Rules I've Come to Accept

Home:
A freshly swept and mopped floor is an invitation for the baby to make a milk puddle on the floor by bouncing his bottle/sippy cup on the floor upside down, and for the cat to puke.

After the last load of laundry is washed, folded and put away, then Clara wets her bed, the cat pukes on my bed (as he runs across it, making sure a pillow, the sheets, blanket and bedspread have all be puked on), Isaiah poops through his diaper, Jacob spills his juice and Husband drops his plate on the floor.

Wearing white is an invitation for disaster in the form of spills, spit up or mud

I've come to accept that I will probably be wearing either spit up or snot on my shoulders for awhile.

Anytime there's extra money, like a tax return or Husband's quarterly bonus, something big and expensive will break.

The more likely something is to stain, the bigger the mess the kids will make.

Never leave a child unattended with crayons and markers.

Spaghetti sauce is best absorbed through the face and hair.

After bathtime and getting the baby to smell oh, so good, he fill his diaper with the rankest of nastiness.

After changing a wet diaper, Isaiah will poop in the fresh diaper. Every. single. time.

Four days are spent cleaning, straightening and catching up on housework. It is all undone in one day: Sunday while I sleep and Husband home with the kids.

The kids only get sick shortly before I'm ready for bed. 85% of the time it will be Sunday night into Monday morning, or Monday night into Tuesday morning when I've worked all night and will have to stay up with them all day. The other 15% of the time will be at 8:30 at night when I'm exhausted and ready for bed. Ah, motherhood ;)

At work:
When you are short staffed and every labor room is full of active labor patients, that triplet mom who has been hanging out on bedrest for the last several weeks, will start to have contractions, and you'll end up in the OR for delivery.

If we've been busting our butts all night long with labor checks that aren't really in labor, 5 deliveries, including 1 c/s, a patient transfer for preterm labor, we'll get a patient with a previa who's bleeding at 6:15a.m. By the time dayshift comes in, we'll have just sent our last delivered mom to post-partum and we'll only have 1 outpatient left and this c/s being prepped. They'll say "So, it was a slow night?" and then they'll wonder why the hell we're still there charting an hour later.

Leave the saline lock in a redhead a little longer than you would normally.

Never say "things are pretty slow" or "it's been a good night so far" or even "it's so crazy it can't possibly get worse". Those are invitations to fate to prove those statements wrong.

If you know the patient you're admitting, you are most likely going to miss her IV start.

You will be doused in every imaginable bodily fluid at some point: blood, poop, pee, vomit, and amniotic fluid.