This damn toddler...

I hate being mom.

It had to be said.  Now, I don't REALLY hate being mom, but right this minute? Right this minute it seems like a real load of crap.

Let's review the last, oh, say, 18 hours... not completely, I'm sure, and a bit out of order perhaps, but everything I'm about to tell you is real.

Dinner is a fight. Well, not always, sometimes I can make a meal that a family of 6 (7 depending on the day) is perfectly happy with, but most nights there is an audible distaste for whatever veggie I am forcing my children to ingest. I cook, I serve, I retrieve whatever might be necessary (albeit with the occasional assistance of a most wonderful man) and then I sit down to attempt to eat. The toddler never wants whats on his plate, he wants whats on mine. But he wants to eat it while sitting in my lap. He wants orange juice, drank from my cup - of course, so he dumps my water into his cup and then later proceeds to spit into both his and my cups. Why? Why does a toddler do anything? The kindergartener never wants whats on her plate but she will eat from her brother's, who is eating from mine, so... why not. She also likes to announce, repeatedly, what on the table she doesn't want to eat and follow dinner with a request for something to eat.

Bathtime is a fun one... The littles typically are bathed together but this practice is most certainly becoming obsolete as one likes to sit on the other and there is a lot of hair pulling and water dumping and general asinine shenanigans.  Last night? Pretty good, overall... the night before? Well, the preteen didn't want to clean the poop off the toddler pre-bath so the kindergartener screamed her objection (understandable) to bathing with "poop flakes". Mom to the rescue.

Bedtime stories are a must, reading is important and part of this mom's priorities... and last night we read 5. Yes, 5... only to have toddler fall asleep somewhere around the 8th page of the last book and must be carried to bed, waking with a start and a banshee scream when he realizes mommy isn't the one holding him anymore. Kindergartener gets in bed and finds THE book she had put aside for tonight's reading... and somehow gets irked when mom says "tomorrow". But the 2, 5 and 12 year olds were all in bed tucked in snugly by 8 or 8:30 so I'm not complaining about that.

Until around 10:30 when a cry comes from the littles' room. Kindergartener is kicking toddler in the head in the process of climbing off the top bunk. I grab her and take her from the room (because toddler is miraculously sleeping through this) and figure out that she's on the verge of peeing herself... but has made it this far without ACTUALLY peeing herself, so I sit her on the potty. Her eyes are still closed because, folks, she's still asleep. She pees, I hand her toilet paper, she wipes and....... hands it back to me. Well, alrighty. I put her back in bed... which might not seem like much, but hoisting 60 lbs of dead weight onto a top bunk silently is a talent rarely possessed.

I settle back in for more Netflix with my honey and another cry comes from the littles' room.  I crack the door to see what's going on only to find that no one is crying. I stand for a minute to be sure and right before my eyes, toddler slides off the bottom bunk and crashes head first into the floor. I pick him up, put him back, kiss his head and all is well.

Now, in the mornings, I sneak into littles' room to wake kindergartener without waking toddler. It's like playing Russian roulette with 5/6 loaded. So this means that unless I want to drag a kicking, screaming, demanding small brick of irritation with me to the bus stop, I get kindergartener up, dressed and ready without so much as a creak of a floorboard. Most mornings I'm pretty good at this. This morning, success. (This morning, only success of the week. And it's Thursday.) Luckily, wonderful man took kindergartener and preteen to the bus stop today so mommy didn't have to (even though I've been letting preteen walk kindergartener more often now since I can see the bus stop from the window and kindergartener's bus comes before preteen's... 6:30am is too early for a bra.).

But just as they walked out the door? Toddler awakens.

*sigh*

And then teenager oversleeps.

And then toddler and mommy get dressed to take teenager to school. I need gas in the car, so I stop at the gas station and go in to use my rewards ($0.30 off per gallon, ya know) and the attendant -ugh- don't get me started... heifer stole my coupon and told me I'd get the 30 cents per gallon back on my card. Lies. That's not how this works. Lies. So this debacle caused us to arrive 2 minutes late and find that we would have to drag toddler into the high school to sign teenager in... so mommy makes the executive decision to have chicken minis from Chick-fil-a first. Never attack the day without coffee. I should've known better.

As we're eating breakfast, toddler decides the play area isn't climb-y enough, but that mama, who is attempting to eat her food, makes a perfect ladder... and proceeds to stand on my back, shoulder, wedge his way between me and the seat and dig his tiny elbow into my shoulder.... so he earned himself a swat on the rear and mama's stern talking to. The couple behind me told me I was doing a good job and that they're happy to see my discipline him... and I take it as a compliment because after nearly 16 years and 4 kids of parenting I'm pretty good at deciphering a genuine compliment from a condescending remark. We leave, take teenager to school and have an hour before story time at the library. So mommy decides to go to Old Navy.

While the actual roaming of the store part was not terrible, the checking out part was. Why, Old Navy, WHY do you keep that overflowing container of various sporting balls at your register? Don't you know that a grumpy, sleepy toddler is bound to pick one up and be hell bent determined to take it home? And when mama says no, over and over and OVER again and she tries to put the ball back only to have 3 fall and toddler pick another up and and AND vicious cycle...... Well, your cashiers know. So a hand slap and stroller confinement got us out of there... But I did buy a white cardigan and 2 bottles of sparking fruit water. Which brings me to the parking lot.

Yeah. I see you, first time mom with 4 month old baby. She's cute now and I know you can't imagine her EVER having to be held down while you strap her into her car seat as she pinches you and proceeds to bite your hand while screaming at the top of her lungs. Judge away. But this *circles pointer finger around this whole situation* THIS is what every toddler looks like at some point. And the fact that I kept my cool and calmly handled my hellion's tantrum may say less about my resolve to be on my personal best behavior and more about my proximity to my snapping point. So I put away the stroller and sit in the driver's seat, not going anywhere until the rhythmic shrieks from the back seat level closer to tolerable and I cracked open my fruit water. Not terrible. And then it begins... The demands. I calmly tell the back seat terrorist that he must as me nicely and then I will open his water. We're at a stalemate. Until he throws the cup of iced coffee remnants at me. (I had given him the ice from my iced coffee when we left breakfast and it had melted a bit while we were in the store.) I'm pretty sure I actually said the words "Aw HELL no..." out loud this time. He got a swat on the leg and I decided waiting for the screams to subside was akin to waiting for the flood to cease before seeking higher ground.

So... library's out.

He screamed at me all the way home.

Finally, he has a moment of clarity and in his sweetest "this is why I'm still alive" voice, asks me politely for his sparking fruit water. The red. Carbonated. Fruit water. Which I opened. Holding the bag with my new white cardigan in it... only to find that he had shaken the bottle. *sigh* I hand him the bottle after it stops fizzing and retreat to my room to assess the potential damage. Not bad. Not bad at all.......... So while I'm back there anyway, I figure it's a good time to pee. Before I even get firmly planted, the door swings open and there are toddler and fur child (the dog) both staring intently at my urination experience. Veteran moms know peeing with an audience is sometimes the only option, so I finish up. Before I even flush, fur child is whining because toddler has a firm grip on his rear leg. After several minutes of "let go of his leg" "he yikes it" "no, he doesn't like it, he's going to bite you" "*giggle* he no bite me"... I shoo toddler out of my bedroom and try to love fur child by feeding him because I know all to well how dealing with toddler makes you feel the overwhelming need to eat something... and then I walk into the kitchen where this kid has poured the entire bottle of red soda stuff into a cup and is now pouring it BACK into the bottle...... because we're in our "I do it" stage of development where EVERYTHING HITS THE FLOOR. So. 2/3 of this bottle of overpriced water stuff is puddling on the kitchen table and in the floor and in the chair where a distressed toddler is unhappy because HIS. FOOT. IS. STICKY.

He's now asleep beside me on the couch as I type this. Thank the good Lord. It could be worse. Ya know, like yesterday when at this very time, he dumped out every toy he has and proceeded to throw blocks and train pieces at my head repeatedly out of anger (why you mad, kid?) and then fight a nap to the point I just locked the door to his room and watched an episode of Frasier.

Have I mentioned how much I LOVE being mom?