It's officially been two weeks since I've posted anything here, which is disgraceful, I know. These last weeks have been that brand of busy that is peculiar to having a small child, wherein one is simultaneously busy caring for and entertaining one's child and mentally bored out of one's skull. I can only stack a pile of blocks just to watch them be knocked down so many times.
Seester and the three munchkins spent a couple of days with us last week, as the school-age kids were not in school due to Teachers' Conference. I have to say that I am utterly amazed at how quickly a 2 year old and a 5 year old can trash an entire house. BabyA isn't mobile yet, so we have a basket of toys on each level of the house, and those toys tend to stay in the general vicinity of the basket, unless she carries one of them upstairs on the way to a diaper change. But my two little neices managed to completely and utterly destroy that system during their visit, let me tell you. It really is a good thing that we give birth to infants, because if they came out as a toddler, I suspect no one would ever have more than one child.
This week has been the week from hell, really. I believe Baby A is teething, although as yet I have no evidence of such. She is generally cranky and whiny, and moves from being ecstatically happy to monumentally cranky in seconds, and it is driving me nuts. Also, in the past couple of months we had reached a state where I could alternate between playing with BabyA and doing a little housework, getting dinner ready, maybe being online a little. That, my friend, has been thrown out the window. It is now all BabyA, all the time. When I'm not holding her, she is whining to be held, and when I am holding her, she is squirming and whining for a reason which I cannot fathom. As I've already said, I suspect the culprit is teething and the general discomfort that accompanies this process, although she's also developed a bit of a cough in the last couple bdays which may be contributing to the crankiness. And on top of that, BabyA seems to have decided that nobody will do except me. No Daddy, no Nana, just mommy, non-stop. Aaarrgghh!!
Whatever it is, I am going crazy in tiny little guilt ridden segments. As of yesterday I officially lost my patience on the umpteenth time BabyA whined to be picked up, only to whine, arch her back, and squirm out of my arms, and I yelled. At my baby. I yelled, and then saw her eyes go all wide in surprise, and I tried to turn it into a hey look at mommy having fun and making noise,
and she totally seemed fine. But I knew I yelled at her, and that wide-eyed look nearly broke my heart. No matter how frustrated I get, I do not want to yell at my baby. I know this may have been the first time, and probably won't be the last, when I feel like the last tiny shard of patience and sanity I am clinging to disappears out from under me, but I really don't want to be a yeller.
So today, I woke up and decided that I had no expectations for the day. I wasn't going to try to clean, or tidy, or cook, or whatever. I was just going to be there for my baby. And you know what? Today was better. I don't know that BabyA was feeling better, but I just tried to let go of doing other stuff. When she fussed, I picked her up. When she squirmed, I found something new for her to focus onI'm not sure that she was less fussy, but things seemed to go more smoothly. No yelling, no pulling my hair out. I know this won't always work, but I had to remind myself that at least for now, I'm still on mat leave, and it is my job right now to take care of BabyA. The rest of it? All secondary. I will have other crazy crying weepy days, but for now I need to focus on my dearest girl, and hang on to every second before it slips away.
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