Beehive Brain

Photo credit: Kathy Jones (so blame her if you can’t sleep tonight)

Bzzzzzzzzzz.  Bzzzzzzzzz.

I constantly feel like my skull is a beehive full of swarming bees, with each bee being something that I need to remember to do or worry about.  It all functions fairly well, with each bee getting to where it needs to go, coming in and out of the hive, but being replaced with new bees.  The hive never empty.

But it’s okay.  I get the important things done and dealt with, and I haven’t forgotten to pick anyone up yet.  So it’s all good.

Except there’s the buzzing.  The constant buzzing.  It never stops.

But the buzzing is okay.  It’s better than the stinging.

The stinging happens when the bees don’t get to where they need to be.  Like if I forget to pack the ipad to greet Maggie when she comes out of school.  It’s part of our routine.  She is brought out to the car early, and her reward for getting, and the key part…staying, there is the ipad.  If I forget the ipad, there will be some stings.

And like with the wasp nest we stepped in last year, one angry bee often turns to a lynching (the first person to point out that I am mixing species in my metaphor gets an actual sting, and anyone who says that it’s really a simile, because I think it is, gets two stings).  Maggie won’t get in the car because there is no ipad, so Grace wanders off to talk to her friends while she waits for me to get Maggie in the car.  I get Maggie and Grace in the car but then Molly starts to freak out because she has to climb over someone to get in since she took too long.  Grace starts to whine about how we never get to stay and play at the playground.  Molly is screaming at this point.  Maggie tries to leave the car again because Molly’s screaming is so loud.  But Molly isn’t even in the car yet.  And well, you get the point.

By now I am covered in stings and my head feels like it is swollen up bigger than a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.  And it just continues to spiral downward from there, much like the wasp that was trapped in my capri pants.  Trust me on this…you NEVER want a wasp in your capri pants.

Some days I can handle the bees better than others.  Last week was not one of those times.  We had complicated camp schedules to juggle, and Nerdguy had a ridiculous amount of meetings.  I swear he even had meetings about meetings.  Plus we had 2 early morning appointments for Molly that were nearly impossible to get her out of bed for.  I was grumpy but I was getting people where they needed to be.  And then I forgot to hand in Maggie’s lunch form for Friday’s special lunch.  Turns out that was the bee that broke the mama’s sanity.

I completely flipped out.  You would think that I had forgotten to hand in …well I don’t know what could not be handed in that could possibly elicit the reaction I had…all I could see was a doomsday scenario of how the world was ending because I screwed up.

I need a better system for tracking the things I need to do.  The bees need to die.  As much as I love my iPhone for everything, I can’t seem to get in a groove with any of the list makers or to do lists.  They feel like they take forever to setup, and I just end up more annoyed.  And I use a paper agenda to keep lists on, but it never lasts either.  I think I get irritated and even more overwhelmed seeing the long list of items that never get checked off.

What do you do to keep the bees quiet?  What’s your system?

Now excuse me while I go lie down for awhile.  All this wasp talk has stirred up the flashbacks from last summer.