If I’d written this post yesterday as intended I would have told you how wonderful it’s been over these past few weeks to awaken each day to the sound of happy children fixing themselves breakfast in the kitchen.

Because, you see, suddenly the youngest two have begun to realize that going through the morning routine is ever so much easier if they follow mommy’s instructions calmly as opposed to shrieking their protest like angry bats. This has freed up their time for more industrious pursuits, such as brushing teeth without assistance (thrilling!), putting together puzzles away from my watchful guidance (scintillating!) or, most exciting of all, carrying out alone the small ceremonies of cereal preparation. This event has merged — coincidentally or not — with a new and frighteningly earnest desire by the eldest to sleep until the last possible moment; she now scorns the breakfast-making responsibilities once so fervently desired that she set her alarm for 5:30 am to avoid any chance that I’d beat her downstairs.

It’s been a real pleasure to loll in bed and eavesdrop on the little ones’ chatter as they decide which will be in charge of the cereal pouring and which the milk dribbling, because as I’m sure you can imagine this process is by no means neat. By the time I arrive raisins and flakes dot the floor but I cannot be concerned because at the counter they sit, beaming with pride and dewy with milk. “We made breakfast,” they proclaim, and my heart overflows with gratitude that no longer must I face the screams of infantile starvation which woke me during the first year of each child’s life, the demands of out now which greeted me during the second or the repetitively sodden bedclothes of the third. Now, I thought; now is when the good times roll.

And if I’d had less accessory work (or more energy; or a safe, arrest-risk-free source of crack) that’s the story I would have told. Alas it was not to be. Screams instead of murmurs woke me; when I was able to prise apart my eyelids I saw my weeping middle child standing before me. I might have thought that her head had been ripped off by wild bears but that the sounds coming from her throat left no question about its integrity. Blearily I scanned her for any other catastrophic damage. Finding none, I began gathering evidence from other sources. The smell of smoke? No, but there was another unusual scent working its way into my warm bed. It was minty and fresh, like toothpaste, or –

“He put gum in my hair!” she bellowed, pointing at the grinning imp who’d sidled up beside her.

“You put gum in her hair?” Parroting back questions to the opposing sibling is, I’ve found, an excellent way to buy a few seconds of time in which to ponder how a good mommy might handle the situation.

He nodded, still inexplicably grinning. “Why did you put gum in her hair?”

He answered with the kind of logic displayed by four-year-olds everywhere. “Because I wanted to, Mommy.”

This story has a happy ending. In the early days of mothering I absorbed the fact that neither ice nor peanut butter was the gold standard of gum removal. Simple cooking oil, they said (they being those other really smart mommies who have their shit together so much that their kids don’t get gum in their hair but they still know how to remove it from the slatternly lady’s kid’s hair) worked best at breaking the bonds between hair and gum. Only problem was, I didn’t have any cooking oil in my bedroom, and there was no flippin’ way I was traipsing downstairs before dawn to find some.

Instead I used what was on hand, and it worked better (and faster) than I could possibly have imaged. See? I told you that stuff is miraculous.