Trilo-bite me

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Yesterday, the phone rang and I saw the number was from my kids’ school which usually means illness, injury or my son forgot something. I have to be honest. My first thought was, “Well, this day has just gone to hell.”

My partner is out of town for the week. I am trying to meet a self-imposed (and possibly unrealistic) deadline for finishing my manuscript and I have editing work to do.  There are blog posts to write and emails to be sent. There is a pile of “Thank You” cards for wedding gifts sitting downstairs, some need to be addressed and some just need to be dropped in the mail. There is a terry cloth mountain of towels to be washed and laundry in a basket that I still haven’t put away and I need to call two different doctor’s offices about appointments.

Next week, the kids don’t have school which makes me feel that everything has to get done right now.

So, I took a deep breath before answering the phone to prepare myself for whatever was about to disturb the delicate balance of my daily life. I closed one eye, as if that would somehow soften the blow of whatever awaited me, and said, “Hello?”

“Hi, mom. This is Miguel. I need to talk to you about Thanksgiving and I need you to know that we have to go to the grocery store tonight to get our food for the food shelf and I promise I didn’t forget. They just told us today but I am wondering if you planned to go shopping today during the day because you also have to get the cake mix for my trilobite cake and I also need white frosting and black food coloring and black gel icing and when are you going to go to the store and can you please get some cranberry sauce too?”

And that’s when I remembered Thanksgiving.

And that’s when I remembered the trilobite cake.

“Well, we’ll have to go after dinner tonight.”

“Okay, mom. Thank you and that’s all I wanted to tell you. We can’t forget about the food shelf and the trilobite cake stuff.”

No, we certainly can’t.

Where does the time go? Wasn’t it just Halloween and I was frantically figuring out costumes and sorting through pumpkin muck to make roasted pumpkin seeds? Thanksgiving is next week and then Christmas will be after that and I need everything to just slow down a bit.

Who do I talk to about that?

So, last night, we went to the store and picked up the food for the Thanksgiving food drive and all the supplies needed for the trilobite cake and, today, I have to bake the cake so he can decorate it tonight and I need to prepare for the inevitable emotional breakdown that will occur when he is unable to draw the perfect trilobite in icing.

I can see it now.

At midnight, I will be searching the internet for such things as “Fix gray cake icing” and “Trilobite images + cake” and “How to make a 12 year old stop crying?” and “How to use black gel icing to cover the bags under your eyes?” and “Bakeries that sell cakes with fossil themes.”

The writing will not be finished. The editing will go undone. The “Thank You” cards will remain in their stacks and the mountain of towels will creep like a glacier through the bathroom until it takes over the house.

The tiny trilobite will be our undoing.

Not bad for something that died out over two hundred million years ago.