post mortem

There's this picture Stacy took of herself (um, I think that's called a self-portrait?) that's so worth clicking to I'm not going to let you off the hook by describing it here.

When I first came upon that photo (see, I'm giving you a second chance) a few months ago, I thought to myself, There is no way that is humanly possible; she'd never done this except for right at that moment, for the benefit of the camera. After spending a couple of days with her, all I think when looking at it is, Why did she not also show herself crocheting with her toes?

My god, this woman can multi-task. For example: Yesterday, at the very craziest time of day in what I'm sure she now agrees is a very crazy household, there she was, an island of focus and follow-through amid the crashing seas of 6pm ADHD chaos--dogs barking for their dinner, kids barking for their dinner, dogs barking for the kids' dinner, spilled milk, mischief, tears, foot races, fist fights. In this milieu, she managed to do the following all at once:

1. sit with her laptop up at our counter, tweaking a short story she had been working on for her MFA program, apparently making progress;
2. keep Lilah in check, gently redirecting her as she stood on a box of cat litter in the pantry, holding the dish of cat food and attempting to hand-feed Ramona, Eloise, and herself;
3. grab her camera, which was within arm's reach, and shoot something that had caught her eye; and
4. respond more or less appropriately to my various sighs, grunts, and Oh, shits in the kitchen while I attempted to do the following all at once:

1. get my kids fed (which, all right, in the interest of maintaining my standards of truth-telling and never exaggerating about anything, I'll admit I managed to do);
2. tidy up in the kitchen, instead shuffling things from here to there on the counter top, incapable of deciding what to do with the half-eaten sandwich, the box of granola that had about a tablespoon left, the three crackers, the almost-dry plastic containers, the possibly relevant/possibly irrelevant post card from preschool about an upcoming family dinner, and pretty much everything else I came across;
3. prepare the kids' lunches (in Ezra's case, a wasted effort, since today turned out to be ANOTHER GODDAMN SNOW DAY), instead simply inventorying the contents of the fridge, then the pantry (oh, hi, Lilah!), then the fridge again; and
4. decide which calls of distress from the playroom were worth tending to and which I could responsibly ignore, and in the case of the former, completely forgetting what it was I had been attempting to accomplish before the interruption.

It was a remarkable study in contrasts.