Friday, June 11, 2010

My Lesson for Today

Friday night pizza night is a really good idea.

Tonight, I tried to cook dinner after work. Now, I cook dinner after work every week night* so you would think this would be no problem. But Fridays are busy days for me. I have a lot of meetings, which makes it hard to schedule my three** pumping sessions. One of the meetings runs over the lunch hour, which I hate. I also have to write my weekly status report on my department. Plus, I'm tired by the end of the work week.

So, tonight's dinner was an easy recipe, but I still damn near melted down getting it on the table. It all started off well, with Pumpkin entertaining Petunia while I assembled the dish. Then, Pumpkin decided to put the hood on Petunia's shirt up, and Petunia fell forward and bonked her forehead on the cupboard (something that happens a lot these days, and is not usually Pumpkin's fault). I never really got Petunia happy again. Pumpkin pouted over the reprimand I gave her for several minutes, and then announced that she didn't like what I was making for dinner. Meanwhile, the water boiled over on the stove and made a mess and I discovered that we were out of Pumpkin's bread, so I had to substitute a tortilla, which required heating in the overn instead of a quick turn in the toaster.

Then Hubby came home, and went straight back to change clothes and go to the bathroom. This is part of his routine, and I think it is important for him, functioning as a way to separate the parts of his day. I don't really begrudge him this, but I am intensely jealous of it, because I often don't get a chance to go to the bathroom after work until after Petunia is in bed. I was already a bit grumpy, and my mood just deteriorated further.

I was so frazzled by dinner that I didn't handle Petunia's subsequent refusal to go to sleep at her regular time all that well, which undoubtedly just made the routine take longer. And now Hubby has been stuck doing all the nightly chores, because Pumpkin has also decided not to go to sleep easily, so I need to stay nearby and wait for her to stop calling me back into her room to tell me random things like how she likes to go to day care and see her friends and teachers. Followed a few minutes later by an announcement that she also likes her weekends with Mommy and Daddy. I am typing this blog post in hopes that it will keep me from running screaming from the house.

My dish (Gnocchi with a turkey and tomato ragu) was tasty. But I think we'll stick to frozen pizza on future Friday nights.

*Because of how we've arranged our schedule: I work the "early shift" and do day care pick up. Hubby works the "late shift" and does day care drop off. In actuality, our "shifts" are only about 30 minutes different, but those are crucial minutes. We believe in family dinner time. In order to make family dinner time possible, we need to east dinner at roughly the time Hubby walks through the door, so I cook. On the flip side, I largely missed the Great Sunscreen Wars of the 12-24 months period of Pumpkin's life.

**Soon to be reduced to two sessions if Petunia keeps her recent bottle schedule.

2 comments:

  1. Pizza for sanity seems like a win win for everyone. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. pizza is our regular friday meal. I hate cooking on friday. I'm just tired. no ideas on the sleep....

    ReplyDelete

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