Stick A Fork In Me, I'm Done.

I know this blog has been generally lighthearted up until now but allow me to change tone for a few minutes.

Christmas this year sucked. Don't get me wrong, the kids had fun. They enjoyed the toys and the presents but beyond that it sucked from one end to the other. I spent weeks tearing around trying to get everything ready to go. Between the cleaning, the decorating, the baking, the shopping, and the wrapping I felt like I had something to do every single second of the day especially because I was trying to fit all those things in around taking care of the kids. Throw in the added stress of all the bills (I hyperventilate when I think about our credit card bill) and I'm really struggling with my life.

Liam was a royal pain in the butt leading up to Christmas. He was exactly what a four year old should be but I thought I was going to lose my mind. The kid who gets sent his room maybe twice a month was getting sent to his room three times a day. He simply could not behave properly. My patience with it was thin anyway because of all the other crap going on and I just couldn't take it. I thought it would settle down once we got through the Christmas Orgy but instead he now insists on getting between Jamie and his toys. Liam wants to play with them and he thinks he's playing with Jamie when in reality he's just taking over and blocking the kid from his toys. We've told him a hundred times to knock it off and he seems incapable of doing so.

Scot is fighting his migraine problem more and more and it seems as though the specialist he's seeing really isn't that much help. He ended up in the ER two days before Christmas because he'd had a migraine for 5 straight days and all the meds he had at home couldn't break it. So he's frustrated with the fact that he's getting very little help for a problem that's been plaguing him for at least 6 months. When he's incapacitated with a headache he can't cope with the kids and that leaves me to deal with them. I don't blame him - far from it - he wouldn't choose to be this way if he had the choice. But I feel trapped with the two kids all the time and even when he tries to give me a break it inevitably falls on a day that he's worse rather than better which makes me feel awful because he's got to deal with the kids.

I feel like we've spent much of the last year and a half mired in illness in such a way that our lives are a mess. First I was pregnant and sick, then I was pregnant and bitchy, then Scot fell down the stairs and fucked up his wrist, then I was *really* pregnant and *really* bitchy, then Scot had surgery on his wrist, then I gave birth, then Jamie was a wreck for the first three months, then Scot started fighting incessant headaches. It's one disaster after another and we keep trying to cope and keep trying to deal with the kids and I feel like all I do is pick up slack and try to stay sane.

To add insult to injury Jamie is teething like mad and screechy much of the time. He's not sleeping properly and he's so cranky that I can barely walk out of the room to pee without him having a screaming fit. So, he's *always* with me and *always* climbing on me. I'm getting ready to wean him because I can't take being attached at the boob anymore. I know that people think it's easy to just pump a bottle and go but it's not. It's takes me 3 days worth of pumping to gather enough milk for ONE bottle. Because I don't pump on a regular basis and because I'm near the end of my nursing relationship to boot (and thus don't have extra milk production) that's just how it is. It's more hassle than it's worth unless there's some big event I need to attend.

I'm just really not very happy with my life right now. The kids are driving me nuts. The house is a wreck. My husband is nearly always incapacitated in some way through no fault of his own. I'm overweight. I'm bound to an infant by the boob and I'm ready to scream. I don't get enough sleep and haven't for FIVE SOLID YEARS.

Now I have to look forward to undecorating the house from Christmas (how exactly do I keep Jamie out of all those boxes?!), the dark, cold, frigid depths of winter, and all the screaming of a teething infant that I'm trying to teach to sleep through the night.

Welcome to my little slice of hell.