Susan’s out of town on business so it’s just Brady and me this week. This morning, the following happened, beyond the normal ‘make breakfast and lunch for both of us, feed the dog and chickens, and get everyone bathed and dressed’:

• Second day in a row Brady didn’t like his breakfast, which had me scrambling to get food in him. Muffin ftw.
• I shave every other day, and today’s a shaving day. I leave Brady playing in the tub while I shave, during which the first poop emergency ensues – a floater, shouts of no touch, and emergency cleansing of boy, butt, and bathtub follows, whilst my face is half slathered in shaving cream.
• Inexplicably, while feeding the chickens and retrieving the eggs, the chickens attack me as part of a broader inter-chicken clan skirmish. This has never happened before – I’m shocked. The yellow rooster gets some good ones in on my leg, I nearly drop Brady, kick a rooster (it was unharmed and undaunted), and fail to notice one of the white hens concluding it’s better to flee and fight another day – it escapes the coop.
• While chasing the hen around Brady wanders into the garden and plays in the dirt, soiling basically all of himself. Fortunately chickens are dumb and I quickly corner and catch the escaped hen.
• Unfortunately, Brady also manages to soil lots of me when I retrieve him from the garden. So much for heading to work in clean clothes.
• Unbeknownst to me, while all of this is going on, Soolin finds some poop to roll in. I discover this after we’re all in the car and I realize that smell is not a dirty diaper. This is the second poop emergency.

Despite all of this, I was only 15 minutes late to work, and mostly I found it funny. But honestly, how do single parents do this day after day? My guess is, they don’t have chickens for starters.