The Circus is in Town

"Mommy, mommy, mom, mom, mom, mom!!!” The two year old is insistent and incessant.

“What is it honey?”

“Ummmm….I forget.”

Meanwhile, his brother is sitting in the middle of the floor looking forlorn.

“What will happen when I fall through this trapdoor?” he queries.

“What trapdoor?”

“I just know this is a trapdoor and I am about to get sucked in.”

Cut to camera three where sister is doing her homework. She bites her lip and talks out loud as she fills out her paper: plants and animals that live in ponds.

“Water scorpion, muskrat, algae, dragonfly, flatworm, roundworm, leech,” she painstakingly copies.

“Mom, what’s a basscarp?” I stop her for a quick lesson on the beauty of commas. She is not amused.

“Mom, mommy, mom, mom, mommy.” He’s at it again. “I ride stop sign.”

“No honey, you are not allowed to ride your bike to the stop sign when you are two”

“Mom I just know it. I’m going to get sucked in. Will you catch me before I fall into the floor?”

I learned how to juggle in grad school. I have half of a technical theater degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and since I am not currently blessed with enough time to play with power tools and hang light grids, the juggling is all I’ve got left.

And boy does it come in handy with three kids and their various problems on a random Thursday night. I started with balls and haven’t progressed much from there. Unless you count the kids and the myriad questions/problems/wonderments at any given moment. No knives or flares of fire for me though. I’ll leave that to the professionals. And I have to sing that circus song. Always. Or I can’t get the rhythm right. “Da, dadada da dada dad a da.” You know the one I mean.

I laugh when I think back to how much I didn’t know then. How stage managing a show seemed so difficult and all-consuming. Theatre’s got nothing on the “mom, mom, mommy” crowd.

I like this role. Don’t get me wrong. But gone are the days when I could do just one thing at a time. I no sooner get this thought into my frontal lobe when I hear the familiar refrain:

“Mom, Mo-om!!” The dramatic daughter cries when I am busy talking Marty away from his imaginary trap door. “I just got nail polish on my face.”

I look up in time to see the bright green smear covering most of her right cheek.

“Just tell them it is your pond visual aid,” I quip. "Algae."

And her perfectly placed seven year old glare tells me clearly that I have dropped the ball.