This Entry Would Be Good With A Nicely Aged Cheese

I'm sure most of you already read Amalah (and sorry there's no link, but Blogger has been screwing up my links for about a month now,) but if you don't, or didn't get to read today's entry yet, let me just urge you to right this minute. Or at least to read this excerpt, which gives you the gist of it:

The thing is, I'm not unhappy. Like, at all. I love this life, this crazy minivan-full-of-many-boy-children life that I never, ever expected to be living, but oh, I'm so glad I do. Honestly, I could kind of see myself having baby after baby, if I only had a place to put them besides Ikea dresser drawers. Or enough money to keep them all in karate/braces/camp/pizza/college.

Or enough patience to promise myself that I wouldn't yell at them for taking too long to put their shoes on, thus making me get out of the car and show the world that I didn't have time to get dressed that morning, even though that was my own damn fault for not getting out of bed 15 freaking minutes earlier, because...what? I thought today was going to be the magical day when everybody puts their shoes on the first time I ask instead of the seventh? Come on.


Indeed. I am overall so grateful and content and even EXCITED about my Important Life Choices thus far, but boy can I relate. Especially to that bit about feeling teeth-grindingly irritated at your constant state of running behind schedule, even though you know you could probably head off the crazy by just regularly ASSUMING that none of your kids will function properly and compensating accordingly. I mean, how many times have I yelled at everyone to hurry up when what I really wish I could do is go back in time an hour and yell that very thing to mySELF, still laying in bed with an arm thrown over my eyes trying to wish away the call of duty?

Today was even a good day, overall, but sometimes this suburban, stay-at-home parent to three young kids, living-on-a-budget-much-tighter-than-we-anticipated-back-before-2008 life feels... about like it sounds, I guess. Huh.

I should be very excited right now: my friend/client is due with her baby basically any day at this point, and while I am disappointed that she will very likely deliver before I've attended my workshops, thus disqualifying that experience from counting towards my certification, I am happy that her difficult pregnancy will be over soon, and happy that at least I probably won't have to worry about heading for Ann Arbor for three days, leaving her a hugely pregnant time bomb at a week from her due date.

I also got a new client last week, a referral from my own doula, who is herself having some very serious health problems due to a surgical complication, and who may be out of commission for quite some time. While this is hardly good news (and please pray/think good thoughts for her if you would, as she went through some really scary stuff) it does mean I may be able to fulfill my three practice births requirement sooner than I anticipated, which would be fantastic. It was a really cool feeling to go and meet with a client who has no personal knowledge of me and whose only relationship with me will be as a birth professional... definitely a different experience than serving as a doula for a friend, though that is obviously a thrill too. But serving in that capacity doesn't feel quite as NEW, I guess, since I've been present at births of friends and relatives before.

But anyways, you know, I should be feeling pretty jazzed and instead I feel a little PMS-ish and frustrated and overwhelmed by all the different categories of to-do lists running through my brain. I guess part of my mood could also be due to a week straight of rain/clouds, and another part still to the ongoing Eli struggles: he's doing much better in terms of daily behavior than even a few weeks ago, thank goodness, but still battles so much with controlling himself once one little thing (and my, how fun it is predicting what that one thing will be, HA HA HA) tips his mental scales into the negative zone.

It's depressing mostly because I feel like the majority of the behavior improvement has been the result of Jim and me figuring out better ways to head off the temper tantrums. Which is GOOD, don't get me wrong, but I'd prefer for ELI to be the one gaining improved coping skills, y'know? I sometimes feel so exhausted at the end of the day from constantly navigating the minefield of his fragile and unpredictable emotions. And I LOATHE that our family is falling into this classic, middle child as the difficult child stereotype. Sigh.

In a side note, it is also WILDLY UNHELPFUL to my general frame of mind that the very bad word cluster very bad worst cluster roof is leaking into YET ANOTHER VERY BAD WORD CLUSTER CLOSET! A CLOSET IN WHICH MY PERSONAL CLOTHING RESIDES! AFTER HAVING BEEN ALLEGEDLY REPAIRED BY PROFESSIONALS! VERY BAD WORST CLUSTER. This, on the heels of Jim having to put our mailbox back up after last week's babysitter (who was a gem in all other respects) backed into it. Home ownership is for the birds, man.