I Feel Like A Heel

Today was not my best day. I didn’t intend for any of it to be bad, but sometimes you just know it’s a bad day, and you don’t do anything to ensure it turns around.

This morning, I dropped Little Miss at daycare after Mister Man’s bus came (early for ONCE instead of 10-15 minutes late, which meant instead of sitting outside reading, he was still putting his shoes on). As I see every single day when I am at the daycare, there is a car parked in the handicap spot. Well, mostly in the handicap spot anyway. He was parked somewhat sideways to ensure he took up most of two spots.

The daycare the wee ones go to has two other businesses in the complex. There’s a Christmas tree business in the building behind is and something generic on the close side of the building by the drive up to the complex. The Lexus parks in the spot closest to the drive with no handicap tags or sign every single day that I go there. Granted, it’s unlikely that the handicap spot is going to be truly needed by someone, but it’s still wrong and illegal (and obviously a pet peeve of mine). It isn’t like there aren’t other spots nearby. In fact, the non-handicap spot next to where he (and I assume it’s a man) parks is usually open.

So today, I looked up who does the police for that town, and I called them and let them know about the car. The woman I spoke to seemed irritated by the car being there and promised to send a car out to take a look. I feel somewhat conflicted about doing that, but I’m still going to look to see if the car is there when I take Little Miss to daycare on Monday.

But before I did that, I had a bad mom incident – completely accidentally, I swear. Mister Man asked for a bagel for breakfast. Since they’d both slept in somewhat this morning, and I knew that the bus driver had “promised” to be early today (as opposed to picking Mister Man up at 8:51 to get to a preschool 20 minutes away that starts at 9am after picking up two additional kids…), so we had to hurry.

I put Little Miss’s waffle in the toaster and quickly cut a bagel in half and put it in, too. Then I fixed some granola and yogurt for myself – oh, who am I kidding, everyone shares with me because it’s yummy. As they cleaned up the front playroom, I set the table with their milk cups and food, then called them in.

We were having a lovely conversation, each intend on eating our food. About halfway through his bagel, Mister Man broke it in half. It was then that I saw the outside of it for the first time. And realized that it had spots of mold growing on it. The bagels were purchased only four days ago, so I was definitely surprised to see the mold. I quickly grabbed the bagel. Then I thought about it for a minute. He only had about four minutes to finish eating, and I didn’t exactly have time to make him a new breakfast. So I ummmm improvised. I tore off the pieces of mold and gave him back the bagel to eat.

And then there was tonight…. I’ve always known that Little Miss was going to be the more difficult of the two children. She’s far more headstrong, and she seems to think the world revolves around her – no idea where she got that notion!

Tonight, as we were getting ready for bed, Little Miss decided to start acting up. As she took off her socks, she started rubbing them in my face. I politely explained that this was disgusting and that it wasn’t a nice thing to do. So she did it again, at which point she got the raised-eyebrow-you’d-better-stop-it now. So she threw the sock at me. As I was explaining that throwing things isn’t really allowed, she started kicking me (like she was swimming, not standing like kicking a soccer ball). When I asked her if she wanted to go to the naughty step, she said yep and ran to it. And proceeded to play on it and have a grand old time.

She thought it was a grand game every time I picked her up and put her back on the step. Finally, I asked her if she was going to stay on the step or lose Baby Coco. And I took had to take Baby Coco. When timeout was over, I asked her if she knew why she was on the naughty step. She insisted she had no idea and started kicking me again.

When asking her if that was an appropriate thing to do, she giggled and said yes. I asked her to stop and explained that if she didn’t start behaving, she wasn’t going to have time to listen to Timothy read a Bob book. She laughed, jumped off the naughty step and proceeded to start kicking again. No Bob book tonight for her (Mister Man, however, read one of the books to Daddy).

That’s when she turned on the siren, accompanied by the waterworks. She didn’t want to go to bed. She wasn’t tired. She wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t want to wear those pajamas. She didn’t want to get into bed.

Unfortunately, when she misbehaves, she doesn’t exactly get her way. She continued to scream and cry as the pjs went on, as I put her into bed, as she ran out of bed and back into the hallway, as I put her back into bed, as she opened the door and stepped across the threshold, as I put her back in her room…. It was over an hour before she finally stopped crying, but I knew that if I went in her room to comfort her or to check on her, that would only prolong it both tonight and in future nights. So I stuck it out.

Then the dilemma was whether I should go into her room and move her into her bed or leave her where she fell asleep. My husband and I discussed it for awhile. Finally we decided to go put her in her bed. But we were surprised, she’d put herself into her bed before falling asleep.

The worst part of it was that my mom called midway through the crying spell to check on the plan for tomorrow (her childcare day). She could hear Little Miss crying and wanted to know what was wrong. I explained that she simply didn’t want to go to bed, but it was well past her bedtime. My mom immediately went into the “Well, aren’t you going to check on her? What if she’s thirsty? What if she needs something?” mode, which of course is counterproductive. But now she’s all worried about my parenting of the wee ones. Hmm, coincidence that this is starting right after the return from Florida? I think not.

Here’s hoping that tomorrow is a better day all around. Of course, given that I’m headed into the office at 6:15 tomorrow, I’m not holding my breath. But I am going to bed so I’ll at the very least be well rested!