Working Mom

Laurel...well, let's just say she's experimenting with asserting herself. This involves a lot of screaming. Diaper changes become wrestling matches. Bathtime is a battle to keep her from standing up and subsequently falling down (I tried once to just bathe her while she was standing up, but this resulted in too much slippage for the baby and near-heart-attacks for the mama). She insists on feeding herself, so she finishes every meal with food smeared all over her face and hair. She roars and gnashes her teeth and clenches her little fists and shouts. I can only imagine what words will come out once she's more verbal, although perhaps language will help her to feel less frustrated and she won't feel the need to race around the house yelling like a banshee.

Of course, she's still a little baby at heart, so she tends to want to crawl up in my lap for a hug moments after she's given me the baby equivalent of the finger.

I'm not sure I really have this Working Mom thing under control. We coast along pretty well as long as everything goes according to plan. But one unanticipated meeting or sudden illness or plumbing problem and it all goes to hell. I guess I should be happy that everybody is well fed and we've not run out of clean underwear, but let me tell you when I fell down the basement steps tonight while I was scurrying around to get the garbage out to the curb, and coffee grounds spilled all over the place and I banged my forearm and twisted my back, I just sat there and cried...stunned and defeated. I probably would have sat there and cried for a good long while, but my sister happens to be in town and when she came to see what happened we both just started laughing, and she swept up the coffee grounds and everything was ok again.