Times that Try Men's (and Women's) Souls

I'm trying to keep my cool, but I swear, between the dogs and Sam today, I'm finding it really difficult. ALL afternoon, the dogs, Lily in particular, have been a royal pain. I let the dogs outside several times during the afternoon, but apparently that wasn't enough to keep Lily from doing her huffy "let me out" barks every 10 minutes. I had a meeting at 2pm and let the dogs out 15 minutes beforehand. As soon as the meeting began, Lily started up again, with her imperious "woofs", accompanied by a bratty stare in my direction. Honestly, she probably didn't even want to go out, since as soon as I'd open the baby gate (in place to keep the dogs, not Sam, out of the basement), she'd try to head down to the basement for a cat pan raid rather than out to the back door.

After my meeting, I decided to try to get a short nap in, and for a few minutes thought it'd be quite nice, since Lily followed me upstairs and curled up on the bed with me. Within 15 minutes though, she was doing her huffing barking, until I finally yelled at her and she stalked off. I settled back down and was finally about to drift off to sleep when I heard a clatter coming from downstairs over the baby monitor. Knowing that Chris and Sam probably hadn't gotten home yet, I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to the kitchen. My instincts were correct, as I caught Lily in the midst of a refridgerator raid. She'd already managed to scarf down some old hotdogs and was in the process of trying to gnaw open a box of leftover pizza. In the process, she'd managed to pull half the food off the bottom shelf onto the kitchen floor.

I guess I should have expected the fridge raid, since the baby lock we've got on the fridge (again, for the dogs, not Sam) broke recently and doesn't really keep it locked. Still, it was beyond irritating. After cleaning up, I hauled both dogs upstairs so that I could keep an eye on them while I napped. By then though, I wasn't really sleepy anymore, particularly because Lily wasn't really showing any remorse and had instead moved on to barking at me for her dinner.

Anyhow, I wasn't in the greatest mood when Chris and Sam got home, but was happy to see them and get some company other than some ill-behaved dogs. However, within 10 minutes of getting home, it became clear that Sam was in high-maintenance mode. The living room was trashed within the first half hour, with toys strewn everywhere, not played with, just knocked about for no good reason. There was a lot of climbing on the furniture in ways that we don't consider acceptable, lots of screaming over small things ("It fell DOOOOWWWWWNNNN!!!!!"), and, hardest to take, lots of Sam running over to various objects (coffee table, bookshelf, and, amusingly, at least, my exercise ball) and intentionally banging his head on them, then falling down and shrieking.

Still, it was mostly manageable. Then Jack, for no good reason, jumped up off the couch, walked over to me, and puked on my foot. What the!?! Why!?! Up until that point, he had limited his obnoxious behavior to barking every time a garbage truck when by--a fairly frequent occurence on Thursday afternoons in our neighborhood.

We cleaned up the puke and tried to move on to dinner. Almost as soon as Sam got home, he announced he was hungry and agreed that he wanted a peanut butter sandwich. Well, no sooner was the sandwich made and he decided he wasn't hungry after all. Now, an hour later, and with our own dinner ready to go, he began to insist he didn't want peanut butter. Not wanting to set any sort of precendent involving making multiple meals for Sam, I didn't cave and told him he could have the peanut butter or not eat. From here on out, things got even more crazy. A chair was knocked over, magnets ripped off the fridge, etc. Finally, after two time-outs, Sam seemed to chill out and finally sat down and ate his sandwich.

We had about 20 minutes of calm after dinner, during which Sam played nicely with his trains. Then, he started to get frustrated and started throwing the trains, so I decided it was bedtime. Sam, on the other hand, decide it was "Daddy's turn!", a common refrain at bedtime, and one that I'm really trying hard not to take personally. Apparently Daddy is the preferred parent at bedtime, but it was in fact my turn, and Chris seemed a bit frazzled, so I tried to perservere.

I got Sam's pjs on, but by the time that was said and done, he was sobbing for his daddy in a gasping, overwrought way. I spent a good 20 minutes rocking him and talking gently to him, singing, etc. and he finally settled down. And then.... "It's DADDY'S turn!" All. Over. Again.

Chris, thankfully, stepped in, pulled a few books off the shelf and started reading. He's reading the last of the books now, Sam seems calm, and if all goes well, Sam will stay calm and go to sleep before too long. He is obviously tired, though if he's overtired, we may have a long road ahead. Right now, I'm just hoping he'll be asleep within the next hour so that we can watch The Office.

I think the hardest thing right now is that I want to make the most of my time with Sam, but it doesn't always work out. Instead of having a nice time with him this evening, it felt like a long, drawn-out battle. I had to reset my emotions a few times, reminding myself that I was the adult and that getting mad and yelling wasn't going to help. With the baby due to arrive any day now, I'd have loved to have had a nice bedtime cuddle with some good books, but it just didn't happen.

Hopefully tomorrow evening will be calmer, either because Sam is in a better mood or I'm at the hospital. I guess we'll just have to wait and see, and pray that we don't have another night like this one. The one thing to be happy about is that we did not, at least, have to give Sam his antibiotics this evening. Giving Sam his medicine has become quite the production, involving both me and Chris having to restrain Sam while trying to squirt the antiobiotics into his mouth. Last night he took it to a whole new level by trying to spit it all out, right in our faces. Thank god for Ms. Emma, who is willing and able to help us with the medicine without anywhere near the drama.

And thankfully, whatever happens for the rest of the night with Sam, the dogs are now in their nightly chilled out frame of mind, lying about the living room like giant slugs.