one day at a time ... or should I say, one pile of poop at a time

I don't know how we are making it through the days with Shel being injured. It is all a blur to me at this point. A haze, A fugue state, A fog.... I think you get it now.

The days are blending into one another. On the one hand it seems like it only happened yesterday, but on the other hand the days drag endlessly.

I am getting up, getting dressed, getting the boys up and dressed. Trying to get everyone something to eat and get Shel everything she needs close at hand for the day. Our neighbour has been AWESOME and watches the boys while I work (when she can). I get the boys to her place and get to work. Then I pick the boys up and we go home. I try to get supper, baths, bottles and bed all done and get stuff for Shel that she needs.

On Tuesday the boys were in bed by 7:53 and I was in bed by 7:54. Our neighbour returned my call after 8 and got no answer. Even the phone ringing did not rouse me.

Somehow in the daytime the piles of laundry and the toys and the dishes all replicate in science fiction proportions and I am not doing well at keeping up. Every time I think I have a handle on it I leave the room for one minute and come back to a disaster area.

It doesn't help that the boys have two favorite places to play - the little wading pool and the sand pile. They go from the water to the sand and not the other way around which means they get dripping wet and then roll in the sand pile and the piles of laundry just get bigger, and bigger, and bigger..... and then I discovered after coming home one afternoon that the two dogs in the house do as much damage as two boys.

Yesterday we needed to be away from the house for a few hours to go over some forms in preparation for court. We thought we would be gone for about three hours and it turned into closer to nine hours by the time we got home. I went to the meeting straight from work and Shel came from home. Because she is having difficulty maneuvering on crutches she did not put the puppy in his crate but left him "loose" in the house when she came into town. Since he has already chewed both couches to smithereens she figured there was little remaining in the house for him to destroy and that we would be safe with him out of his crate for a few hours.

When we arrived at home and I opened the back door I knew immediately we had a problem. The puppy had diarrhea while we were gone. I could tell he had tried to get out of both the front door and the back door. There was drips of poop from one end of the house to the other.

This is NOT what I wanted to encounter to end my day. I was so tired (mentally and physically) that the last thing in the world I wanted to do was start cleaning up dog poo. Unfortunately in this situation I had no choice. For over an hour I went from room to room, splash to splash, cleaning up Great Dane sized amounts of poo (and by "great dane" I mean "small horse"). NOT FUN.

I think of how many loads of laundry I could have done in that time, or how many dishes, but ACTUALLY if I had not been cleaning poo I would have simply fallen into bed and fallen further behind in the housework. Did you know there was something worse than cleaning wet dog poo? It is cleaning dry dog poo. Extra muscle is required - which I had little of at the end of the day yesterday and so it made the job that much more difficult.

Our poor puppy was so distressed that as soon as he came inside after I was done with the floors he went right upstairs and went into his crate and went to sleep. I will add - to his credit - that he did not step in ONE drip of poo. Which makes me wonder how he managed to avoid it when he seems incapable of walking past me without stepping on one of my feet?