"I didn't think about it"

For a little balance in the story, I'm getting very tired of hearing that excuse from my teenagers.

We were supposed to be heading out early in the morning for a trip to visit grandparents in C'burg and then head down to Alabama to visit an adopted aunt & uncle. I say supposed to be heading out, because at 10 o'clock this evening, as I was checking to make sure people were ready to go and the boys were busy playing "Magic the Gathering", Kyle said he was intending to pack when he went up to bed. I realized I hadn't noticed Kyle doing laundry since he got here, and when he left last week I told him the hamper full of dirty laundry needed to be washed and put away before he left the next time. I don't need a hamper full of four-week-old stinky laundry sitting in the corner, and he is certainly capable of doing his laundry when he is here for a week at a time. So, Kyle's not ready to go. And I can't leave him behind and take Samuel when Samuel's hamper is almost full, can I? So Samuel gets "punished"/consequenced without getting the warning, and laundry isn't generally an issue for him. So we don't leave tomorrow, and then Miriam misses out, and she doesn't even have dirty laundry here-because she left all of her dirty clothes at her dad's house to ripen for two weeks!

Where's the manual to handle all this???

On the up side, I finally finished a 60-page translation project that has been hanging over my head for months! (No, I do NOT do written translation. I think I have finally learned my lesson.)

I had a joint celebration for that planned for Sunday evening, but Liza didn't think about the 5 PM dinner plans when her stepmother prepared a birthday dinner at 4. Rough spot to be in. And then we couldn't do a later dinner, because the kids had a church youth meeting at 7, which neither girl thought to tell me about. With Eliza preparing to head off to Hungary in nine short weeks, I felt/feel cheated out of a celebration time I needed.

They're still great kids, but I'm really tired of "I didn't think about it", and I'm not feeling very successful as a mother right now. I'm open to suggestions.