Were your kids born with really big heads?

It has been a whirlwind week of activities and as the summer rapidly draws to a close, so too does my patience. I am done. The summer, admittedly, has flown by at the blink of an eye but I just really need a break from the long, long days and the constant chaos that is my world right now. I know that there is a season for everything but this seems to be our season of discontent and noise and I in no way want to wish time away but I do long for a little peace and quiet. The boys are all over each other all the time and on a good day I feel more like a referree than a mom and on a bad day I feel like a jail warden. Too many times lately I have lost my patience and ended up screaming at the boys and then I feel bad and we all cry and I just want it to stop. All of the fighting. All of the noise. All of the tears. Just stop. Please. But oddly enough when it does stop I miss it. Isn't that ironic? Last night Dean and I got to go to a wedding while the boys spent the night at Nana and Bampaws. I was giddy with joy at the anticipation of spending an evening with my husband uninterupted by multiple trips to the bathroom along with separating, threatening, begging, admonishing, entertaining, and discipling children. As predicted we had a great time and spent a large part of the evening in silence, just enjoying each other's company and I loved waking up in our bed (both of us, no kid in between and not one of us on a kid's floor!) and waking up to our own internal alarm clock. But I missed my boys. In fact, I really only made it 2.5 hours into the evening before I started to feel empty and like I was missing something. I must not be too evil of a mom these days because thankfully my boys missed me too (and their dad obviously) and were so excited to see me (us) this morning. The week's long list of activities cluminated tonight in a birthday party for Cadalyn Jane who was in town from Austin, TX to celebrate her 3rd birthday and introduce her new baby sister to all of her friends and family here. We had a great time but Dean is gone (again) and it is really hard to keep up with two little boys all by myself. Even though Cherrylynn's family is awesome and so supportive and really pitched in and helped me corral my monkeys, I still ended up, as always, feeling like an inept mother who had no control over her ill-behaved children. Not a good feeling to be sure. The boys weren't bad at all, they just behave like little boys and I wish I didn't hold them to such high expectations, but it is so hard for me to relax when I am at another person's house or someplace other than my own domain where I do tend to loosen up and let my "boys be boys." Their big personalities seem even bigger (and louder) when we are around other people in unfamiliar surroundings and I find myself apologizing for them profusely and spending more time being embarrassed when I should just try to enjoy their antics....it seems like everyone else does. It was toward the end of the party when my nerves were nearing their breaking point that a sweet stranger at the party asked me about the size of my kids heads and made me laugh and reminded me that I needed to get over myself and back off my kids. If all she noticed, after all, was how large my kids craniums are, then their behavior must not have been too terrible!! Otherwise she would have asked me if my kids were born that badly behaved, right?!