Wrong Side Of The Bed

I admit it. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

There's something about leaving my kids with the nanny today, after Monday's 911 fiasco, that sent me straight into grumpy land. I was anxious. And I took it out on Kyle, Claire, and the nanny too. Well, I wasn't overly mean to the nanny, but I did leave her with a "let's not have a repeat of Monday ..." comment as I walked out the door. As if that ensures no accidents will occur.

I had a sick feeling in my gut for the first half a day at work. The afternoon was better. I calmed down, I checked out some really cool wireless phones at a holiday preview event, and then my friend and I snuck out of work (well, not really - I told my boss I was leaving) to VOTE. Yep, we live in an early voting state, so we cast our official ballot today. That made me feel happy, having done my civic duty.

I picked up a rotisserie chicken on the way home and made dinner while Kyle watched kids. Usually it's his night to cook - my office days are his nights to handle dinner - but I knew I could efficiently pull together a quick dinner if he could just manage the kids and keep them out of my hair. And that he did. Claire annoyed the heck out of me by not staying in her chair at dinner and refusing to eat much of anything. The grumps reared their head again.

Then, Claire and I worked on her birthday thank-you notes. Her task was simply to sign her name, and she messed it up at least 5 times which brought out the grumps again. I shouldn't have been so hard on her - she's only four! - but seriously I don't know why she can't manage to focus and get her name right on a consistent basis. She's always forgetting the 'i' in her name, or writing straight up the page rather than across the page. And she doesn't like being told that she didn't do something well or right. It makes her mad and she gets the quitting attitude. I get frustrated by that.

Tomorrow my boss has cancelled our weekly team meeting, relieving the nanny from her childcare time here, so the good news is that puts some space between me and her until next Monday. Hopefully that provides me some time to put this week in perspective. Tonight I came home to one knife and a cutting board that hadn't been washed, but more annoying was how she somehow went through all of our clean spoons when I just ran the dishwasher yesterday. She at least cleaned up the kid toy messes because I harped on it again this morning, but I guess she hasn't clued in to my bigger issue being an untidy kitchen. I know these are little things, but generally it's the build up of little things that frustrate relationships, right?

Time to get to bed and banish the grumps for a while.