now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

The days are falling into a rhythm (alas, that rhythm does not include enough time at the gym, due in no small part to my being pissy and not wanting to stand in line for 15-20 minutes to get Sean into the child center, they’re so full up in the morning, but I will be fixing that this weekend. The me not working out, not the child care center’s counts management problems). Wake up entirely too late. Take shower. Caffeinate desperately. Flail wildly at my enormous workload. Wonder if the yard has finally dried out from the work week (no lie, a solid 4.5 days) of a near foot of rain back at the end of June that I really need to water it (answer: yes). Have child play happily and independently, hugging me randomly and generally be chipper.

Yep, you read that right.

Our boy’s happy. Our boy’s loving. Our boy is flourishing. I kind of want to bow down and kiss the feet of the staff at his new school.

And I want to find the woman at the old school who told my husband, in all seriousness, “You’re taking a problem with you.” and point out to her, vividly and in a manner she will never, ever forget, how very wrong she was, and how very neatly that one statement of hers encapsulates everything that was fundamentally wrong about that school. I mean. Along with the physical abuse. That the Lad walked in and witnessed.

Oh yes. We’ve been very busy setting some of our anger down and letting others carry it. Soon we find out the results of that.

The blogging wagon, that is, but I had a GREAT reason. First I was out of town for the better part of 3 days, and there were shenanigans with cancelled flights, delayed flights, assy flights, you name it. Then we dealt with the mysterious Sickness that claimed a little man right at the start of his T-Ball game, leading to his collapsing and napping for over two hours last Saturday, spiking a fever, it breaking in a volley of sweat and nastiness, and his then collapsing back into bed to sleep until well after 8:30 am on Sunday. Which, I’ll point out, was a mere 2 hours 15 minutes after the Lad left to fly out for his nearly week long conference. From Sunday morning through Friday early evening I was….solo mom. All mom, all the time. To say this was an event which had been filling me with an icy cold sense of dread since this conference was announced is an understatement. In a nigh desperate effort to maintain some basic hold on my sanity, I:

-Signed the kid up for a half day morning sports camp at the gym, operating under the basic principle of ‘if I exhaust him, he cannot put that much power into his whining’.

-Pre-ordering, for my convenience, a kids’ shake at the gym cafe, which I could THRUST into his greedy little hands immediately upon pickup from camp so that he would be occupied with scarfing it down as I drove him pell mell to school, figuring if his mouth is occupied with hoovering down a smoothie, it’s that many fewer minutes of ‘where’s dad’ and ‘how many big sleeps till dad comes home?’ and ‘what did you do with dad?!‘, the last always said in a slightly accusatory tone, as if really what’s going on is I clubbed dad with a frozen leg of lamb and buried him in the tomato and squash beds in the backyard (explaining their sudden massive lushness), and if I so much as think of cooking up the lamb to get rid of the weapon, Sean’ll rat me out to the cops (but only after eating a minimum of 3 slices of it)

-Arranged for a rotating array of tempting takeout and basic kid friendly cooking to lure him to eat dinner even though Dad was now fertilizing my cherokee purples.

-Obtained all manner of tiny surprises and wee little toys, to deploy as necessary to avert crisis.

Much to my shock, he was absolutely fine. I mean, I was wrecked every night, don’t get me wrong, but he was fine. We have seen a massive, drastic improvement in his behavior and his mood since switching schools- he is happy, he is demonstrative, affectionate, his sense of humor’s back at the forefront, and boy howdy, did it help this week. Previously when one of us was out of town there would be by day 2 or 3 The Meltdown and the Oppositional Behavior From Then On Out. Not this time.
(I am kicking myself for not getting him out of his first school sooner. Why the hell were we unable to see so much of his mood was NOT stereotypical 3 or 4 year old? But he is sunny and outgoing now, and there is no use crying over spilt milk, as it were. We move on from here.)

So that’s what’s going on, more or less. We lived. Next update: puddles, the Great Flood, and the nearly perfect Saturday until the unfortunateness at 2:15 am which really was Sunday.