49/52

This week was hard. Christopher hasn’t been sleeping well. I had major post-holiday blues. I woke up every morning hoping the day would end. That sounds dramatic, but it really was hard. I angrily uttered the phrase, “Spankings for everybody!” at one point this week. I then gave those spankings after which both kids looked at me like they didn’t know what had just happened. Which of course made me feel terrible. Ben got home from work one night just in time to hear me screaming at Carson and Betsy. He said he heard me clearly from outside the house and had never heard me talk to the kids like that. I was so glad when Saturday came. And we had a nice weekend, which was much needed.

The day that stands out the most (I’ve blocked a lot of it out) as I type this is Thursday night. Ben had left for Minneapolis, so I was home by myself. There was a lot of up and down the stairs between 7 and 10. I finally got in bed a little after 11. Around 12:30 I went upstairs again and fed Christopher and spent the next hour getting him back to sleep. Around 2, right after I’d started to fall asleep, the dog started whining. I let her outside and she peed. I brought her back in and put her in the kennel. She kept whining and barking. I yelled at her from bed to stop, but she kept doing it. I figured she was freaked out that Ben hadn’t come home. So I closed the door to my bedroom and turned on my white noise. At 5 Christopher started crying. I opened the door and smelled something terrible and knew right away that Ginger had done her business right there in the kennel. I went upstairs and tried to get Christopher back to sleep. That didn’t work, so I brought him downstairs and let him cry on the floor while I bathed a poop covered dog, cleaned up her kennel, and the walls of the laundry room. Yes. The walls, y’all. So I started Friday at 5:30 cleaning up poop and listening to the wails of a very unhappy child.

I didn’t take many pictures this week since there weren’t many moments worth documenting.