Alex had to work today and I wasn't feeling good so I just laid around on the couch all day. I let the kids play amongst themselves pretty much all day. You could tell the poor things were so bored.
It was 3:30 and we were still all in our pjs. When Alex got home I took a shower and decided to get the kids out of the house. We had free kids meal coupons at Frisch's, so we were going to take them out to dinner. The girls decided to skip their nap today, which seems to be an every weekend occurrence these days. They fell asleep in the car and were in cranky moods when they woke up. We got seated and it was a disaster from the beginning. None of them wanted to sit down, they didn't want to share the crayons, and they wouldn't stop screaming and yelling at each other. It was about 15 minutes of us begging them to sit down and stop screaming, when I decided I had had enough. It had been 15 minutes and no one had even walked over to take our drink orders. With three toddlers this seemed like forever. There were 4 workers walking around filling salt and pepper shakers and just having a good time. None of them were our waiter but they could have at least told our waiter we were there. After the 10th breakdown and the wait, I decided to just get up and go. Of course as we start "trying" to get the kiddos up to leave the waitress starts walking towards us and I head her ask the other lady if we had been there a long time. We were trying to get out of this place and we have three 2 year olds screaming "No I want to eat" and screaming all the way out the door. Talk about a scene we were! I know everyone in that place thought we were bad parents!
We got to the parking lot and Alexis still was not a happy camper. She kicked herself out of my arms and would not walk with me either. I yelled at her to come on. Of course more people look at me like a bad parent. I am generally very patient with them and they normally are well behaved in public. I very rarely yell at them because at this stage explaining what I want them to do or what they are doing wrong seems to go over better anyway. I have probably only yelled at them a handful of times but never in public. It just makes everyone around you uncomfortable. I felt like the biggest failure of a Mom today!
We decided to just go to McDonald's across the street. We were going to just get it and go home but we figured another 20 minutes before they could eat, probably wasn't a good idea. We went in and they were so good! They all sat down and ate and had no breakdowns. There were these 3 older couples across the way that Alexis kept waving and smiling at. When they got up to leave they walked over and asked if they were triplets. We told them that they were and they said they kept trying to figure it out. They told us how cute and well behaved they were. They told us that we were so blessed. They said Hi and Bye to the kids and then they went on their way. This is how I wish every stranger conversation went. None of them asked if they were natural (I do not consider my kids unnatural and I will never refer to them as that), or if triplets ran in our family (I know people generally mean do multiples run in our families, but sometimes I just want to say yes, my brother and sister both have triplets.) None of them told us how sorry they were for us or how full my hands must be. They just genuinely wanted to say Hi. I loved those people. They made me smile.
I am telling myself every Mom has a bad day, and am already thinking about how to make it up to the kiddos tomorrow!
