I admit that I stole the title of this post from a song by a rad Celtic folk-punk band called Flogging Molly, but it kind of perfectly describes things at the moment, and the fact that I always--always get in over my head.
If I don't make it out of here, I want you all to know I love you. Well, most of you. Some of you are fucking dicks, and you know who you are. But I love you anyway.
I don't have a lot of time so I'm going to cut right to the chase. I've got fourteen kids under the age of 10 "sleeping" (i.e. located) in the downstairs of my house right now and two adults present. The ratio is not favorable, and we are severely outmatched.
I don't know how they all got here, but, weeeelll . . . here they are. Some of them are siblings, and two of them are mine. The rest I couldn't tell you. But I did write all of their names down on an attendance sheet and brought my A-1 game from my four summers as a camp counselor to get them all in their sleeping bags and reading books before midnight. Also they all peed and brushed their teeth.
It wasn't easy, and we're not out of the woods yet, because I've already had to go down there twice and lay down the law.
They won a number of battles against me earlier in the night: the sugar battle; the television battle; the hot tub battle; the generalized mayhem battle. They won like all the battles, basically. And I just stood by shell-shocked, being bitten to death by ducks (metaphorically speaking) while my spouse did everything else.
And all along, it was like hanging out in a loud, raucous bar but you had to shout over kids and Harry Potter instead of cool live music and fellow bar patrons.
At the moment they are quiet but I'm afraid to go look. I don't want to break the spell in case some of them are actually asleep. Then suddenly I'm causing a disturbance in The Force and I'm getting requests for bananas and water and all kinds of shit that I'm not prepared to deal with. Stuff that they don't really need if they would just go the fuck to sleep.
Things are looking good, but the outcome is far from clear. So I'm sending this letter as a precautionary measure.
If I ever leave this world alive, I'll see you in 2016. Otherwise, please avenge my death.
Love,
One Hot Mess
P.S Update: I just made the mistake of watching how the whole rest of the world was celebrating NYE on Instagram.
