Rubber, Meet Road

I'm sitting on the bed in my jammies, eating chocolate covered raisins and hoping that the baby, who is laying beside me, will miraculously fall asleep on his own.  He just yawned.  He might have fallen asleep in the swing while I ate my breakfast, but I put him in it with a dirty diaper, somehow forgetting that I had just listened to the familiar sound of a load being delivered to that location.

In half an hour it will technically be time to start getting Liam to eat his lunch.  I doubt he will be ready.  He slept until 9:30 and by the time he had "helped" me change the baby's diaper, gotten dressed and started a video he said he felt like he was going to throw up.  I got him a mixing bowl to catch with if he needs to (since I can't remember where the official "spit box" is) and suggested that maybe he's just really hungry.  I think that he has started to eat his pb&j sandwich in the comforting company of Bob the Builder.

I've been thinking about a blog post I read yesterday which defended a parenting style which is, in many ways, similar to my own.  And I'm realizing that in spite of the fact that I work hard and run at the margin of what I feel I can possibly do on any given day I think of myself as lazy.

Take this morning for instance.  After a night of waking up...well maybe six times to nurse the baby was restless and fussy.  I'd given up on trying to get him to sleep in the crib beside me which he'd done earlier in the night, so he was pressed against my side.  I had just nursed him within the last half hour, so I didn't think he was hungry.  He just needed to poop, but he needed to be awake to do it.  So before he got worked into a real tizzy I sat up and held him upright.  His eyes opened, but he was limp and his head drooped.  I bent my legs and propped him against them.  Then I reached over and started my laptop.  After a few minutes spent reconnecting with the world of social networking I realized that instead of waking up and pooping the baby had gotten comfortable enough to fall back to sleep.  So I got as comfortable as I could and started to burn through my Candy Crush Saga lives.  Which is where I was when Liam got up.  Although by that time the baby really was awake and completing the digestive process.

If I was a different kind of person I would not have had my baby in bed with me to begin with.  Also, if my fussy baby had fallen asleep while I was holding him I would have put him down and gone to do something useful like eat breakfast - until he woke up crying three minutes later.  At that point I would, I think, have changed his diaper and gotten him dressed before again starting my breakfast.  I'm not sure if this energetic and efficient version of myself would have changed the poopy diaper before or after eating, but I'm pretty sure she would have managed to get dressed and empty the dishwasher and would not currently be sitting on the bed with a sleeping baby on her chest watching the clock and trying to imagine a way to get Liam to school in less than an hour without anyone having a meltdown or showing up in a bathrobe.  (And no, I'm not going to try to fix that super-long sentence.)

I tell myself the following:

• My children are fed and dressed and often happy and always loved.
• Cleanliness is not, in fact next to godliness and the fact that my kitchen counters haven't been cleared in weeks does not make me a bad person.
• I'm not faking exhaustion.  It's a real, actual fact of my life.  Sometimes it ebbs away into the background, but it doesn't really go away.
• Heading into day three of a migraine might be having an effect on how I'm thinking.
• Comparing myself to that other, imaginary self doesn't do me or her any good.
• If I don't get up RIGHT NOW I will not get Liam to school on time.
• Tea.  Drink some.

OK, I'm back.  I did get the kid to school on time although it was close.  It turned out that eating had revived his appetite, but that his tummy still hurt and he needed to ...

.......poop.  Blah blah blah.  Turned out he was sick.  Threw up all over himself at school.  Now instead of thinking about whether I'm lazy I'm trying to figure out how to survive the rest of the day.  I guess I'll get back to the theoretical stuff later.