you should be sitting for this

Well. Perhaps I was due. Because I just got a huge dose of happy. I've signed with a literary agent who believes in my memoir and wants to try and find a publisher for it! I told Mom I wasn't going to blab about it on the blog because I don't want to seem unprofessional. But the way life happened today - well, I just changed my mind. She called yesterday at around - um - 2:25 and 45 seconds? And from that moment, I lost all sanity. My poor brother called seconds later and felt concerned that I would hyperventilate. I almost forgot my children at school, and that's when the sanity really took a turn for the dark side. I got them home safely but continued to ignore them while I called people and let out all the squeals that I had promised my family I would contain while actually speaking on the phone with the agent.

By evening I started to notice something. John wasn't himself. Usually easy-going, he had suddenly developed a very short fuse with his younger brothers. When I invited Drew along on the trip to McDonalds that was supposed to have just been John and I, John grimaced and held his fingers in his ears the whole way there (Drew was reciting original poetry).

I decided to watch and listen for a while before I talked to him about the sudden attitude. But in my head, it had already begun. The inevitable tailspin of our lives because I put my career above the care of my family. I had acquired a New York literary agent! And with it, the end of life as we knew it. We were going to be like the lottery winners who end up bankrupt with broken families. Yes. All of this because John held his fingers in his ears while Drew recited poetry. If you're shocked at my dramatic reaction to the events of my day, I have to ask - you have read this blog, right?

So here's the happy ending. I made banana bread. I'm not kidding. That's how everything became right again. It was this morning. We were out of milk, and I reached for a banana bread mix that John asked me to buy weeks and weeks ago but I had yet to whip up. Today, I baked it. The house smelled like Little House on the Prairie, and everything started turning. I went to take a shower while John devoured his breakfast, and eventually I heard a knock on the door.

"Yes, Baby?"

"Thank you for making banana bread, Mama. It was delicious! So thank you."

"You're welcome, John!"

And he's been himself all day. Goodbye Dateline sob story. Hello mother of the year.