Wednesday, April 7, 2010

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.

8 comments:

  1. I totally understand about the soup thing! My friends think I'm weird because I won't let food sit at room temp for very long, but after taking Pathogenic Microbiology I am fundamentally changed! (I'll never cook stuffing inside a turkey either.)

    Glad the morning made an eventual turnaround. Kudos for you to have the patience to restart it time and again for Landon.

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  2. Insurance companies = evil. They try to wear you down with their incompetence until you give up and pay all the bills yourself.

    Sounds like the morning could only have been saved by a healthy dose of benadryl for the toddler, forcing the husband to remake dinner RIGHT NOW, and going back to bed while equipped with a HUGE amount of chocolate. You are much more patient than me!

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  3. The soup incident thing has happened at my house too. It is so crazily disappointing. I also became irrationally, almost ragefully angry at my husband once when I bought a CRATE of YoBaby Yogurt at Costco and, 24 hours later, found that he had put it away... in the pantry.

    The meltdown over the mismatched shirt/cereal bar/cup thing, though? From reading along with you since Landon was an infant, I'm guessing you can't be that surprised. He IS your son, afterall. :)

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  4. Ah, insurance companies. It's my own little daydream that all this Health reform legislation will somehow stop them from bullying people who pay them piles of money each month, such as yourself.

    Forgive my complete ignorance, but couldn't one simply re-boil the soup and then eat it? I mean, provided it "seemed all right"?

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  5. I can so empathize with the no good, very bad days. I think ice cream (and JP provided dinner) are very well deserved. Hope the rest of the week rocks and this was just a fluke. And if not, I'm pretty sure ice cream is a food group during pregnancy. Have you tried Dreyers Tart Mango? So delicious, and it has yogurt, so you know it's healthy too :)

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  6. Ice cream is definitely called for! Large quantities, and what you bring home should be the flavor you love, and everyone else is bleh about-- so THERE.

    There is nothing as frustrating as making a huge pot of something, or something expensive, and having to throw it out because someone who promised to put it away or to eat it, didn't. Ours is commonly a huge pot of stew or a complicated casserole. And we had beef tenderloin left over from Christmas which I had grandly left in the fridge for older son when we were away (I didn't want to freeze it, because it was that good, and freezing doesn't help things.) I described how he could heat it gently or make sandwiches, or just eat as is. Of course, I came home to week-old untouched tenderloin and LOTS of Del Taco bags. Arrgh.

    I don't know if kids with tubes actually get worse, but we've catered to them for several days, gifting them with popsicles and new toys and lots of attention, which we are forced to cut back when reality intervenes. But it does sound like typical toddler behavior-- I used to say, "OK, YOU go pick out your clothes. You may pick any school clothes you choose." The outfits were original (school always knew immediately what had happened, but the child was happy. (I understand this happens regularly with most girls, but I don't speak from experience there!)

    Of course, peeing in the shoes is another matter; my kids typically had shoes and sandals, one pair of each, and sandals were prohibited at school. I would be in the bathroom trying to hide the fact that I was using a blowdryer on his shoes! If they put them on warm they don't notice the damp, and you can deal with them better the following evening (I am a fan of Resolve carpet cleaner for cleaning sneaks outside and in. I hear magic erasers work, too.)

    I have to smile at your brief exposure to "typical toddler"-- it just gives you some insight as to how lucky you are!

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  7. You probably know this, but you can appeal the pharmacy denials-- there should be formal appeal process information available from someone, either online or from your local HR person. Sometimes that gets the claim to an actual RN or physician (and out of the hands of the pure paper pushers), which can help. Sometimes.

    Again, you probably already know this, but I can't help myself mentioning it. :)

    Glad Landon is back to his sunny self.

    J+1

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  8. I just found your blog, and I'm thrilled to learn about all you've gone through. I'm a 1L in a part-time evening program and my husband and I just decided to start our family. I work full time and do law school at night, so obviously once we have a baby, I'm going to quit working and just do evening law school, but I'm still really nervous about how this is all going to work! Your blog gives me hope!

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