I guess it always comes back to the coffee.

I think today goes down as the worst day of staying home with the kids to date.  Although now that I look back on it to record it on this blog, it doesn't seem so horrible.  But at 11:00 this morning, I was beyond frustrated.  Here's the scene:

Ivy, Milo, and I had just gotten back home after going to the Campus and then grocery shopping.  Those two things had gone relatively well, and Milo had even fallen asleep on the way home, so I only had one child to entertain while putting away the groceries, which is always a plus.  So I was happily preparing my morning mocha and Ivy was, I thought, happily putting away the groceries (please note: she helped with this last time and pretty much everything ended up in the refrigerator, whether it needed to be there or not, which was perfectly fine with me because it kept her busy AND helped get food out of bags and into a closed space).  This is the moment that everything went awry.  I'm still not sure why, but Ivy grabbed a mug off the kitchen counter.  This would have been fine, except that it was full of the coffee that I didn't have time to drink this morning.  So in a moment, everything in the kitchen that had previously NOT been covered in coffee, now was: Ivy, Milo's carseat, Milo, the groceries, and about 25% of the kitchen floor.  Thankfully, since the coffee was over three hours old, it was room temperature.  But that didn't stop Ivy and Milo from immediately bursting into tears.  How I didn't join them, I'll never know.

The drama doesn't really stop there, but anything worth sharing does.  The shortened version is that I somehow managed to calmly get Ivy in the bathtub and repeatedly tell her that she wasn't in trouble, because she was convinced that she was.  I got everyone and everything else cleaned up, but at this point Ivy was an emotional wreck, and after multiple irrational conversations (because there is no reasoning with a sobbing two-year-old), I forced Ivy to take a nap.

Like any person on any given day in any given job, it was just something that in the moment seemed overwhelming and awful.  I was ready to go fill out an application at pretty much anywhere.  But, also like anyone, once a few minutes (okay, maybe like thirty) passed, I was back to good.  Present story excluded, I've loved the majority of my time at home with my kids the past month.  To be completely honest, I kind of thought I would hate staying at home.  And I do have some things that I struggle with.  But days like today are a good reminder that to get the good, I have to endure the bad.  And if the "bad" is spilled coffee once every four weeks, I think I can handle this job.