BAD Mama

So over the weekend I was putting Spotty to bed, that side of the house was dark and quiet. Spotty said he was really really thirsty so I said I would get him something and to stay in bed. I went to the kitchen and got him a glass of water and out of the corner of my eye I see him “hiding” I quickly turn to him and yell “get your ass back in bed sir” and he runs of laughing. As I stomp towards his bedroom I am aggravated because fuck, can’t he EVER just stay in bed for 5 seconds, then I hear him cry and in my head I’m like “serves you right you little bastard, you should have stayed in bed.” But then the crying doesn’t stop and the tone changes so I am running trying to find a light switch. Why is his mouth red I wonder as I scoop him up into my arms, why are there little red droplets in my hair as I walk towards the linen closet to grab a face cloth and watch as the whiteness quickly turns red. Shhhh baby mamma got you as I stumble over things to get to the kitchen and get him a freezer pop.

Yes my boy bit through his lower lip. No we did not go to the ER because his lip stopped bleeding fairly quickly. Yes, I feel like the suckiest mom on the planet because I did not run to him immediately when he cried.

Anger?

There is a good article over on Babble . It’s on anger management and how it used to be ok to be angry with your child and now it seems that a parent would be classified as a monster when they get angry. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I have anger issues, especially when I am about to go PMS. I can now tell when I need to up my happy pills because I get irrationally angry at Spotty Chop. (I am sure I used to get angry at boy toy, but he deserved it). When Spotty was an infant I literally beat myself up whenever I would get frustrated with him; even if I had only been able to get 30 min of sleep in a row for days.

Now that Spotty is 3 I will admit that I still get upset over my being upset with him; and I am not talking about the PMS bullshit either. I may yell after the 40th time of asking him not to swing off the couch by my pony tail, or the 15th time of telling him that head butting me in the boobs hurts and to knock it off. When he cries it tears me up. I know at times he uses his tears to manipulate (while on vacation he watched himself cry in the bathroom because it had ceiling to floor mirrors.) It doesn’t negate the fact that it makes me want to throw up. So I read with interest as another mom admitted to thinking of holding her child too tight, of causing some pain to reflect the pain that she had been feeling. I think it’s healthy to get angry (within reason), so maybe it’s time for parents to admit that they get angry, maybe by admitting that it’s there, it would help the parents that cross the line. Thank god I never have, but it is easy to see why or how it might happen.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Annie over at one thing I hate about today was talking about clutter, more specifically the clutter than comes about when you have the pitter patter of little feet in the home. This is something that is so a part of my life that I am paralyzed at times. I have no idea where to begin cleaning/sorting/tossing crap. I wish I could blame it all on Spotty Chop, but he has only enhanced the clutter. Boy toy and I have always been lazy, and I am a pack rat of the first order, and as we have been together for 20 some odd years that adds up to a lot of crap. Boy toy is also not as…enthusiastic about home cleaning as he could be. So at times to show him, I do not declutter the way I should, and as boy toy could care less, then I care even lesser than his less and down that slippery slope lies madness. Now add a 2.75 year old who loves cars and trucks and has learned from his parents that clutter is the norm. CHAOS (feel free to pronounce it rhyming with floss). Add to this the holiday’s and where the Frell are we going to put the tree and more toys and more stuff and and and.

I need to go lie down

Crash and Burn

I feel as if I am on a downward spiral to…DOOM, death, despair, apocalyptic horror. I’ve been in a funk, rut, car with no breaks heading over a cliff. I am just not in a good place right now and haven’t been in awhile.

Part of it is work. I really try to avoid talking about work on this blog because I have heard of the horror that can come from it, of course that is if you are one of the big names and folks follow your writing, but still it pays to be not stupid. Anyhoo, there was a reorg, and my place as a golden go to girl has plummeted to that of the piece of schmegma that you scrape off your shoe. So needless to say I’ve been a bit apathetic at work? Granted I am doing my job, but you know how there is always stuff that isn’t a priority, but should get done, eventually… so just not with the enthusiasm of old. I am certainly not offering to do extra. Work stays at work. When I take a day off, I take the day off and the crackberry can go to hell. There is in fact so much petty bullshit going on that it makes my head want to explode and I am afraid that if I start talking about it I will not be able to stop and this blog will turn into one giant festering pustule.

Then there is the house redo. Our house was sided with pressed paper; there is a name for this type of siding, myter board? You may not know this, but when paper gets wet, it sometimes disintegrates. We have been putting off doing anything with the wisdom of the folks that first invented this craptastic product. However it got to the point that even I was saying, FUCK we need to do something. So we had folks in to do an estimate. Since the house was in such a great state, they said they would unfortunately have to tear everything off and redo it all. On the plus side, the siding I wanted Hardy plank, a cement type of siding that looks like wood and is guaranteed for 50 years, was now only $2500 bucks more than traditional vinyl siding. The down side? Having to totally strip and redo everything was about $10,000 more than we were hoping. But what can you do? The house kind of needs to be standing to live in it. The plus side? Since we are talking a buttload of money, we may as well get a new front door and a new slider out back, and gutters, and shutters. The down side? We are spending enough money that adding these other items only added about 40 bucks to the monthly payment. BLOW ME. My parents and I got into a fight over the siding because when I was talking about colors the color blue came up as a possibility, not a true blue, what I was looking for was something between a light gray and a very dark gray. We have a ranch house; dark colors would make it look smaller than it already is. I wanted a medium gray, but they didn’t have one. They did have a blue that was grayish. My parents FREAKED out, blue is such a bad choice, you have to think retail value, very few people buy blue houses, you have to do something neutral. My dad called a few days later, he had done research, the top selling colors for homes were white (our original house color that I hate, a ranch house is so uninspiring as it is, I think you need a bit of color to define it even slightly.) They just want to help keep us from making a mistake…My mom called a few days later; I talked to our friend the realtor. He feels that painting the house blue is a BIG mistake etc. etc. I stopped listening, she got pissy “I guess our advice isn’t welcome, I have to go.” Christ on a cracker! We ended up doing a light gray with white trim and midnight blue shutters. If it ever stops raining during the weekend we will paint the front door midnight bluish as well. Have I told my parent’s? HELL NO, I haven’t even told them we moved forward with the project. I figure they will be out to the house in March for Spotty’s birthday, they can see it then. Passive aggressive much?

And speaking of Spotty, so as I am writing about my gloom and doom (boy toy and I are constantly at each other too right now. We have cycles, it happens, at least to us, and now is not the best time it seems) the way I handle stress is I read, a lot; constantly in fact. So when I should be doing other things (umm hello bills, what? You haven’t been taken care of in two months? Crap, I will get to you once I finish this chapter). I am in fact 5 or 6 books behind in my reviews, that’s right I have 5 or 6 books that I still need to review good friggen god. So back to Spotty. I feel like I am neglecting him somewhat because all I want to do is read to take my mind off of everything. Which means the housework has gone to shit. Not to mention that The Bride borrowed my vacuum cleaner, yes back in October. So the house hasn’t been vacuumed in forever and a day. There is crap everywhere (no, not real crap, just stuff). So the house is in complete disarray. We needed to do yard work last Sunday as we have not closed our pool yet. So boy toy ran out to get gas for the lawn mower so he could blow all the leaves. He is gone for a fuck long time (we can walk to the friggen gas station). He pulls up into the driveway with crap falling out of the truck. He happened to drive behind a bunch of stores and they happened to have just thrown out a bunch of Halloween costumes. So now we also have bags and bags of costumes everywhere as we try to sort crap out. Which is great because I have been telling boy toy how I want to get a bunch of stuff so Spotty can do dress up. When I was growing up my parents had a huge box and it was filled with stuff like my dad’s army jacket and helmet, my mom’s nursing uniform, all sorts of 60’s shenanigans. We have tons of great photos of the neighborhood kids over playing dress up. I want that for Spotty. And now I will be able to, which is great.

But I try and do something like a load of laundry or dishes and he wants to play. I know if I don’t do the dishes or the laundry it is just NOT GOING TO GET DONE. So I have to tell him I will play in awhile. And we do play. We play geotrax and monster trucks, he likes to take his monster truck and smash into mine. I make mine drive away screaming and he drives behind me saying “I didn’t mean to scare you” and then he crashes into me again, and again and again. Until one of the monster trucks says “want to come over to my house for milk and cookies?” (Where the hell did he come up with this?) We are also doing a bunch of finger painting. I guess I feel bad that when he is watching his little foot videos (dinosaur series) I am reading. And I do try to get out of playing sometimes so I can read, but I know how bad it is to just have him sitting in front of the TV.

Now onto my final bit of gloom. SIL is going to work full time in January. I am really upset about this. Mostly because I have been able to trick myself into thinking that I am not really such a bad mom because I have family watching him. Realistically we could not survive on boy toys salary. I am a big enough bitch that I have refused his ideas of him staying home with the boy. If I can’t stay home with him, which is what I want to do more than life itself, there is NO Fen way in HELL I am going to let boy toy do it. FUCK THAT SHIT. So I have been looking at day care, which is FUCKING expensive. How the FUCK does anyone pay for this shit? I have been more and more depressed on how we are going to be able to swing this. Tim’s mom works in a day care which is actually my first choice because again, that family thing. But my mom and dad also live in the town; which is a great back up. I have been dreading the cost. Places I have been looking at have been between $1600 and $1300 a month. I went to talk to them yesterday and because Gramie A has worked for them for longer than the boy toy and I have been together, we are getting the teacher discount. This turns out to be about as much as we were paying SIL. WOO WOO for us!!! Now I just need to get over the fact that my baby will be going to day care. On the plus side, he gets away from the terminator. On the negative side, he is going to day care. I have been stealing boy toy’s meds because even as I type this I am crying. I think I hear my book calling.

Pot Smoking and Children

Babble has an interesting column on pot smoking and dealing with your children.

The writer talks about her shitty day and how her toddler frayed her last nerve. So she heads to the mall and before putting the kid in the stroller takes a hit or two. I liked the article. For me personally I could not smoke pot and deal with my boy. I would be too afraid that the one time I took a hit too many Spotty will crack his head open/loose consciousness, break a bone or two and I will not be able to function the way I should. Now that’s me. I am not saying that anyone that has ever toked a few and then dealt with their child should be shot. I am of the belief that smoking pot and drinking are pretty much the same in terms of effects it has on folks. Well, on most folks. Alcohol makes some of us violent, mean and ugly. Which is why some of us no longer drink. I have never seen pot make anyone violent, mean and ugly. Stupid, hungry and sleepy, but not so much on the violent side. This is not to say that I condone heavy drug abuse around children. I worked for several years in a group home for emotionally disturbed boys and I saw first hand what heavy drug use in the home can do to a child. But that is not what the article is about. In fact the author was trying to remind folks that you need to remember you child is a child and try getting down on his level and see the world the way they see it. The comments as you would expect were hot and heavy. With the folks who have never done drugs ready to call in the police and publicly flog the mother. Folks that may have been around the block once or twice seems a bit more level headed in their comments and reasons behind them. I did take exception to one comment made that “you knew it would be hard and what you were getting into when you became a parent” and I have to say BULLSHIT. People tell you it’s hard, that kids can be trying, or that they will drive you crazy, but until you have gone through the process and actually had your child and then spent some time with them. You have no friggen idea what it’s going to be like. You may have had thoughts, wishes on how it might be, but I don’t think anything can prepare you for the reality that is parenthood.