend that aren't part of the regular, already frantic schedule.

When dad is gone I will be forced to serve crappy kid friendly food all week, since it is pointless to cook nice home made goodness as usual, since the only one who ever eats it is their dad and I.

When dad is gone there will be a house maintenance issue, for example the sewer backs up into the finished basement or a heater quits working when it is 20 below zero.

When dad is gone someone will have 47 pages of homework in one day eating up my whole night because of course it will be very hard and they will need help.They will fight me tooth and nail the whole way through.

Lastly, and this one happens every.single.time.
When dad is gone there will be more whining, crying, fighting, tantrums, messes and general bad behavior!

Now, after eight years of this, since he got this job, I have become quite the expert at handling all the crap like a pro. I am super mom after all, so I GOT THIS, but I gotta say it is still exhausting!

This is the kids of stuff my husband builds all week!

What crazy shit goes down at your house when dad is gone?