Oprah's People Called... She'll Be Here For Dinner.

A few years ago I was watching Oprah... yes, it has been a few years. I used to watch her all of the time, but that was back when I would lay on the couch all day eating Bonn Bons while getting a pedicure and watching my maid Alice do the laundry and scrub the toilets. Ahhh, memories.

Anyway, I remember this one show where Oprah surprised people at dinner time to see what they were cooking. She was in a wayyyy upper middle class neighborhood and every house she went to was clean and organized. There were no kids running around and there were clean counters and empty sinks. People were actually cooking large meals-from scratch. Oprah ohh'd and ahh'd over what "America was making for dinner."

Oprah needs to visit my house at dinner time and see what "REAL AMERICA" is making for dinner... or as I like to call it, "What the hell am I going to feed these people!"

Take yesterday for example. I prefer to wait until late afternoon to get the bulk of my chores done. I do this because I hate housework and I do not want to spend my days cleaning... I would rather spend the last hour of my day screaming like a lunatic and sweating like a sumo wrestler while I run through the house picking up toys, doing laundry, wiping cemented toothpaste from the bathroom sink, and wondering why there is a chainsaw in my son's bedroom.

I do all of these things with a baby attached to my hip and a 4 year old following behind me asking me for a drink because she is so thirsty that her head may just blow right off of her body any second now and she just can't take it!

As I am loading the washing machine, folding clean laundry, doing the breakfast dishes (yes, I realize I am making dinner and doing the breakfast dishes at the same time-don't judge me), chopping onions, browning ground beef, and balancing the checkbook, one of my older children comes into the house with all of the neighborhood kids following behind her because she has fallen off of her scooter and is now bleeding profusely from her knees-the neighborhood kids are apparently there for moral support. So now I am washing a bleeding knee with the dish towel that I was just using to dry the breakfast dishes and I am putting a few dashes of Tabasco in my casserole-which I kept forgetting how many dashes I had put in because of all of the neighborhood kids telling me the horrific yet heroic story of my daughter falling off of her scooter and the blood that came squirting out-oh well.

By this time the baby is screaming because she is not being paid attention to since I am vacuuming and dusting and the 4 year old has spilled the entire pitcher of lemonade on the kitchen floor because I did not bow down to her request of a drink fast enough for her standards.

I yell for my son to come help and he walks in with tar all over his hands and he smells of goose poo. I direct him to the shower and simply say "You wait until your Father gets home!" and I don't ask questions-I did not have time to reprimand him... I'll leave that task to his dad.

While I am mopping up the lemonade the baby is still crying and the 4 year old keeps saying "I love you Mommy." She obviously can tell by the pulsing vein on my forehead that she needs to butter me up a bit.

I finish folding the laundry and put it in a laundry basket-I'll put it in drawers tomorrow. The house is vacuumed and dusted and the bathrooms smell of Lysol and Windex. The dishwasher is emptied and the breakfast dishes are put away. Dinner is bubbling on the stove and I instruct the kids to set the table and fill the milk glasses.

I put the overly spicy casserole on the table just as my husband is walking through the door from work and he says, "The house looks nice!"

Yeah, Oprah needs to ring my doorbell at 4:30 in the afternoon to see how real life happens. My guess is she would call Dr. Phil immediately.