Stealth Attack

A bad day snuck up on me yesterday.  Generally, if a day starts well, I can keep the good day momentum going throughout the rest of my activities for the day.  But every once in a while, the bad day is sneaky, and it waits until late morning or even early afternoon to rear its ugly head.

A normal bad day is easy to deal with.  You know from the get go that things are not going well.  You can keep a sense of humor about the fact that it would have been smarter to stay in bed all day.  You know that nothing productive will happen from the moment you wake up, and so you're not disappointed when nothing does.

There's something almost comforting about a normal bad day.  As a believer in balance and Murphy's Law, I feel like a normal bad day is my payment for all the good days I have.  Just as in college, I felt that in order to keep my dorm room neat and clean, I had to have a center of chaos (usually a drawer) wherein I allowed the entropy of my stuff to reign.  Without that center of chaos, the chaos would demand payment and my room would become, in the words of my mother, "Who Did It And Ran."  Similarly, the gods of apathy require a certain number of bad/non-productive days as payment for the number of with-it, productive, "I can kick your ass, pile-o-tasks" days that I enjoy.  So when I have a normal bad day, I can enjoy the fact that I paid off some of my debt to the apathy gods (not that they care--HAR!) and know that I will be back on track the next day.

But a stealth attack--whoo, that's a horse of a different color.

Yesterday started off great.  LO woke up around 5:45 or so and politely requested some breakfast.  I took him downstairs to watch Good Morning Indiana while I obliged.  (I've so become a mom--I watch morning news shows.  I even look forward to them!)  He went back to sleep like an angel around 6:45 or so, and I was able to shower, make breakfast, and see J off to work with a hearty kiss.  The siren song of the internet took away a good hour of LO's nap, and I think that was when the stealth attack really began.  Rather than get started on the things I needed to do for the day, I let myself overindulge on FaceBook and my favorite advice columnist sites.  A god of apathy stood over my shoulder, rubbing his hands.

Then, LO wanted second breakfast/first lunch.  We spent a lovely half hour making funny faces at each other after he ate, when I realized I was a little tired.  I still hadn't started doing anything productive, but it was still early.  So I took a little nap.  (And when I say little, I mean little.)  LO let me sleep for about 10 minutes before the frustrating unspecified sobbing (aka FUSSing) began.  Nothing would calm my LO.  I suspect that the apathy god was pinching him when I wasn't looking.

Suddenly, I looked up and it was 3:30.  So much for my plan to get to the bank and the grocery store.  At that point, getting the laundry in off the clothes line might be a little too ambitious.  LO, the adorable baby who smiled at me so engagingly in the morning, had been replaced by this time by a screaming demon of anti-calm.  I looked hopelessly around the house.  The pile of mail, unsorted.  J's works shirts, wrinkly.  Zucchini for zucchini bread--rapidly becoming something at which the dog would turn up his nose.  Freelance writing research--undone.  How had my day gotten away from me so effectively?

J arrived home around 6.  He saw the glint of crazy in my eyes and suggested we take a walk.  So we leashed up the dog and Bjorned the child and went to the park across the street.  LO fussed for approximately 2.7 seconds in the Baby Bjorn, and then ZZZZZZ....  At the park, we found a huge contingent of adorable kids dressed up for a Halloween activity at the local zoo.  (We live directly across the street from a tiny zoo.  It's AWESOME).  The children were charmed by Obie, even though he was twice the size of most of them.  We were charmed by the tiny pirates, witches, ninjas, pumpkins, lions, tigers and bears, oh my.  The god of apathy stayed home.

Unfortunately, he was waiting for me when we got back.  After dinner, I attempted to get LO to sleep at an earlier hour than normal, which meant I fell asleep next to him with my clothes on at 8:30 at night, leaving the dishes undone, the laundry unfolded, the teeth unbrushed, the meds untaken, and the husband unkissed goodnight.

This morning I had some coffee.  We'll see if it helps.