‘90s FAMILY : The Longest Hour of the Day : Coming home to your kids after a hard workday can be unnerving. But preparing yourselfmentally--or even just feeding the little ones--could make for a less painful experience.

They whined. They cried. They collapsed on the floor in blubbering little emotional puddles--and Mom often joined right in.

“The best-case scenario was that if I had had a fairly decent day and I wasn’t exhausted, it was just me doing a whole lot of talking and cajoling to get us through the situation,” says Janine Fiddelke of Brea, whose boys are 3 1/2 and 1.

“On the worst days it was kids throwing temper tantrums and crying. And there were some days when all of us were in tears when we hit the door. And we’d all sit down and have a good cry. Colin with his bottle, Ellis with his sippy cup. And if Mom were a drinker, I would have been right in there. . . .”

Why all the fuss? Because it was the end of the day, D-Hour, homecoming, that time of day childhood experts call “transition time.”

Parents of preschool and early school-age children have a few other choice terms.

“Arsenic hour,” says Ellen Galinsky, author of “The Preschool Years” (Ballantine, 1988) and co-president of the New York-based Families and Work Institute.

Even at-home parents struggle with that time of day, Galinsky says.

“Everybody is at their lowest ebb of energy,” she says.

And if parent and child have been apart, there is another factor--your child is very happy to see you. So happy that the child is like a little thundercloud waiting to burst upon the sight of you. That’s good. Of course, sloshing about in the downpour can be hellish.

“It’s usually that the children save up their difficult feelings for the people they feel the safest with: their parents,” Galinsky says. “It’s comforting to know that they feel so safe and secure with us, but it doesn’t make it fun.”

Fortunately, there are ways to make it go a little more smoothly. Start with lowered expectations, Galinsky says.

“We look forward to the Great Reunion,” she says. “But it may not be roses and violets and violins playing and angels singing.”

Remind yourself that even though your child has had what seems to you to be a pretty darn good day--playing with friends, napping, running outside--it has still been a busy, exciting and, to a child, demanding day.

Prepare yourself for the reunion with a simple transition of your own. Listen to music in the car, take three minutes to change clothes when you get home, change your shoes even before you start driving. Find something that “helps you move from what’s required of you at work to what’s required of you at home,” Galinsky says.

Then feed the little critters.

“I know that if I didn’t do it with my kids, it was a disaster,” says Galinsky, whose children are now 20 and 25. Keep the servings small so it doesn’t ruin dinner, but healthy enough so that if it does dent the dinner appetite, there won’t be any nutritional loss or need to crank up stress levels with nagging at the dinner table.

“Things like carrot sticks and rice cakes. My son really liked soybeans for a while,” Galinsky says.

Fiddelke found instant relief when she started packing small snacks for the car ride home after picking up her sons.

“I was of the mind-set that if I gave them something, that would spoil their dinner,” she says. “But I’m convinced that half the problem is they’re just hungry.”

And tired. Build a simple, non-taxing end-of-day routine so children aren’t pushed beyond their limits, says Elizabeth Sobral, a marriage, family and child counselor with Family Service Assn. of Orange County.

“There’s a sense of security that a child gets out of a routine because the child knows what to expect next,” Sobral says.

Start in the car by chatting about the day, then move on to reminding them about what will happen next.

“So, for example, you can say, ‘When you get home, you know there’s going to be a snack and play period and then we’ll get dinner and then . . .’ or whatever the routine is,” Sobral says.

Don’t burden children or yourself with stops at the dry cleaners, last-minute shopping or other errands. That’s where tantrums are born. Children can’t “come up to you and say, ‘Oh, Mom, I’m feeling so irritable today.’ They’ll whine or they’ll cry or they’ll throw things or they’ll run around in circles,” Sobral says.

Cassandra Booker-Drake of Los Angeles doesn’t even want to think about that kind of scene. She sacrifices her lunch or break times to dash out on errands or for dinner groceries, but never the time after she has rounded up her 8-year-old daughter and 2-year-old grandson from the sitter’s and preschool.

“That would drive me crazy,” Booker-Drake says.

In addition, she has her daughter finish most of her homework at the sitter’s house, so the late afternoon and early evening at home are more relaxing.

Relaxing is the first order of business when Gardena-area residents William Young and his wife, Helen, settle in for the evening with their 18-month-old son, Jamal.

“We try to suck up some new air, become refreshed and give him the best of ourselves,” Young says.

That means they pull on the softest sweats they can find, plop on the living room floor and drag out the toy box.

“We just play with him,” Young says. “We do this for about an hour.”

Only then do they move on to dinner, which is often leftovers-by-design.

“We make enough porridge and three bears eat that porridge for the next couple of days with the help of the microwave,” he says.

The Youngs have each other for help, but single parents and parents whose spouse works a different shift find themselves riding out the arsenic hour all by themselves. Find help, if you can, Sobral says. Call on family, friends or creativity.

“Too often we parents think we have to do it all alone,” she says.

Fiddelke found a creative respite. Once a week, her son’s 3-year-old cousin comes over for dinner. The two think it’s a lark, play happily and let Fiddelke feed the baby in peace--then they come to the table together for a chatty little dinner. In turn, Fiddelke’s 3-year-old gets dinner “out” at his cousin’s house once a week.

Even children can be the source of solutions. Galinsky is a fan of coming clean with kids--”We’ve got a problem. This isn’t working”--and asking their advice: “What do you think would help?”

You just might be surprised.