motherhood, politics, faith & whatnot

Suze’s patience was at code level orange, dangerously close to code level red.

Code level orange usually invovles a moderate amount of yelling along with some hard-closing (read: slamming) of cabinets and drawers.

Code level red usually involves more yelling, slamming of doors and what mainly distinguishes it from orange is the throwing of various household objects — remotes, phones, that kind of thing. Not at anyone, mind you, but definitely with the intent to break ‘cause breaking stuff feels so good sometimes.

Yes, as you can see, I have a bit of a temper on occasion. Tempers and two-year-olds and teething babies aren’t always a good combination.

Take Friday morning for instance. We have a play set out back that the previous owners so graciously left us. It’s pretty nice, but the mosquitoes are so bad in our backyard that we can’t really play out there very much through the summer.

Things are starting to cool down finally, so we went out back Friday morning. There’s an upper level that Daniel needs helping getting up to, so I helped him climb up.

Daniel’s not the bravest child when it comes to physical activity, which I think is in part his nature, but I’m also afraid that we’ve fostered this tentativeness a bit. So, when he wants to do something more adventurous, I try to help him out with it.

Well, once he got up there, I had to go check on the baby because I thought I heard him crying. he had been taking a nap. Sure enough. He was awake and crying. I didn’t want to take him out to the play set area because I had begun to notice that the mosquitoes were getting bad.

But Daniel didn’t want to come down. Or rather, he wanted to come down, but he didn’t want me to help him the only way that I could, if that makes sense. I think he wanted me to come up and carry him down the ladder or something. But to be more stable, I wanted to guide him down while standing on the ground.

So, with the baby screaming (I had moved him outside in the exersaucer while I figured out how to get Daniel down), I tried everything to coax Daniel down, but was quickly losing my temper. And didn’t know what to do.

I wish I could have been more patient and gently coaxed him down. But as I mentioned, I was at code level orange. So I finally just climbed up and grabbed him and took him down kicking and screaming.

I was so disappointed that it ended like that because it was supposed to be a fun thing and ended up being all too much drama.

Aunt Flo hasn’t really been around either because I’m still nursing or because of my b.c., but I think there’s some regularity to these level orange/red days. If I can figure it out, then I can make sure to be far away from civilization on those days, or something. Heh.