High Anxiety...

So, yesterday was day two with the au pair and I got a call from Riley at 3:30 seemingly doing well. I was late getting out of the clinic so didn't get the girls until seconds before the 6:00 deadline and we rushed home. The boys were outside in the back yard playing with Nastia. I started putting the dinner on the table so I could go to my 7:00 meeting.

Of course there was a ton of flurry about why I was going back out again and I know I probably shouldn't have tried but...

So, after the 4th or 5th time someone jumped up from the table to kiss or push me out the door, I lost it and brought them all back to the table and snapped that they needed to stay and rushed out.

As I was shutting the door, I glanced at my pager/email on my PDA. There was a note from Matthew's teacher with a litany of his sins that day and asking me if I knew what might have gotten him off to a bad start (as if, he needs something to get him off to a bad start!). At this point, my anxiety is high cuz I can't stand being yelled at / chastised for things that I have no control over (which is what the email basically was doing) - oh and ..."I tried to call several times this afternoon and there was no answer..." - so I am doubly bad cuz I was working! -Makes no difference that she didn't call the number that is CLEARLY marked as my preferred method of communication (my cell) and that I didn't even know that she had an email address until 4 days prior when she decided to try and make the fact that she hadn't done her job with the bus change stuff my problem!

But, I decided I needed some distance between me and Matthew to calm down and off I drove. I was in the meeting for 3 minutes when I got a call on my cell from home so I rushed outside to find it was Riley who wanted to tell me that "THE SOUND ON OUR TV ISN'T WORKING" - Oh the catastrophe of it all!! ...but by that time, I was so done that I left and ran to Food Lion for a few things before going home. I walked into the garage to put some of the food in the freezer that I have there and found ...it ...unplugged!!!

So, after I screamed for the two boys to come out to the garage and had a feeble attempt at denial, Matthew admitted that he was playing with the plugs! Ugh! luckily the stuff hadn't defrosted as it had probably been less than 2 hours but I almost blew my head off holding in the screaming I wanted to do cuz...

...well, he had had a bad day at school and I needed to have him at least be able to have some ability to focus when I talked to him about it
...and I know he just can't help himself with some of these things
...and he told the truth nearly without any prompting (which is very unusual)

So, I sent a long note back to the teacher after laying with him and trying to get him to talk about what happened at school. So here I sit, at the end of the next school day with nary an acknowledgement of my email. Have I said ...I hate people today yet?!