My body let me know at the beginning of the weekend that I pushed it too hard last week– the first week Jay was back at work full-time. I won’t belabor how, but I found it frustrating the same way I’ve found certain people frustrating. Two (maybe three?) jobs in a row I had as a teenager, I got in trouble/reprimanded for things, not when they happened, but when the boss/supervisor had collected enough other (also un-reprimanded) infractions to have a load to dump.

Very stressful, emotionally.

What I found so frustrating wasn’t that they were scolding me, but that they seemed to expect me to know certain things in advance of the correction.

It was the most wonderful thing in the world to me (at age 20) when my supervisor gave me a “warning” she was upset with something so soon after I did it. It was downright freeing. I knew that I wouldn’t have to rely on my perception of her feelings toward me as a measurement of how well I was doing. She would actually tell me.

To connect this back to my self, I thought I was being careful, and not doing too much. By the end of the week I was doing even less than at the beginning. But for whatever reason it had snowballed and I got it in the face Saturday morning. I’m mostly better now, but back to trying to figure out my limits without direct feedback.

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I did my first post-baby FAM workshop on Saturday afternoon. That meant Jay had the three kids to himself for a bit over three hours that day. We are vary happy to report that Elisha seems much more willing to take a bottle than Melody was.

When Melody was maybe 5-months old, I was stuck in a city council meeting 3 or 4 hours. She both refused the bottle and screamed much of the time I was gone. I came home to an understandably frazzled Jay. I had wondered if this would be the case Saturday, and thankfully it wasn’t. The house was very peaceful when I got home.

In fact, Melody was more interested in being with me than Elisha. He was asleep when I got there, and stayed asleep even when Jay passed him off to me. Melody climbed into my lap, and didn’t budge until the end of the movie Jay had started. She is one cuddly kid.