This morning at 6:54, the Tyrant marched into our bedroom and said, “Dad, take me potty.” So Husband took her potty.
Then she crawled into bed with us and made me scratch her back. After the back-scratching I got her a sippy cup with milk, took out the dog, made the coffee, took the Tyrant poopie, talked to her extensively about giants while she sat on the potty, brought the Pterodactyl a sippy cup with fat-free milk and no scratches on the top, and handed the Tyrant advertising circulars which she ripped into pieces and artfully arranged in my bed. Husband pretended he was dead. But really he was just being very still, thinking, “I got up first and took her potty. So we’re even.”
Husband swears he does not keep track of who does how much housework, but he is lying. Certainly I keep track. I’m winning. Although I try not to hold that against him, there is naturally some accrued bitterness.
I am obligated at this point to add that I definitely have a keeper husband because it is rare to find a heterosexual man who has large biceps and nice legs and is also obsessed with clean floors and tidy bathrooms. Just last night during a family outing to Bed, Bath & Beyond, he begged me to buy him a floor steam cleaner, but I talked him out of it because I had just spent the same amount of money on boots.
Nevertheless I cringe at the monotonous routine of obligations that monopolizes most of my mornings. Make the kids breakfast. Make them eat their breakfasts. Yell at the dog for eating their breakfasts. Wrestle the tutu off the Tyrant. Put her in timeout for hitting me with the tutu. Make the kids lunch. Comb the house for the lunch boxes. Wipe lipstick off the Tyrant’s mouth. Find matching shoes. Pack backpacks. Dig through stacks of clean laundry to find socks. And nearly every task includes nudging Hot Firefighter Husband out of his comfortable habit of leaning at a 90 degree angle on the counter, the newspaper spread across an acre of counterspace, eating his oatmeal and sipping the coffee that I made. 
I realize that I’m complaining about Doing My Job. I am in fact the family’s designated Domestic Engineer and Estate Manager, and my duties include all of the above mentioned tasks. But still! Can’t somebody else force-feed Froot Loops down the children’s throats sometimes?
Weekends usually are slightly more relaxed, but sometimes not having a routine trips us up, too. Friday night I had a Social Obligation, by which I mean a Girls Night Out, while Husband worked. Sometime around midnight, while Husband was saving the life of a person in cardiac arrest, I was learning about a really fun game in which you do a shot called a Lemon Drop, then a guy holds a lemon in his teeth and you suck the juice out of the lemon, which saves you the trouble of squeezing the rind.
Anyway, neither of us slept for more than three hours that night, so in my opinion we should have equally shared responsibility for entertaining the children, who were bright-eyed and enthusiastic after an excellent night of sleep. To his credit, he did let me take a nice long nap while he cleaned the Pterodactyl’s room, but then who do you think had to clean the kitchen? Actually, he did that, too, now that I think about it. But I am definitely the one who had to come up with the idea of taking the Pterodactyl to Outback Steakhouse for dinner, and then it was me who had to stay up until 10:15 last night to pick up the Diva from a birthday party. I’m exhausted.
Right this second, in fact, as I’m trying to write this important perspective on motherhood, the Tyrant is screaming at me to go find her tutu, which I threw behind the dryer last night in a fit of rage, and Husband is watching Meet the Press. It’s not fair. At least, though, in the battle of Who Does What, I’m winning. For now.
