Showering

My life has become all about how long I can stay in the shower before someone needs me.  I don't dare shower while I'm home alone with the kids.  Any mother who is home alone nightly with small children will tell you that you cannot shower while they are running around the house.  In the time that it takes me to shower, my children would ransack the toy room, draw all over the computer monitor, feed the dogs 20 milkbones a piece, and eat every last chocolate chip cookie in the kitchen.  So I wait until they are asleep to shower.  But this plan still doesn't always work - invariable I will be all soapy and warm and hear a heart-wrenching "Mooooommmmmmm!!!!" only to hurry up and half rinse off, grab my robe, run upstairs...and find that they're already back to sleep.  And tonight, as I was finishing up my shower, I heard someone pushing on the bathroom door.  Of course, my mind immediately leaps to the serial killer that I just know is out there.  I calm down, reassuring myself that if someone came in the house the dogs would bark.  The dogs bark if someone walks down the sidewalk and looks at the house, so I'm pretty sure they'd bark if someone actually came inside.  So I finish my shower, get out, and open the door...only to discover that it's the dog that wants in the bathroom.  So even when the kids manage to sleep all of the way through my shower, the dog apparently can't.  That's when I realized that my life has been reduced to seeing how long I can actually take an uninterrupted shower.  And maybe, someday, I'll actually be able to take a nice, long, relaxing bath.  Hey, a mom can dream, right?