I had to post this one because this woman sounds just like me. Except that she has six kids, not four. And she sounds like maybe she copes better.

Laughter as a Parenting Tool
By Lisa Belkin
Books (Illustration by Barry Falls)
One day, two of Dawn Meehan’s many children decided to play baseball in the house. That led to a broken light fixture, which Dawn began to sweep up, but she was distracted by shouts that her daughter had tried to flush a pull-up diaper, causing the bathroom to flood. Over the next few hours, all before she’d had time for a cup of coffee, Dawn ran from one half-solved problem to the next: yogurt smeared on the television, an escaped hermit crab in the toy pile, a baby covered in maple syrup, crayon on the living room walls, a three-year-old eating puppy chow, a hole knocked into the bathroom wall.
What to do with a morning like this? If you are Dawn Meehan you write a side-splitting account and post it on Ebay, where you auction off “the baseball that broke the light.” And if you are Dawn Meehan, 220,000 people visit your auction page and you end up selling the ball for $1,125.
Then, buoyed by the idea that your words can make others laugh, you start a blog. Traffic is slow until the day that a pack of Pokemon cards somehow winds up in your grocery bag while you are out shopping with your six kids, and you don’t notice until you get home. What worked once might work twice, you figure, so you auction those on Ebay, too, with a description of what it is like to go to the supermarket with six children; 94,000 people visit your new blog within hours, and nearly a million within the month; you get 10,000 emails a day; and you become a destination site for parents who want to be reminded that laughter is the most important tool for raising children.
Eventually, you write a book. Dawn’s, out this week, is called “Because I Said So … and Other Tales from a Less-Than-Perfect Parent.” It is a portrait of life in the Meehan’s 1,200-square-foot house outside Chicago, with Dawn’s husband, Joe, who works in the maintenance department of the local school district, and their children Savannah, Austin, Clayton, Lexington, Jackson and Brooklyn (yes, they are all named after cities, and yes, Clayton is a city.)
There is something going awry in that house on almost every page of the book, which will both make you feel better about life in your own home (if it’s equally chaotic you will feel like Dawn is your soulmate; if yours is even marginally calmer you will feel grateful) and will make you marvel at Dawn’s ability to take the chaos in stride and almost enjoy it.
I got Dawn on the phone for a few minutes last week. She had just finished explaining how “parenting should be fun, kids should be allowed to be kids and have fun, and a sense of humor is absolutely required,” when there was crying in the background.
“What happened, tell me what hurts?” Dawn asked, followed by “go sit down and watch TV.”
“Clay fell off the top of the refrigerator,” she explained. “He likes to climb.” Yes, she said, he was O.K., and no, she didn’t need to hang up and call me back.
Later in the day she posted the following on her website:
I did an interview with Lisa Belkin from The Motherlode Blog, NYTimes.com this morning. Whenever I do an interview via phone, I set the kids up with a movie and snacks and beg them to please, please, please be good and quiet for the next 20 minutes. If that doesn’t work, I bribe them with marshmallows, or large amounts of cash.
Well, 5 minutes into my interview today, Lisa asked me, “Do you exaggerate on your blog or do your kids really get into so much stuff every day?” I thought to myself - if I say I exaggerate, there goes my credibility. If I say that they do indeed get into tons of stuff, that makes me a bad mom. As I pondered this, I heard a thud and crying, followed by Brooklyn yelling, “Clayton fell off the refrigerator and hurt himself!” Well, I guess that answers that question. Yeah, they get into insane amounts of stuff.
After I hung up with Lisa, about 15 minutes later, I discovered that Brooklyn had painted her nails. Despite the fact I had JUST painted them before taking the phone call, she decided she needed another coat just for good measure. And while she was at it, she applied a lovely coat of red to my couch as well.
Please understand, Dawn is human. She yells in the book. She punishes, and she makes her kids clean up their messes. But she has an underlying sense of amusement, which she was probably born with, that the rest of us would be lucky to learn.
How do you handle the toll children can take on your walls, windows and light fixtures — and on your last fraying nerve?