Talk me down from the ledge

I am having such an emotional day.  SUCH an emotional day.

It started with a fight over the dog and shared responsibilities around the house and how I’m feeling overwhelmed.  Progressed to me leaving my super yummy lunch (and breakfast) on the kitchen counter where it is now ruined (and I hate wasting food).  And culminated in me feeling a giant case of Mommy fail.

Annie decided that Joshua’s bath toys are AWESOME snacks.  AWESOME.  So she ate one.  There’s probably a drying pile of dog puke on my rug at home as I type this.  Fab.  Joshua loved that toy (I should say “toys” since this is the second one she’s eaten this week…).  I want to cry because my child can’t play with that toy anymore and they were a gift so I don’t know where they came from and why can’t I just be responsible and pick up the damn toys instead of leaving them on the side of the tub. 

I busted my ass on Tuesday to clean parts of the house and asked Dan to clean the kitchen.  It hasn’t been done yet.  In his defense (y’all, seriously, I’m defending him because I love him) he started a new job this week (WOOT!) and has been mentally overwhelmed and exhausted this week because of all the new things he has to learn to do.  I get that sort of exhaustion.  I really do.  But this morning, I snapped and it wasn’t pretty.  I feel like we don’t appreciate each other and I feel like we fight all the time and I don’t know how to fix it and I want to cry.

I was in a furious rage while I finished getting ready this morning.  I loaded my stuff in the car but left my lunch sitting on a counter that is not by the coffee pot.  Then, I got the boy and loaded him into the car and got all the way to work before realizing that I did not, in fact, have anything to eat.  Because of ye olde dairy, it’s not like I could swing through McDonald’s and get a biscuit, or visit the school cafeteria (yuck!) for lunch.  The prospect of having no food made me want to cry (and the fact that I’m still dizzy and swimmy-headed from too much coffee, the inability to breathe through my nose, and not consuming my regular number of calories in a day isn’t helping).

(Thankfully, a co-worker rescued me from no-food-land by going to Subway and getting me a sandwich.  Otherwise, I’d be passed out in a mobile unit somewhere from low blood sugar.  But I’m still starving.)

Then, while milking myself like a good dairy cow (because I need a bottle to give my kid before I feed him dinner tonight and since he won’t be going home until after dinner, I have to feed him at school), I read a blog and saw a baby younger than Joshua who regularly gets himself into a sit and who is already pulling himself up.  I literally almost lost it just a minute ago.

Things like this make me feel like I’m doing something incredibly wrong.  Like I’m somehow failing my child because he can’t pull himself up to standing at almost 8 months old.  Like I haven’t given him enough experiences or opportunities to work on skills like these.  For crying out loud, he isn’t even crawling yet. 

I don’t know why I care.  I don’t know why this bothers me.  I don’t know why I even keep up with what other babies are doing.  But right now, I feel like bawling my eyes out.  I just want to cry for days because I feel like my kid is “behind” somehow.  WHY DOES IT MATTER?!?!  WHY AM I PUTTING THESE SORTS OF EXPECTATIONS ON AN INFANT~!?!?!  WHY!?!?!

I have no idea.

But I’m about to cry about it.