Murphy's Law

I pulled up to Ladybug's after school program today with my fingers crossed. Please please please let her have had a good day. I know it is not good that I get emotionally involved with her behaviors. But she has had a few hard weeks and I want it to be better. Please

And it was! 11 out of 11 points. Yes, that means she is back on the other chart. But it works. I know most parents want their children off the bad behavioral chart. I want her on it -- she does better on it. And she is happy to see me.

The school is having another fundraiser. This time it is at our favorite pizza place. And it is healthy pizza. If she was good today I was willing to forgo cooking dinner (HA!) and go out for pizza. So we drive across town and get pizza. We apparently go here a little too often because all the waitresses say hello to Ladybug and notice that she has a new hairstyle this week.

She starts to get a little frantic. She is shoveling pizza in. She can't sit still. She is touching everything -- with her greasy, dirty hands. She is picking her food apart. She is talking and not listening. I am just hoping she holds it together long enough to get home.

We leave the pizza joint and we are crossing the parking lot heading to our car. She is singing and dancing. And I am vividly aware that the car parked next to ours is about to back up. I start talking to her. Asking her to wait. Asking her to stop. She is ignoring me. I know she won't listen and I reach out for her to stop her but she is a little to far away from me and I can only grab her hoodie and yank her back to me. At which point she spins on me with all the attitude she can possibly muster and yells at me to stop. I yell right back as I am pointing at the mini van that has now backed out and would have hit her. But she doesn't back down. She yells that I could have just told her. And I lose it. I did! She didn't listen. She would have been hit. Now get in the car.

She gets in and buckles up and promptly falls asleep. I know she is tired. She has been sleeping like crap this week. But I know she has fallen asleep because she is shutting down because I yelled. But I use the ride home to calm down. We are about 3 minutes from home when she starts coughing in her sleep. She has been fighting a cold for a couple of weeks. Not really sick but coughing in her sleep. She has grabbed my shawl and is holding it up to her face as she coughs. I tell her not to hold it in. Cough -- clear it out.

I pull into our parking lot as she coughs into my shawl. I turn and look. Oooooh! I know that look. Nooooo! Don't throw up. Not into my shawl. NO!

She does. Of course.

I park. I tell her not to move. I unlock the front door. I unlatch the car seat. When I had an older car unhooking the car seat was easy. One button. Now that I have a newer car it is more complicated. I have to crawl into the hatch back and dig under the bedding to unhook it. Then I have to crawl into the back seat and unhook it. It is safer. But not nearly as easy at the end of a hard day in the dark to deal with.

It is all unhooked. But I don't want her to stand up and walk out of the car. I don't want puke all over the car. I don't want to clear the car. I don't even want to clean the car seat. So I make the decision to remove the now unlatched car seat from the car with her still in it. I mean, how difficult could it be? To remove a large car seat with a 56 pound child covered with puke from the back seat without hurting the child or getting puke on me. Sometimes I hate being single.

But I managed to do it. Not gracefully. Then she unbuckles herself. Of course she has puked right down the front -- covering the buckles. She wants me to do it. I don't want to do it. She does it. Yeah, I know ... Mean Mama. I drag the car seat to the front door and leave it outside. I let her jut inside the front door. Standing on the linoleum. I ask her to strip. She starts to. But she starts to follow me. Dripping puke on the carpet. I walk her back to the front door. She strips. I send her upstairs to shower. I start grabbing the pukey clothes and taking them to washer.

She is in the shower singing and giggling. I am outside trying to yank the cloth off the car seat. It requires that I take the whole seat apart. I am trying to do this without getting puke on me. I get puke on me. It starts to rain. Of course. The good news is that it will wash away the trail of puke from the car to the front door. She sounds happy. I am not.

I get the cloth in the washer. Now I must wash the car seat. But I don't want to do it outside. It is raining. So I decide to put down my down blanket on the carpet and place the car seat on it. It can be washed. And I have been thinking it needs to be washed. Really. It could use a washing. I try not to breathe too deeply. The smell of pizza, doritos, and stomach acid is not good. Luckily most of the puke is on the cloth part of the car seat. Which is in the washer.

When the washer is done I realize that one piece of the car seat had too many folds in it to get really clean. So I send it back through the wash. With the blanket. At the end of the cycle I pull it out. The 2 have tangle into each other. Probably because of the hooks in the car seat. I untwist. I rotate. It is not coming free. They are now one. So I get the scissors. And cut my blanket. I need the car seat parts.

I am waiting for the parts to finish drying and then I would put it back together. And then tomorrow morning I get the joy of latching the car seat back into the car. And I am not a morning person. I just hope the car doesn't smell like puke in the morning.

Mean Mama
PS. I should add that the blanket shed all over the cloth car seat parts and I had to use a lint roller on it before putting them together. Luckily I had a lint roller. And I could find it. Unfortunately I apparently had the bright idea of storing the sticky lint roller in a plastic bag.