It was so a Monday....

If I'm having a bad day, I don't have even have to check the calendar. I just know its a Monday. How do I know its a Monday? Something always goes wrong.

My Monday mornings are filled with making a lunch for T then packing her and R up in the car for the very short trip over to her kids program. Sounds easy enough, right?

I drop her off and then run errands before briefly touching down at home to fed R and me before picking her up again. I have four straight hours with just one kid but those four hours seem to just fly by....way too quickly I might add.

My Monday mornings are filled with productive errands. Its the Monday afternoons that seem to be a challenge. Not only is T exhausted when she gets home but the 'powers that be' seem to think its funny to throw monkey wrenches into my plans.

Last week it was T putting a DVD into the player and having it jam up the machine.

I had to first take the DVD disc player apart. Then I had to take the 5 disc carousel apart to rescue a precious Wiggles DVD that had jammed up the gears.

After 45 minutes of removing screws, getting out the tweezers, extracting the DVD then trying to figure out where the screws where supposed to go, it was all fixed. Ever notice that no matter how hard you try, you always end up with more screws than you seem to have holes that they fit into?

As I replaced the player into its slot in the entertainment centre, the cat purred a You go girl!, R gurgled a congrats and a very grateful 3 year old promised to never touch the DVD player again.

This week?

Well, let me start with the fact that I hadn't planned on running errands this AM. It was going to be a quick drop off for T and then home.

Why? R is teething and is very cranky. Yesterday's trip to the pumpkin patch was interspersed with my very grumpy boy's very verbal complaints that he didn't care to participate in selecting pumpkins thank you very much. He just wanted to nap in the quiet of his room. Truth be told, I could have done without the crowds too.

But a quiet morning at home was not in the cards this week.

No, I had to get formula at Target. And well, a trip to Target wouldn't be complete without scanning the clearance racks in the kids clothing department. I was after all already in the kids section to get formula, right? Then there was the DVD display with the new release of a movie T had mentioned she'd like. It was bundled with the both the DVD and Blu Ray edition. Makes sense to plan ahead for Christmas, right?

Then it was off to a local lumber yard to track down corner trim pieces. That involved two stops. One to the original store to pick up 6 pieces, then one to their storage yard down the road to pick up 6 more pieces that were at the warehouse.

I swear I was the only XX chromosome in either of the lumber places. At least I didn't get "Well, hi there little lady, what can we help you with today?" That would have been very bad.

Then it was time to return home for a quiet morning of house cleaning...yeah right. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I got a couple of items ticked off my list before I discovered my laptop had been attacked by gremlins.

By gremlins, I mean it wouldn't start. Not. At. All. Apparently a .dll file had gone missing.

Missing DLLs have been going missing on my laptop for sometime now. I guess the gremlins have found a new food source!

This time however it wasn't just a dialog box, alerting me that I needed to do something. No, it completely prevented even the login screen from coming up. It just sat there, staring at me., going Nana Nana Boo Boo, too bad for you! R napped in his seat so I had time to try to find a solution.

I knew the day was coming that I would have to reimage my laptop so I knew exactly where the boot and install disks where located. But that didn't mean I remembered how to do a reinstall. Its been a while.

Truth be told, I've never been a hands-on PC tech. Basic troubleshooting is about as far as I get without Google. And only having acces to Google, on my smart phone just wasn't cutting it.

Then R needed to eat. The clock ticked closer to the time I needed to be leaving to pickup T.

No, re-imaging my computer wasn't in the cards for this morning, thank you very much. No, I had other plans. Au contraire, ma cherie, but it was. One thing I learned from last time was to store all things important on the D drive otherwise you lose them when you have to reinstall everything. That was the only smart thing I did in preparation for today.

After several attempts to get the boot disk to work, I figured out what I was doing wrong. The system BIOS isn't the most explicit in explaining how to do this (nor where the instructions from the manufacturer that came with the boot disk).

And in my defense, I've only had to do a full install a handful of times in my life so I'm cutting myself some slack on how long things took. I even debated on spending 50$ to get the local geeks to look at it.

After I got the initial re-image done, it was off to pick up T. That went relatively well, all things considered.

Upon returning home, the laptop had to take a back seat to T's need to eat (since she didn't eat her lunch while she was out), R's need to nap/eat and then T's absolute need to ride her bike.

Once everyone was fed and watered, I returned to restoring my PC. There were about 37 Microsoft updates, programs to reinstall, favourites to import and of course laundry to be done.

Wait, why was there laundry to do? I just did a major load of kids clothes yesterday. We should be all caught up right? RIGHT?

Oh no. T got paint on her new (albeit cheap) shirt and R, well he decided to add a little laundry of his own.

R had gone down for a nap but decided that he wasn't too into sleeping or playing. So I did the thing that always works in this situation, put him in his swing. TO add a little spice to his day, he has taken to leaning in his swing on a 45 degree angle. He's tied in and normally, this isn't too much of an issue, I just prop him back up and all is good.

However, today was Monday and that just won't do. No, I didn't noticed his position until I heard that sound that every parent dreads. The "thunder from down under" could be clearly heard across the room. I chuckled to myself when I heard it that it was going to be bad.

My worst nightmare did not come close. Within seconds of checking on R in the swing, I could see that I was in for yet another load laundry.

There was poop EVERYWHERE. Little boys seem to have a habit of shooting it straight up their backs and out of their diapers. But this time it was a little more than up the back...it was out the side, down the leg and all over the swing's cover...charming.

Ah yes, it was Monday. Go big or go home, baby! My boy went big.

If I happened to have missed the constant gnawing on his thumb, the crankiness or the burgeoning white buds on his gums, I couldn't miss the crazy bad poopy diapers that accompany my children's teething.

R had to have a bath. R's dislike of the bath tub or any form of bathing rivals the cats'. In fact, the cats take to having baths better than R. I have to say that the howling does get to you after a while.

If the howling wasn't enough, T wanted to help. Apparently Scooby Doo just wasn't as interesting as R covered in poop!

So here I sit at nearly 12am at night, still trying to get things back to 'normal' on my computer. Everything of value has been backup-ed, just in case when I go to turn on my laptop tomorrow, it really does decide to finally go bust.