A Weird Day in My Life
Filming 20/20, making podcasts, writing essays, promoting the book over and over and over again..........
I’ve gotten a lot of requests to do a day in the life of post because so many people were asking me how I juggle work and kids and all the things. The answer is that I drop a lot of balls and then I pick them up and I start juggling them again. I was about to do a day in the life post last week and then it turned out to be a gonzo bananas day. I almost didn’t write about it but then one of my friends reminded me that most of life is gonzo bananas so why not just share it.
Here goes.
4 am: Baby wakes up mad. There’s nothing actually wrong with her except that she’s one and her brain is still fresh, so when she wakes up everything is strange and new all over again and it’s confusing. I go down to soothe her but she wants to play with me so Nick has to come down to finish it up and get her back to sleep. The baby currently sleeps in the corner of Nick’s office at night and in a portable crib in the Big kids room when she naps during the day. Eventually we will figure something else out, but for now we need an office more than a nursery and there are SO MANY CHILDREN in this house.
5 am: Four year old wakes up “itchy.” This is clearly phantom lice from earlier in the week. I scratch her head and she goes back to sleep.
7 am: Alarm goes off. I’m exhausted and can’t get out of bed right away since I took my mom to the Andrea Bocelli concert the night before as her Christmas present and didn’t get home until midnight (plus the mad baby and the itchy kid). Nick gets up and gets the getting ready process going with the kids.
Twenty more minutes of sleep.
Bathroom time (why isn’t poop ever mentioned in these things??)
Head downstairs to fed and dressed children. Brush their hair and grab the naked baby wandering around the kitchen table begging for waffle scraps. That is the biggest difference between my third and my first baby. We made homemade organic baby food for the first one. This one gets fed like the family dog wandering around the kitchen and she is the happiest of all of them. Change diaper and get Nick and the big kids out the door to school.
8:30 am: Throw all of the kid shit on our first floor into baskets and light a candle so house looks presentable.
Our caregiver comes and grabs the baby and a camera crew arrives to set up for a video shoot for 20/20 where I’m talking about Ruby Franke.
Seriously. And the crew was so kind and wonderful and no one asked me if I had a lazy eye or the condition of my teeth (See below story for an explanation of that one).
I tell them to move whatever they have to move, eat anything in the fridge and text me if they need me before the shoot begins at noon.
9:00 am: Start work. Return emails. Write an essay for Philly mag about the Philly food that inspired dishes in the Sicilian Inheritance.
10:30 am: Marketing meeting with Sicilian Inheritance UK Team. Tell them again that I fucking love the UK cover.
11:30 am: call Michael Vincent Ferreri executive chef at Irwin’s to talk about Sicilian food for Philly mag story.
11:45 am: The kids babysitter puts fake eyelashes on me so I look halfway awake in the interview for a major news network. I flat iron my hair.
Discover one of my children has used the shirt I was planning to wear ON TV as part of a fort and it is now sticky. Wear black jumpsuit instead that may or may not have been a maternity onesie.
