The Day Nobody Wants to Trade

There have been days that Robert has said he'd really like to stay home. I remember the first time that he told me that. Hannah and I had been at a friend's house all day and we came in all happy and sun kissed. I had to remind him that it took a long time to get to this point. I had months of no sleep and lots of crabbiness from Hannah. I always felt like I'd like a day away too but it's virtually impossible when you are nursing a little one. Yeah sure you can pump milk and make arrangements to have a babysitter come, but the reality is that there are not guarantees that the baby is going to drink the milk or that the baby won't scream in the babysitter's face the whole time. Plus I just can't deal with the guilt of having someone else be screamed at by my baby. She's my baby.

Well today is a day that no one would ever want to trade with me. Hannah has been sick for a week now. I had hoped that Hannah would be feeling better. It appeared that she was--initially. For a good couple hours today she screamed at me about how she wanted to go to sleep or go outside with out shoes or that she wanted me to wipe her nose with a tissue that I had just thrown in the garbage. There was really no pleasing her. I even lost my head for a while there trying to buffer all her requests with reasoning. You can't reason with a crabby three year old! At one point I was screaming "If you would just stop screaming you and I could do something fun while Noah was sleeping but instead you chose to SCREAM the whole time!" It wasn't my proudest moment.

Looking back at the day Robert noticed that Hannah's bad behavior began when I forced her to let me put some salve on her chapped face. Tomorrow I'll try to talk her into letting me put it on or maybe I'll just let it go entirely and just see if we can start the day off better. I would rather a red ruddy face than a screaming toddler.