Oh, What a Beautiful Morning

I went to bed much too late last night for no good reason at all. At 9 p.m. I had forced myself to make my favorite soup (the chicken barley chili) so it would be ready to heat up quickly when we got home tonight. Pleased with my productivity, I then wasted an hour on the couch flipping between HGTV and the Food Network. I promised myself I'd go to bed after the Daily Show was over at 10:30 but found I couldn't work up the momentum to exit the couch cushions. Finally at 11:45 I was in bed, mad that it was so late and I hadn't done anything worthwhile since 9:30, and JP had tucked me in and promised to put the now-cooled soup in the fridge. I fall asleep within 15 minutes (record time for me).

Six hours later Landon's cries were piercing through my dreams. It was 5:45. I know there are people who wake up at this terrible hour, but Landon usually gets up between 7:30 and 8 and I've come to rely on that with my too-late bedtime. After several minutes of soothing in the stairway I was able to make out that he was crying because he couldn't find his puppy (which was up in his bed under the covers WHERE HE SHOULD BE), and he was upset that he was awake but the sun was not. My sensible solution- that he get back in bed, with his longed-for puppy, to wait for the sun to be awake- was rejected with a wail, and thus began our morning.

He wanted his cereal bar but was upset the cereal bar did not match his PJ's which did not match his milk cup and he wanted the little milk cup and not the big milk cup and his feet were cold but he did NOT WANT SOCKS. NO SOCKS. "But my feet are colllllllld [interrupted by a combo sob/hiccup]. I want my pupppppppy.... NO PUPPY! NO SOCKS! GO AWAY MOMMY."

Happily, darling.

He was just acting like a normal, upset, under-rested 2-year-old, but it was a side of him we pretty much never see, so I decided his surgery must be to blame (which is possible; the ENT nurse said that while kids usually do great immediately after the procedure, about half become very crabby and emotional on days 3-6 post-surgery, so yeah, that must be it). And I was so tired and a million weeks pregnant and without my usual reserves of patience, so I headed back to our bedroom to tag JP to come reason with our child, and then I saw the soup pot on the stove. The full soup pot. The soup which we now needed to dump down the drain and couldn't eat for dinner because my mother is a bacterial microbiologist and if there is anything I learned from childhood it is how to imagine all the creepy crawling microscopic things that are now swimming around in that soup after being left at room temperature for 9 hours. Waah.

JP took Landon back upstairs to "start the day over" while I crawled back in bed for a few minutes of sleepless rest. Landon's do-over went well until he crumpled in a little ball of tears in the pantry because his cereal bars had not magically changed colors and there were still no green ones and now he was wearing an orange shirt- and really I have no idea, but he told JP in a voice of tears that he wanted to "start over again with mommy."

So up we went for Wednesday Morning attempt #3. We picked out a new shirt and pants, and things were going well, so we fed Lilly and headed back down to the pantry of peril. This time we breezed through the breakfast picking process only to have him lose it at the selection of the milk cup. Then he was so busy screaming at me that he couldn't use his words to tell me he needed to go to the bathroom so he had an accident in the middle of the kitchen floor, which REALLY made him mad (at me, obviously). He'd been doing so well with using the potty and was so proud of himself, so peeing on the kitchen floor and then having to change his clothes was absolutely the worst thing that had ever happened to him in his life. So we were back to "GO AWAY MOMMY. GO AWAY DADDY. YOU ARE NOT MY FRIEND."

All in all, a joyful start to the day.

The good news is that once he was installed in his fourth outfit he started jabbering about sharks that live in the ocean and ate his breakfast and drank his milk without incident. And then he stayed busy re-hiding his Easter eggs in the playroom, expressing his delight that the sun was awake "just like me Mommy!", all the way until 9:00 when it was time to go to daycare. And though I wanted to be grumpy and mad, I couldn't help laughing when he marched out of the house wearing his sunglasses and blowing me lots of kisses. God did not make babies and toddlers cute on accident.

I dragged myself to work, only to find that my two pharmacy claims had been rejected by my insurance company, again, for ridiculous loop-hole reasons, so I'm still paying out of pocket for my progesterone shots even though they are medically indicated and prescribed by my doctor and will likely save my insurance company tens of thousands of dollars in NICU bills. This is the same insurance I pay $1,000/month to cover me and my family and whose representative actually made me cry on the phone last week during my 50th phone call regarding some of my 2009 OB bills. I don't cry easily.

Blogger informs me that this is my 800th blog post, so I feel like it should be so much more than a long whine about my morning, but this is all I've got. I've decided we're going out for ice cream tonight (and JP is taking care of dinner), so maybe I'll have something more insightful and positive to say then.