Tonight I told my children to stop being dramatic about their vitamins.

Remember that. It’s going to matter.

At our house, the nightly vitamin routine has all the peaceful energy of administering medication to feral raccoons. There’s wailing. There’s gagging. There’s at least one child who holds the gummy in her mouth for twenty minutes like a hostage negotiator waiting for better terms. And there I stood, calm and patient and deeply maternal, delivering my lines: “It’s not that bad. Just take it. Stop being dramatic. You’re fine. Swallow it.”

I was nailing motherhood. I want that on the record.

Because about four hours later, at one in the morning, I nearly died choking on my own vitamin while skiing across the kitchen on a Bluey charades card.

God heard me. Or karma did. Or Bluey, who I’m now convinced is not as wholesome as the marketing suggests.

Let me back up.

Everyone was in bed, which meant I had officially clocked into The Second Shift. That’s the magical window after midnight when a mother looks around and decides this is the perfect time to accomplish everything she failed to do during normal human operating hours. I washed dishes, wiped counters, folded laundry, and cleaned drains. I straightened things that didn’t need straightening and prepped things for a tomorrow that hadn’t even asked. All the tiny bullshit tasks that reproduce when nobody is watching, like gremlins with a cleaning budget.

My logic was flawless. If I just did a few more things, Tomorrow-Me would wake up to a beautifully run household and whisper, “Thank you, Past-Me.”

Past-Me was roughly three minutes from needing an ambulance.

Around one, I decided to take my vitamins like a responsible adult. Now, my children get delicious little gummy bears that taste like fruit snacks and childhood dreams. Once you cross forty, that’s over. Your vitamins come in capsules roughly the size of a hamster, and you choke them down because you’d like your joints, your hormones, and your general will to live to keep functioning a little longer.

So I swallowed one. Except it didn’t go down. It parked itself in my throat like it had paid for the spot, and I started doing that horrible little half-choke where you’re technically alive but your body has begun sending emergency alerts to all departments.

I headed for the sink. Fast. Because obviously I was dying, and when you’re dying, you don’t check the floor.

That’s when Bluey entered the story.

Not a tiny playing card, either. One of those big, thick, sturdy children’s cards built to survive toddlers and, apparently, to take out their mothers. My foot landed on it perfectly, and that motherfucker became a ski.

I have never been skiing in my life. This did not matter. My kitchen became Aspen, and I’d been dropped onto a black diamond with no lessons, no poles, and a hamster lodged in my windpipe. My foot shot forward. My arms went out. I grabbed the stool, the stool went down, something else went down, and I may have gone down too. The details are fuzzy. Trauma does that.

All of this at one o’clock in the morning, with my husband asleep down the hall. After an hour of dishes and cleaning drawers, he probably assumed I was remodeling. No, he probably assumed I’d found the load-bearing wall.

People say that when you think you’re dying, your life flashes before your eyes.

Bullshit.

You know what flashed before mine? My fucking to-do list.

I didn’t see my babies being born. I didn’t see sunsets, or my wedding, or Kris and me growing old together on a porch somewhere. I saw the laundry I didn’t finish. The thing I forgot to put away. The work I should have done. Did I ever switch that load? My final thoughts on this earth were going to be about towels souring in the washer.

Then a worse thought arrived: one of these kids is going to find me.

Which raised the real question. Would they call 911? Or would they just stand over my body asking if I could make bacon?

I can picture it. “Mom?” Kick. “Mom?” Kick kick. “Can you make me a Nutella sandwich?” Silence. “With the heart cookie cutter?”

Eventually one of them might notice Mommy had been unresponsive for an unusually long time and alert an adult. Maybe. It would depend entirely on how hungry they were and whether Bluey was on.

Spoiler: I lived. The capsule went down, the stool went back up, and I stood in the wreckage of the Bluey Ski Resort Vitamin Incident of 2026 and had a revelation. Maybe a forty-something woman choking on a supplement while hydroplaning through her kitchen on children’s television merchandise was God’s gentle way of saying, “Jacqueline. Go the fuck to bed.”

And in fairness to God, He’d been trying to tell me all day. That vitamin wasn’t Death’s first attempt today. It was his second.

The first one was in my front yard, and it was nine and a half feet tall.

I spent most of the day mowing, cleaning outside, tending the garden, and assembling the completely reasonable amount of Halloween decor I bought for the front yard. By “completely reasonable,” I mean I now own a Grim Reaper roughly nine and a half feet tall. My decorating philosophy has always been simple: if the neighbors can’t see it from space, why bother?

At some point he needed his head and his scythe attached. A reasonable adult would look at a nine-and-a-half-foot decoration and think, I need a ladder. I looked at it and thought, I can reach that.

I could not reach that.

So there I was on my tiptoes, arms fully extended and shaking, literally holding Death above my head, because I’d connected a wire in the stupidest spot imaginable and if I let go, the whole thing would come apart. I couldn’t put him down, and I couldn’t reach the connection. Meanwhile, behind me, two children were conducting a full forensic investigation into who had more glitter in their chalk.

“STOP FIGHTING AND BRING ME A STOOL!”

My arms were burning. The Grim Reaper was winning.

I’d expected Kris to help with all of this. He’d promised it would be an early day. It was not an early day. The dump took forever. Lowe’s took forever. The sprinkler repair turned into a whole saga involving a broken wire, glue that wouldn’t dry, and water that wouldn’t turn on. Every time I checked in, there was a new chapter, and none of them ended with him coming home.

By the time he finally pulled in, I didn’t want his help anymore. Was I tired? Yes. Were my arms noodles? Absolutely. Had I nearly been murdered by a plastic embodiment of Death? Arguably. But I was four animatronics deep with one left, and at that point this wasn’t decorating. It was war. I’ll be damned if that man was going to hammer one stake into the ground and later tell people, “Yeah, we decorated the yard.”

No, sir. There was no we. I stared Death directly in his light-up eyes, and Death blinked first. Mostly because he’s on a timer.

So that’s the scoreboard. Death came for me twice today, once with a scythe and once with a Bluey card, and missed both times. Honestly, I’m starting to feel a little sorry for him.

But somewhere between the Reaper and the ski slope, something pretty incredible happened too. Two of my older boys gave me big news.

Thomas made it to the audition stage for the acting conservatory he’s been working toward. He’s passed everything else they asked of him, which means this crazy, talented kid of mine could spend the next couple of years earning an associate degree in performing arts.

And Justin got the call from the Air Force special warfare recruiter. He takes his ASVAB and goes to Meps on October 7th, which also happens to be Lynnlee’s birthday, and has the next step with special warfare the day after.

So by the end of this week, I could know that one son is officially headed toward becoming an actor and another is headed toward letting the United States Air Force claim him as one of their own. Meanwhile, my baby girl is turning seven, and I’m over here trying not to die on a cartoon dog.

Motherhood is weird like that. One minute you’re holding a Grim Reaper together with your bare hands while refereeing a glitter dispute. The next you’re listening to your grown sons describe futures that suddenly sound very real. And then you’re standing in your kitchen at one in the morning, catching your breath, realizing the same kids who once needed you for absolutely everything are quietly building lives that don’t require you to cut their sandwiches into hearts.

That would be a beautiful, poignant place to end this.

Except I still have three book concepts rattling around in my head, a Hot Flash Homicide sequel that desperately needs my attention, and Nora’s story waiting for me to quit screwing around and actually write it. I need to finish Nora, because then I get to write Darla, and Darla is my favorite. Ashley is the character I’m most like, which probably explains why her life is such a shitshow. But Darla? I cannot wait.

So tonight I’m doing something responsible. I’m in bed, and I’m going to write. No ladders, no stools, no power tools, and no giant animatronic representations of death. I’ve removed myself from the vicinity of Bluey. I’m even setting the Apple Pencil down every so often, because given today’s track record, I’m not convinced I couldn’t find a way to impale myself with it.

The chores can wait for daylight. The Grim Reaper is standing. The children are alive. My boys are chasing enormous dreams, the birthday girl is almost seven, and I survived my vitamin.

Barely.

And tomorrow night, when the girls start complaining about theirs, I’ll respond with all the wisdom and compassion this experience has given me.

“Yeah. Those things are fucking dangerous.”