The Grumpy

I woke up Grumpy.  Because I fell asleep sad.  Because I was Lonely.  Because the Overworked was exhausted and fell asleep in 10 seconds.  The Grumpy didn't want to respond to the day.

The Grumpy ignored the alarm clock.  It resisted dressing.  It balked at making lunches.  It didn't make breakfast at all, just snarled a little and told everyone to make their own oatmeal.

The Grumpy wasn't helped much by The Irritator who is constantly teasing, poking, scaring, distracting, conniving, dawdling, and irritating everyone in the house. "GRRRRR!" Humphed the Grumpy as it chewed out the Irritator for a full 10 minutes.

 The Grumpy didn't want to find shoes or brush hair or remind anyone for the umpteenth time that it was time to go.

Despite all the resisting, The Grumpy still had to do all these things because kids had piano lessons and school.  Life rolls on no matter what sort of Grumpy rages.

Piano lessons happened.  The Irritator went to school.    The Responsible, The Happy, and The Silly had a great morning and got off to school. 

But The Grumpy still felt dumpy.  And guilty for yalping at the Irritator.  And sad because The Grumpy couldn't spend time with The Overworked.  The Overworked came home to run, but the Grumpy couldn't go because The Grumpy had a grumpy-dumpy dentist appointment. 

But the Overworked gave the Grumpy some big hugs and tickled the Grumpy's neck and that made the Grumpy less grumpy.

After that the Grumpy did what it does best when it is Grumpy: it worked.  It made the dinner and set the table and cleaned the kitchen and washed the laundry and made the bed and fed the cat.  After that it even made a cake (from scratch since it had no easy dump-out-of-the-box cakes). It made homemade fudgy frosting and went to the dentist.  Then it filed some papers, cleaned up scattered junk, and looked at all it did and started to feel happier.  So it planned Family Home Evening, wrote a letter to a friend, and made a visiting teaching appointment.  Then it had to leave to take its daughter to the dentist. 

It was a full day, but when the car got back from the dentist, the Grumpy wasn't in it.  In fact the Grumpy had disappeared.  Instead of the Grumpy, the Satisfied walked into the house and awaited the return of The Silly, The Happy, The Irritator, The Responsible, and The Overworked.  The Satisfied hoped to bring some small piece of itself--satisfaction--to all the rest of its household.

The End.