We don’t make it look easy.

Sometimes, my life feels like a string of unrelated and inexplicable tasks, perplexing projects, and quests for bizarre items, interspersed with the repeated cleanup of the Same. Exact. Things. I put away only hours before.

Like Valentine’s Day. All four of us sat at the kitchen table trying to eat breakfast and assemble super hero valentine lollipops. We needed 44. And we ran out of tape on number 7, thanks to the older son and his tape fetish. His “I’m a fixer!” Phase suddenly became an “I’m a problem!” Phase. The discovery of some double sided tape helped a little, but not much. The man of my dreams wanted me to cut it into two millimeter strips so that it would better affix the tiny masks. I didn’t show him my middle finger, but I did show him the one with the wedding ring, which means “Nope. We’re married, dude. Now start taping,”

After this fun family project, I had a quality four minutes to get dressed, because, you know, a girl likes to look her best, and then get the kids to school. With both of them safely ensconced, I could go on a mad tear through the city in search of toy sharks. Party City 0, pet store 1.

This day also included assembling Lego Star Wars separatist commandos (who the . . .??), caving to demands to put AC/DC’s Thunderstruck on our playlists, pulling an architecture coloring book from thin air, making an origami dinosaur, “helping” to clean up the knocked over cat food, and researching the role gladiators played in the society of Ancient Rome. And in preparing dinner, I spent rather too long trying to make my hard-boiled eggs heart-shaped. This whole process was not overwhelmingly successful, because when I asked my kids what they thought they looked like, my pensive older son looked at them for a long time before he finally guessed “Turtles?”

Sometimes I wonder: why all the effort? We don’t need to eat turtle-shaped eggs. Drug stores do sell valentines. But I guess life needs the exciting moments to drown out the screaming tedium of the repeated daily routine. Even if nobody follows the routine without me reminding them twenty times at exponentially increasing volume.

I guess that’s how we put the fun in the Fun Apartment.

I heart you. Or I turtle you.