She had to raise her voice. She wouldn’t be heard otherwise. “Go out in the hall, both of you!” she bellowed into sudden, unexpected silence, as Kimberley finally stopped for breath. She added, just too late: “Step around the puddle!”

Something in her face must have got through Justin’s high glee. He was very, very quiet as she washed his feet again, his big brown eyes fixed on her face. From invisible foot-washer to Mommy Monster in five not-so-easy seconds. She took advantage of it to send him out to the kitchen. Unfair advantage. Bad parenting. Blissful, peaceful quiet.

“Guilty as charged, Your Honor,” she said.

While she was cleaning up the mess, she got piss on one knee of her thirty-five-dollar, lace-trimmed, rose-printed sweats – Victoria’s Secret called them “thermal pyjamas,” which must have been a step up the sexiness scale from sweats, but sweats they were, and sweats Nicole called them.

She emerged somewhat less than triumphant and wrapped in the ratty old bathrobe that hung on the back of the door, to find Kimberley, who still hadn’t had a chance to go to the bathroom, hopping up and down in the hallway. At least she was quiet, though she dashed past Nicole with a theatrical sigh of relief.

Ten minutes wasted, ten minutes Nicole didn’t have. She popped waffles in the toaster, stood tapping her foot till they were done, poured syrup over them, poured milk (Justin’s in a Tommee Tippee cup, so he’d have a harder time spilling that on the floor), and settled the kids down – she hoped – for breakfast. Justin was still bare-ass. He laughed at the way his bottom felt on the smooth vinyl of the high chair.

As she turned on Sesame Street, Nicole muttered what was half a prayer: “Five minutes’ peace.” She hurried back past the study into her own bedroom to dress. About halfway into her pantyhose (control tops, because at thirty-four she was getting a little round in the middle and she didn’t have time to exercise – she didn’t have time for anything), Kimberley’s voice rose once again to a banshee shriek. “Mom-meeeee! Justin’s got syrup in his hair!”