I really don't think KFC is worth all of this.

I'm listening to a whole bunch of disco music while writing this post.  I don't know if that really matters, but I thought you should know that I am doing a great chair dance while I'm typing. 

So the kids are back.  Last week when they moved out and my mom showed up from Texas at the exact same time and we helped them move, I forgot to mention that then later that night my brother who lives in Kentucky and his family arrived.  They left on Monday morning, I had taken the day off work to spend with my mom and my other brother and his family because it was my niece's 16th birthday.  Then I worked the rest of the week.  On Tuesday after work I graduated from physical therapy from my broken wrist.  Woot!  Then on Wednesday night, the kids moved back in right in the middle of a torrential rain storm at approximately 11:00 p.m., on Thursday night my mom and I went out to dinner, and on Friday night my brother who lives here in Atlanta and his family came over to my house for dinner and they were all sitting in my house when I got home from work so I didn't even get 30 seconds to decompress from work and Friday afternoon rush hour in Atlanta.  Then my mom left on Saturday morning to head back to Texas, I took my fake daughter to the DMV to get her license and it was packed so it took a good while, then I had my neighbors over for a few hours on Saturday evening so I had to get food ready for that. 

My fake kids stayed with some friends of theirs overnight on Saturday.

Guess what I did this past Sunday?

I spent the day on the couch in my pajamas with a pillow, blanket and the remote control and I don't know if I've ever felt so happy in all of my life.  Except that I was beyond the point of exhaustion so I had a splitting headache that would not go away and so I didn't enjoy it quite as much as I should have.  The kids came home in the afternoon, looked at me and said, "what's wrong?  Are you sick?"  And I bit my tongue.  "I'm exhausted from the two of you living with me!" I wanted to scream at them.

But there is some good news!  Fake daughter changed jobs and is making more money as of this week, she got her car registered so she can drive it now and I don't have to take them everywhere they need to go, and the fake son got a job so he's making money and he's received an offer to play soccer and get paid for it (he played semi-pro last year).  So maybe they will have enough money fairly soon to get a decent place to live.

However, Monday was the first evening they could take their car out and I went to run some errands after work because I had not had a second to do them last week.  I had made one stop when I got a text that the kids had locked themselves out of the house so I had to go home.  They were all dressed up and sitting on my back deck.  I commented that they looked nice and the fake daughter said they had been about to leave to go out to dinner when they locked themselves out.  She was wearing a super cute dress and I asked where they were going to eat.  "KFC," she replied.  I laughed on the inside. 

Turns out, they had no idea where a KFC is and they were using the GPS on their phones but this was her first time driving around Atlanta and it's, you know, kind of a big place.  I honestly don't know where the closest one is either because I never eat there, but they had told me they would bring me some dinner back home.

They left my house at 8:00 p.m.

Fake daughter texted me at 9:30 p.m. to tell me their car was smoking and overheating but one of their friends is a mechanic and was going to come help them.

I called her at almost 11:00 p.m. to see what was going on and she said, "we're on our way home but we've gotten lost 3 times already.  But I think I've been on this road before so we're okay."  They were on the expressway going right through the middle of downtown (the Connector for those of you familiar with Atlanta).  I told them if they could stop and tell me where they were I could come get them but she insisted they would find their way home.  I live about 10 - 15 minutes from downtown.

I ate a bowl of cereal, put on my pajamas and got in bed to read for a while.  I stayed awake until I heard them come in.  At midnight......

The next morning (yesterday), I had to drive fake son to work on my way to work so we were both in the kitchen eating some toast.  And he caught my toaster oven on fire, but that's not the point of this part of the story (yes, there was fire in it and smoke billowing through my kitchen and he said, "what should I do?" and I said, "oh, I don't know.  How about turn it off?").  I saw a bag of McDonald's in the refrigerator and he told me they never found KFC and went to McDonald's instead and that was what they had brought home for me.  So yeah, they were gone for 4 hours to end up going to McDonald's.  And there is a McDonald's less than a mile up the road from my house.  Oh boy.  He also told me their mechanic friend never made it to help them because they stopped in a gas station and this really nice guy came running out and told them how he loves to help people and sold them a bottle of stuff to pour in the car to fix it.  The mechanic is going to look at their car this weekend though so who on earth knows what they poured in it.

But I think between all of that stuff happening on Monday night and them both working hard yesterday they were worn out.  So we were all in bed by 9:00 last night.  I then woke up at 11:30 thinking I had been asleep all night and could not sleep for the rest of the night.  And I'm reading this weird book that I really can't decide if I like or not but cannot stop reading so I read a lot of it last night.  It's called "The Night My Husband Killed Me" and it was free a while back on Kindle so I downloaded it. It's written from the point of view of the ghosts of famous murder victims.  So far I've read the parts about Natalie Wood and Nicole Brown Simpson and I've started the part about Sunny von Bulow.  It is a bizarre book for sure.

Y'all.  If I survive all of this, I deserve a medal.  Or at least a giant brownie.

Oh, after June started talking about the Curly Girl Method over on the Pie, I started that this week.  It's working really well so far and I've been getting tons of compliments from people at work about how great my hair looks.  Let's hope it keeps working.....

In other news, will it ever stop raining in Atlanta?