This article dismayed me. I have a mentally challenged grown child in jail, he tests out on a third grade level and he’s headed toward his nineteenth birthday. What does the justice system need to do with the mentally incompetent when they commit crimes?

What do we do when our children seem to not learn obvious consequences? I have children in special education, children whose reasoning abilities won’t get them elected to public office.

All logic evaporated this morning. Within the first five minutes of me awakening 20 something children for school, one normally sweet son went down in a screaming fit about having to take his shirt to his room. A shirt I’d washed, dried and put on a coat hanger.

He escalated, quickly realizing he was in the wrong, and we ended up in a contagious, full-blown hissy fit. He sucked a birth brother into his drama, and I ran out of patience, pointing out to the two of them that it was their own two birth siblings right now living in out-of-home placements due to their inabilities to obey the laws of our land.

If this child can’t obey mama for a full 30 seconds, his future will be bleak. That’s not a stretch of my imagination, son.

For good measure, this son also managed to make two sisters lose their cool this morning, one who I made go change her clothes, “Not a chance, skanky pants!” And the other, refusing to brush her hair, ended up an hour late to school, provoking me to write a rather bitter diatribe on our family blog.

I was entirely out of sorts by 9 this morning, filling the 15 passenger van with cardboard for recycling, grumbling to no one, “I’m taking my life back,” as I’ve been too busy to be as environmentally correct as I would have liked to be lately.

I’d calmed down enough to eat a bowl of stale raisin bran. There are 28 people still living here…how could something end up stale? It usually ends up gone. Trying to chew the yucky cereal, we were out of oats, I’d read about a three dollar cupcake thus provoking yet another spiel out of me about value systems. Kids starving in the world, and we have $3 cupcakes?

If people have that much disposable income, maybe they’d like to donate a portion to organizations that help people adopt.

It’s just not like me to have such a crabby morning. My four year old daughter, usually the one who is dismayed when everyone goes to school, simply watched me make a fool of myself, fussing so much.