Climbing the walls

I'm having the sort of day that makes me see in a distant way how some people can commit child abuse.

Not that I would ever contemplate harming a hair on my precious and fragile child's head, I hasten to add. But if she wakes up from her only real nap of the day before three hours have passed, I may slam my own head into the wall.

And she really hasn't been any worse than normal today. It's just that I made the mistake of having things I needed to do other than child care after an enormously tiring weekend that left me too drained to have any patience left.

Friday, I spent 19 hours of solo parenting, made particularly memorable by the 1 1/2 period where the sling was being washed due to extreme poop containment failure. As it turns out, K may occasionally be able to go to sleep without being in the sling, but Friday night was not one of those times. During all of this fun, longstrider was at Gencon and didn't get home until 1am. I heroically refrained from eviscerating him and instead went to pump before my chest exploded and went to bed.

Saturday, I woke up after four hours of sleep and spent much of the day that I wasn't doing something child-related making masks and gloves to fill Ebay orders.

Sunday, we drove gonzothegreat's car back to Kalamazoo, but not before discovering that the top had popped off of the container of breastmilk I had packed, spilling milk all over the inside of the bag of K-feeding supplies I had packed. The one saving grace is that we found it before we left town, so we could go back home to clean it up. Three hours of alternately napping and wailing baby later (I won't reveal how much time I spend driving with one arm pretzeled and stretched into the back seat so K can suck on my finger, but suffice to say it's a great deal more than is really wise or safe), we were in Kalamazoo. One wailing baby-filled dinner later, we drove back home in our one tiny car. Don't get me wrong, I'm infinitely grateful to gonzothegreat for letting us use his car over the summer, but if I were to list everything I might have like to do yesterday, driving to Kalamazoo and back with a two-month-old wouldn't even make the top 1000.

Today, as I said, was in many ways my fault for attempting to impose my own agenda on it. But really, is pakaging up a few Ebay orders and going to the post office really too ambitious? I've done it before. But today, it wasn't going to be accomplished without putting the baby down and using both of my hands, which was clearly unacceptable to the baby population of the house. And she was more than willing to express her opinion on the subject at length.

It's not that her behavior was that bad, or out of the ordinary. It's just that after an exhausting weekend, a 5am wakeup call and 8+ weeks of disrupted sleep, my reserves are really really low. I'm feeling incredibly isolated at the moment, desperate to get out of the house and talk to another adult, preferably one that I'm not married to (not that I don't like talking to him, but he's the only person I've really talked to in the past week aside from a brief birthday call to my father on Friday). I'm climbing the walls here.

I know that I'm feeling what every mother of a two-montho-old feels, and there are constructive things I can do to deal with it. And I'll get on that as soon as I've collapsed for a while. But for the moment, I'm too exhausted to cope.