It occurred to me today that I do a lot of complaining about being a stay-at-home mom. Sir Monkeypants gets the worst of it — almost every day, when he comes home, he has to hear me talk about how hard my day was, and how exhausted I am, and how if he doesn’t take the kids off my hands right now for a half hour, I’ll be moving to Texas under an assumed name. And really, complaining is pretty much a mother’s sole inalienable right — can’t you hear your own mother right now, saying, “I was in labour with you for 19 hours, and this is how you repay me???”

Being a stay-at-home mom is by far the hardest, most frustrating job I’ve ever had, but it’s also the best, and I’m so grateful that we have the means available to us that I can stay home. When I see the changes our kids are going through on a daily basis — if anything, they are growing and changing more in their second and third years than in their government-sanctioned stay-at-home first year — I’m so happy that I get to be here to see it all happen.

Last night was a really hard one for us. Captain Jelly Belly has a nasty cold and overnight he woke up about every hour and a half screaming. At around 2:30am he spiked a huge fever and we had to force him to take some medicine, which he hates, which resulted in him throwing up all over his bed, and then again in the bathroom, and we came very close to running out of fresh PJs. We finally got him settled down (with his barf-covered special friend) but neither of us could sleep over the roaring noise of his humidifier and the sound of the poor kid coughing. This morning it was really tough to get out of bed, and even harder to have patience for whining and aching and runny noses.

But magically, this morning he is feeling better, and so is Gal Smiley (who has a bit of the cold too). So this morning we played some trains, and took the Special Friends for a walk around the house in our toy strollers, and shared “smiles” with each other from our smile box (little pieces of coloured paper with stickers on them), and we hid in the big box in our living room that serves as a fort. And then we watched the construction guys building the new house right behind us, and speculated on who would be moving in, and Captain Jelly Belly suggested that maybe it would be another little boy with his same name. And then we had a little lunch and watch Hi-5, a brand-new episode with a new title song that we all loved, and we learned the actions so we could dance along with the closing credits, and CJB pointed out how much he liked that song and how happy he was.

And then it was naptime, and usually there is fussing, but since both kids are still a little sick they practically ran upstairs to get into bed. CJB found his Thomas The Tank Engine sheets in a pile of clean laundry — washed this morning after they were barfed on last night — and got out the whole sheet set, wrapped himself in them, and climbed into bed by himself. He announced he was going to sleep “Just like this” and went to sleep right away, and Gal Smiley was asleep about three minutes later.

They’re both adorable and sweet and smart, and I love them to death. Being a stay-at-home mom is definitely the best job ever. And now it’s naptime for Mommy, too.