Bad Days Happen.

Bad days happen to everyone, including toddlers who are barely a year old. Bad days happen to mommies who have too much to do, and too little time to fit it all in. Yesterday started out as a bad day. Nothing terrible happened, so I really shouldn't complain. We are all healthy, we are all happy. Life is turning up, Daddy is coming home.

Yesterday was the begining of the pandemonium that is the pre-move anxiety for me. I had been able to put off the anxiety on some level, until yesterday. I started cleaning out my closet so that I could put away my summer clothes and get out my fall clothes, in combination with doing what I like to call the "pre-move sort and discard." I got it started, got well into it, when the baby decided he was not so into that. Our morning went something like this:

I cleaned up the main area and put out some toys for him to play with. Daddy called and I had to do some graphic design work. Baby decides toys are for the birds. He will only be satisfied with computers, remote controls and telephones as toys. Oh, and wires. Anything that is a wire was acceptable as well. He cried because I wouldn't let him play with them.

Work slowed down a bit so I started sorting clothing and getting laundry ready to be washed. Baby unsorts clothing. While he unsorted the clothes, I'm picked up the books from the bookshelf which fell off of the wall, and put them away in a cabinet. I started re-sorting clothing. Baby took the books out of the cabinet I put them in and threw them around the room. After telling the Baby NO about the mess he'd made, I put him out to play with his toys and went about picking up the books again. Things got quiet. I went out where he was playing to find he had decided to "sort" all 30,123 DVDs that we had on shelves. He sorted them onto the floor. I picked up all 30,123 DVDs and put them back where they go, while baby went back into my room and unsorted the clothing, took all the books out of the cabinet, and dumped my glass of water on the carpet in the middle of the room. Then he made a very stinky poop. I decided that perhaps it was naptime because I was going to lose it. So, I changed him and put him to bed. I got all of the things (things I'd already cleaned up at least twice) cleaned up and put away. I started putting laundry into the washer. Then the baby woke up. He had slept for 20 minutes, and was done. He had decided not to nap. I tried and tried to convince him that he should nap longer, but he was done. I decided perhaps he was hungry, so I took him up to make lunch. I opened the pantry to see what I could make for lunch, which he took as an invitation to grab all 30 soda can "coozies" and throw them around the room. He then grabbed the toaster by the cord and tried to drag that off along with a bag of dog treats. While he swung the toaster around by the cord, he also shook the bag of dog treats loud enough to wake the dead from here to Timbuctoo.

I pretty much lost it at that point. I strapped the baby into his highchair and fed him Cheerios while I went ape in the pantry trying to organize the contents. I frantically needed to feel as though I was getting something done. I needed to regain control of something. About half way through the pantry organization, that perhaps I was what was out of control, not everything else. I put things back into the pantry, fed the baby a REAL Lunch and tried to relax. It didn't help that while I was in the middle of all of my frantic frenzy, I was in the middle of a big battle of the CC emails with people at work.

Things settled down, and I realized that most of the frenzy was not about the baby, a mess, or moving, but really about my anxiety level. I have too many things going on in too short of a time, and sometimes I just have to sit back and let things go. Today I am still working on the pre-move sort and discard, but I'm much more realistic about it. Surprisingly, I've actually gotten more done today than I did yesterday. It doesn't mean the baby hasn't unloaded the shelves of the DVDs. It doesn't mean that he didn't take all of my books out of the cabinet. It just means, that I gave it up, and let him. I cleaned that up while he napped, and tried to make the best of things. It's all about attitude, and yesterday, my attitude was not in the right place. Yesterday was a bad day, but today is ooooh so much better.