I could tell you about...

I could tell you about how getting the kids their passports was every BIT the living hell I suspected it would be. Worse, actually. We showed up at 10:00 am - with kids in tow. We had our forms all filled out, we had our pictures in hand. Good - to - GO. We pulled a number - Number 76. Looked up. Thye were currently on Number 41. Ohhhhhh-Kaaayyy. So we wait. A Half hour later, they are on #46. Half Hour later - about the same. Overall, there were more than 40 people (most with small children)crammed in this 35x30 room. Two Passport agents. Then one LEAVES. Goes to lunch or whatever. WTF??? Most of the people don't have their shit together. Most have to have their pictures taken right there (which means a wait for processing.) All in all they were clearing about 11 people an hour. At that pace, we were estimating a wait of between 2 1/2 and 4 hours in addition to the hour and 15 we had already been waiting. THANK GOD Bart called the Passport office at the Pinellas County Courthouse in Clearwater. She said they had no wait. So we hop in the car, drive the 25 minutes to Clearwater, and go in. We waited 20 minutes, and then the actualy process took another 25 minutes. I still in total took us over 3 hours. And it cost us almost $400. Don't even ask me what poor people have to do if they need to leave the country or something.

Or....I could tell you about how I found myself sitting alone at a picnic table at Joe's Crab Shack in Orlando Florida. Sitting alone, on the verge of tears, with a beer and a giant cake & ice cream sundae. Sitting alone, while my bratty mean kids played blisfully on the adjoining playground. Sitting alone, pondering the whole parenting thing, and thinking about how I'm not very good at it. So many of my other friends are so much more patient, so much more supportive, so much more creative. I'm just so....well, Not.

Or...I could tell you about how - in yet another stellar example of my sub-par parenting abilities, I drove all the way back to the hotel from the Joe's Crab Shack with Jimmy Buffett blaring as loud as I could get it in order to drown out the sounds of the bickering whining children in the backseat.

Today really exemplifies the title of this blog:

"How did I get here, and where's my Margarita?"