Life with boys…

I was in the shower the other morning, getting ready to head to work, and trying desperately to wake up.

Have I mentioned that I am not a morning person? I’m not.

Anyways, here I am, in the shower, getting ready to wash my hair. I reach for the shampoo—shampoo that I had asked J to pick up at the store the day before, since we were out.

Have I ever mentioned that we have a teenager in the house? Do you know how CLEAN they like to be??? My shampoo, soap, toothpaste, everything tends to disappear into the boys’ bathroom if we don’t replenish every single week. Nothing is sacred. I can buy the most flowery crap out there (which isn’t even my style, but believe me, I’ve tried it) and they don’t mind stealing it out of my shower.

There’s nothing worse than willing your body to the shower, eyes half open, in the morning, to find out once you’re in there that there’s no soap with which to wash.

No, I take that back—buying bagels for yourself at the grocery store the day before, and heading down in the morning to make yourself breakfast, and realizing that they evaporated overnight (again, teenage boys and freakishly tall school-agers) and you didn’t get a single one and THEY (a.k.a. the natives) don’t even like bagels….

The shampoo bottle looked different. In my early morning haze, I struggled to make my mind work—to make my eyes read the plastic bottle.

It was not our normal shampoo. It was for men. With thinning hair. It smelled like a men’s cologne counter in a department store.

I’m not very picky, mind you, but I didn’t want to go to work smelling like any man—much less, this man, from this bottle.

So, here’s the moral to the story, folks: being the only girl in the house (even the dog thinks she’s a boy, and she was supposed to be my equalizing force) sucks. Seats are always up, stinky socks are always on the floor, and Star Wars (especially since we got cable) always seems to be on.

Seriously! How many times can you stinky people watch Star Wars? How many times do I have to search through the entire house, trying to find my toothpaste???

What’s it going to take to get rid of the thinning-hair-man shampoo?