girlfiend

One kid sick with fever, one kid not napping due to teething-not one of the painfully visible but not yet through two on the top, a surprise on the bottom!- and a new found ability to crawl. I’m overcompensating because I’m the only one who has changed out of pajamas.

So far there’s been loads of laundry, vacuuming and cooking: a loaf of oatmeal wheat bread, 4 quarts of turkey stock, applesauce, a huge pot of rice and a small pot of rice pudding.

I’m a little bit terrified (can you be a little bit terrified?) by the way the feverish Fiendling is asleep with eyes open on the couch. But the last temperature reading wasn’t too high at only 101 so I’m resisting the urge to wake him.

• Thanks for the nice comments on my last post. I appreciate them.
• I took my mom and the kids to Ikea for lunch for my mom’s birthday last week. My mom decided to shop AFTER we’d been there for close to three hours. The Fiendling was overtired and overstimulated and after waiting around the textile department for her to make a decision for half an hour he took off running across the store. He’d been given repeated warnings not to run so the consequence was simple. He wouldn’t be getting a toy to bring home. He lost his shit and threw a massive tantrum right on the floor of the South Philly Ikea and continued to scream and cry all the way home. When we dropped my mother off she wanted to give him the toy anyway. I said no. She called me Hitler. Because I’m so strict. Hitler, people. She called me Hitler because I wouldn’t reward running away in a crowded store and a tantrum with a toy.
• Our oven is locked but it locked in the open position. I can’t get it to close.
• I saw a couple looking at a an ad for condos at the building site. The woman looked unremarkable but the man, who looked to be in his 60s was wearing a woman’s full length, fur-lined, suede coat that reached his calves. He was wearing shoes and socks but I could not tell if he was wearing pants.
• The Fiendling needs mittens for our trip to NH this weekend. I stopped at the Gap/Gap Kids because I have gift cards. They had no mittens so I tried on jeans because I was child-free and I could. It seems I wear a size 1P or 1A in Gap. Inexplicably, as I’m anything but, the jeans that fit me best are the “Curvy” style. Sadly they did not have any short or petite curvy jeans in my size.
• My mother-in-law threw out a $10 gift card to Amazon (addressed to Boyfiend) because she thought it was junk mail.
• Costco is far superior to BJs. BJs basically sucks in comparison. But their take home, bake at home Unos pizzas are really good and actually made from real ingredients.
• We took my mom’s car to BJs yesterday to buy some food for our trip. Her car died at a red light. It just died.  Boyfiend thought it was the alternator. He pushed the car to the side  of the road with some help from a stranger and we  were waiting for AAA when I got out of the car and looked in the trunk. When I closed the trunk door the car’s lights went back on. Boyfiend looked at the battery and realized the problem (well, the main one) was a corroded battery line and went to work scraping off the corrosion with a file. We made it to the store, did our shopping, and went home later than planned.
• Boyfiend is a very useful husband.

Last night was shitty. I’d been in a craptastic mood all day and the Fiendling was a pain in the ass to get to bed. Then when I was just dozing off in my own bed the baby woke up crying to eat. I fed him, got him back to sleep, and was asleep for about 20 minutes when the Fiendling was at my bedside imploring me to change his diaper.

This infuriates me. He’s almost three and if he can’t stand being in a wet diaper he should pee the goddamn potty. Anyway, I changed his diaper and not so nicely told him to get back in bed. He insisted that it was light out and that it wasn’t nighttime and he wanted to stay awake. I growled at him to be quiet and very meanly told him that he could either get in my bed and be quiet or get in his own bed and be quiet and if he wasn’t going to get with the program I was locking him in his room because I needed some sleep. Obviously this did not help the situation. My mean growls didn’t make him feel any better.

He cried that he had a poop and I needed to change his diaper. I knew that that was not true and told him as much. He insisted that he needed a new diaper so I roughly unzipped and yanked down his pajamas, looked down the back of his diaper, confirmed that there was no poop, and zipped him back up. I told him to get into bed now. He cried that he was itchy, I told him I didn’t care and that if he didn’t move I was going to pick him up and put him in his own bed upstairs.

He waddled down the hall to my room where I picked him up and put him in bed. He cried that he wanted to get in by himself so I put him back on the floor where he cried some more. He got into bed and tossed and turned and whimpered and whined about being itchy and again I meanly threatened to lock him in his room if he didn’t quiet down and go to sleep.

He quieted down but he was still tossing and turning and clearly uncomfortable. A switch flipped in my head and I realized he was itchy. So itchy he felt like he had a poop. I felt terrible. My poor kid had an itchy ass in one piece zip up pajamas. He couldn’t even get to his itch if he wanted to. There I was, growling at and threatening my kid and his ass was itchy. I felt like a monster.

I kissed his forehead and said, “What can I do to help you? Do you want cream?” He said yes and immediately got out of bed and started down the hall to the bathroom. I got him on the changing table, took off his diaper and got some cream for him. He said, no, it’s itchy inside. Oh dear god. I got a q-tip and  applied some cream inside. I asked if it felt better and he said yes and told me to put his pajamas back on. I got him dressed, washed my hands and carried him back to bed, whispering to him about how sorry I was for yelling. He went right to sleep.

I feel like such an asshole. The poor kid was so itchy he couldn’t sleep and I was yelling at him instead of trying to make him feel better. I was tired and cranky and instead of listening to my poor kid I treated him badly. It must be so, so hard to be a toddler and misunderstood.