Grump

I’m in an excessively foul mood this morning. I blame hormones and lack of sleep. Around 3am, the dog started barking – presumably because Evan was opening our door. I thought the dog needed to go out, so I was searching for shoes in the dark and telling Evan to go back to bed. As I walked outside I could hear Evan crying in his room and told myself I’d take care of him when the dog was done. When I got back in, Evan was asleep, but June had woken up.

Lately June has been waking up most nights. If I’m lucky, she just wants to find the tag on her blanket or get a drink refill, but more often she wants to come to bed with me. I don’t have the best judgment in the middle of the night, so I brought her to my room once a little while ago and now it’s The Thing To Be Done, in her eyes. Last night I was so grouchy and so tired that I told her I wouldn’t pick her up or take her to my bed, which only made things worse. I stormed back to my room, where the dog wanted to follow me and jump up on the bed. No! My space! Let me have my sleep!!

June cried for quite a while. I unplugged the monitor and eventually went back to sleep.

Jarom, as always, dealt with the kids when morning finally came around. He’s a hero for letting me stay in bed shirking my parental responsibilities, especially when I know my grouching and yelling last night kept him from getting a good night’s rest. Unfortunately, there comes a time when he has to leave for work. I bet today he was glad to go – I wouldn’t want to spend the day around me! The kids keep fussing at me and whining when they say my name and it DRIVES ME CRAZY. I’m so short on patience right now.

On top of that, I haven’t had the focus or energy to make a grocery list, and we’re down to one car, so I can’t go shopping anyway. Things I can eat for breakfast: bread, an egg (if I clean up some of the kitchen to cook and eat with), banana. Those are mostly my lunch options too. Hunger doesn’t help my mood at all!

I’d hoped writing this would improve my outlook. I do feel slightly less grouchy, but now I’m extra tired. Maybe I can trust the kids to not destroy the house while I try to nap?

Ha.

Leaning

We made some rookie mistakes when buying our Christmas tree this year. With such high ceilings, we wanted the biggest tree we could get – lesson #1: you don’t actually want a tree as tall as the ceiling. It doesn’t look right. We’d gone to Home Depot for some other things and looked at their trees, which only went up to 8 feet; we thought we could fit almost a 10-foot tree, so we went to a little lot near our house. We ended up with a very, very tall and very, very large tree and got the lot owners to agree to deliver it the following day. We also bought a stand that they said would work best for big trees, to keep it stable and straight.

Well…when they came and set it up, there were 5 kids inside, and 6 adults working on Jarom’s car outside, plus 2 adults inside. We made way for the tree and they put the stand on before standing the tree up. I excitedly swept up the fallen needles and snapped on the tree skirt I bought. (I saw it recently, bought it immediately with some of my spending money, and felt extra happy when it sold out the next day.) Only when I went to take a picture did I realize the tree was a little bit tilted.

By the time Jarom was done working on his car for the evening, the tree was looking distinctly crooked. He spent an hour trying to fix it, but sadly, his efforts were in vain. (To be fair – it is leaning much, much less than before, and it’s been turned around so it’s tilted in different directions now.)

Please forgive the mess! And please tell me your advice on fixing it! Jarom’s next attempt will be to cut off the base of the tree where the hole has been incorrectly drilled and redo the whole thing. It certainly won’t hurt for the tree to be a little shorter! I can’t wait to decorate. I have lots of plastic gold dinosaurs for ornaments, and I’ll add in some gold balls and LOTS of lights.

Yardwork

A few weeks ago, most of the leaves were still on our big chestnut tree. Then there was a big windstorm, which knocked about half of them off, followed by a foot of snow, which made raking impossible. The other half of the leaves fell on top of the snow a day or two before we left for vacation.

Of course, by the time we got back, the lawn was completely covered in leaves. I mean, really, the chestnut tree is huge. But it’s been tricky to find a time to rake, since I have no fence to contain two kids and a dog. I had to leave them to their own devices for a while.

Yesterday brought beautiful weather and June went down for a nap without any diaper incidents, so I sat Evan (and the dog) down with some Netflix and headed out to rake. It went more quickly than I expected, but the sheer number of leaves and size of my yard (not to mention my inexperience with raking leaves) meant it was a 2-hour endeavor. And then what to do with all those leaf piles? I generously let the kids jump in one to their hearts’ content, and a neighbor came by offering to park his trailer by the tree so I could dump all the leaves in – and he’d take them to the city facility when I was done. Maybe that was the generous thing. Jarom took over when he got home, and now the lawn just needs a good mowing.

If only I had a lawnmower.

P.S. I had a book club last night, so Jarom’s friend came over to keep him company. Many kids together = no sleep, and when I got home at 11:30, Evan had just barely passed out on the couch, and June fought sleep for another half hour. Then she got up at 7 this morning. Is there a refund or something I’m eligible for today?