Reply All -- Oops

I am a self-proclaimed ditz. I'm scatterbrained, sometimes flighty, a bit frivolous, and, yes, I'm proud of it.

My kids compare me to Lucy, of "I Love Lucy" fame. I take that as a compliment. I never want to take myself, or life, so seriously that I forget to have fun.  

But there are those embarrassing moments that happen to those of us who walk with our heads in the clouds. Those 'oh how I wish the floor would swallow me up, my face is the shade of a ripe tomato, I really wish I could die right now' moments. 

The day I married Tom I was well aware that I was taking on three more children, and he was getting an additional four, and we were both willing to accept that responsibility. What I think we forgot is that the basic laws of parenthood state that you should not let your children outnumber you, and we have exceeded that by five.

In doing so, we have put ourselves into quite a precarious situation as we have had to learn to juggle the need to get several children to several different simultaneous events in several different locations and, let me tell you, it ain't easy. 

With all that stress comes the opportunity for really embarrassing moments, such as the one that occurred yesterday. 

Our son Thomas plays Little League baseball for East Bay Little League. The spring season has just begun and I have not yet met the coaches as my husband has been handling the responsibility of Thomas' chauffeuring needs. With a family as big as ours, we have to divide and conquer.

Yesterday Thomas' coach sent out a multiple-recipient e-mail informing the team members and their parents of the required uniform for the spring season. Because we used my e-mail account to sign Thomas up for baseball, my husband is not on the e-mail list (note to self: fix this!). However, since he is the one that is handling the baseball undertaking, thus making him the one that would need to get the uniform, I wanted to forward the e-mail to his account rather than making a mental note to inform him later.

Unfortunately, in my hurried state, as I had one child needing a ride to Glee rehearsal and another one pulling the garden hose inside the house from the lanai (a future column), I inadvertently hit "reply all."   Yes, the dreaded reply all. Those two words can send chills down a spine faster than fingernails on a chalkboard. I have heard other people's reply-all stories for years, and now I have one of my own. 

Yes, I mistakenly hit reply all and, in my oblivion, as my husband and I always do when we send e-mails to each other, I festooned it with a sugary sweet, "I love you, love you, love you, love you...with all my heart...forever."   

And I hit send! The second my finger pressed down on that key, I knew. I just knew! And you know how you get that feeling of your stomach dropping? And that sharp intake of breath. And that horrified, "Oh my gosh, what did I just do?" You just want to reach through the computer monitor and yank the e-mail back, but it's out there in cyberspace filling up the e-mail boxes of every single one of those team members and their parents. What could I do? I put my head in my hands and groaned.

And then it hit me. I could fix this. So I quickly did damage control by sending out another e-mail to everyone explaining that I was not, in fact, in love with the baseball coach and that I was very sorry but I had intended to forward that e-mail to my husband, not send it out to the masses. 

Only my husband informs me that I actually did more damage because Thomas was basically anonymous up until that point. After all, no one had met me. I didn't sign my  name. No one knew who I was or who Thomas was. But when I sent that second e-mail, I signed it with my name and then, in little parenthesis, I added "Thomas' mom." 

Now, according to my husband, they know exactly which kid has the ditzy mom.

 My poor son. So, in trying not to take life too seriously, I look for the consolation in all this. For me it's that every parent, coach and team member of the East Bay Little League knows exactly how much I love my husband. As for Thomas' consolation, well, that's to be determined.