1. Wake up forty minutes before you and your three small children need to leave for the preschool field trip.
2. Enter the address of the Bear Creek Nature Center into your phone at a stop light.
3. Miss the exit.
4. Take the scenic route, which is actually really ugly, and stress about being late: your number one pet peeve.
5. Arrive just five minutes late. To an empty parking lot.
6. Find out from hikers that the Nature Center is closed on Tuesdays.
7. Cry on the curb with your crying preschoolers.
8. Take a call from the preschool teacher, who is (kindly) wondering why you are not at her house and why you aren't there to provide transportation for other preschoolers.
9. Hang your head in shame and frustration.
10. Try to figure out how to spend the next 45 minutes until the preschoolers arrive for the field trip that really begins at 10:00, not 9:00.
11. Stroll around with small children, enjoying the scenery (this time it's pretty).
12. Decide to follow the running 5-year-old onto a trail head.
13. Realize that your boots and the kids' flip-flops aren't really meant for hiking.
14. Let the toddler loose and carry the stroller over your shoulder.
14.5 Realize two days later that you should have collapsed it and made your life 6,000 times easier.
15. Stop occasionally to enjoy the breathtaking views.
16. Lose one of the toddler's darling new sandals on the trail.
17. Return to meet the preschoolers just as the organized presentation starts.
18. Start to feel dizzy and nauseous. Get worse and worse until you have to sit on the floor in the middle of the room where kids are walking around.
19. Tell Rachel, the preschool teacher, that you can't function and need to lie down in the van.
20. Pass out (maybe literally?) for 30 minutes while Kate plays in the van.
21. Wake up and tell your children that you forgot to pack them lunches, so they have to watch everyone else eat.
22. Require Rachel to drive you home in your own van while you collect your wits.
23. Discuss mental illness all the way home.
24. Listen to the children scream all the way home because there's not time to stop at McDonald's as promised.
25. Wonder if the children are the sources of your mental illness.
26. Feed the children nuked chicken nuggets and plant them in front of the TV. Put the baby down for a nap.
27. Pick up Clara, the babysitter.
28. Go to Melissa's house to collect the large posters for senior night that she has kindly stored for you (in her house without small children or pets).
29. Bring in the big package on her doorstep since she isn't home.
30. Leave your big blanket in her living room.
31. Set up for senior night at the church.
32. Talk to Karla in the parking lot for a long time.
33. Return home to happy kids and take Clara home.
34. Try to clean up the house a little.
35. Receive a call from Marcia, a friend at the boys' school. Find out that Tyler is crying in the office because Zach took off after school without him. Thank Marcia for bringing him home.
36. Measure and cut and roll a new hem for the maxi skirt/dress/thing you want to wear to senior night.
37. Roll the hem onto the outside of the skirt instead of the inside.
38. Don't realize your mistake until you have sewn four inches.
39. Spend ten minutes looking for your seam ripper because you can't pull the stitches out of the slick fabric.
40. Give up and call your neighbor, who is not home, if you can borrow her seam ripper.
41. Quickly make one more thing in Photoshop for senior night.
42. Give up trying to make the dang thing print.
43. Gather final items for senior night in a bag.
44. Meet Garry at McDonald's for dinner with the kids because it didn't happen for lunch.
45. Pride yourself for eating yogurt (gag) and grilled chicken for dinner.
41. Zip towards home, pick up a fellow cub scout, and take Tyler and his friend to the church for Den Meeting.
42. Go home and change your clothes into the outfit you have decided upon in lieu of the dress with the stupid hem.
43. Get your husband to help you print the thing you couldn't print before, and to find an HDMI cable, and to calm your frazzled nerves.
44. Fly out of the house, five minutes behind schedule.
45. Pick up the projector you are borrowing from Melissa for senior night.
46. Find out that the package on her doorstep was outgoing, not incoming.
47. Watch a fantastically hilarious senior night unfold at the church.
48. Begin the slideshow finale.
49. Recoil in horror when the slideshow stops right in the middle because your computer died.
50. Realize you left the power cord on the desk at home.
51. Drive home to fetch it.
52. Start the slideshow again, but this time with half the audience because people started to go home.
53. Go home, mostly high on euphoria, and not sleep for two hours.
54. Dream about a colony of bees taking up residence in your piano, which mysteriously lived in your son's tiny bedroom.
55. Start another day.
