I was horrid to the kids yesterday. I had gone to bed very, very late and woke up feeling ill an hour later. I was nauseaus and kept going back to sleep and waking up. I finally stayed awake for the day at around 8 yesterday morning on less than 4 hours of sleep. I was tired and cranky and just when I thought I could take a nap for a couple of hours, there was something I had to do that prevented it.
So, I was in a foul mood for most of the late afternoon and everything that a child did that was wrong was perceived as a personal attack on me and was met with foul mouthed banshee type ravings by me.
After a while, I regained my sanity and apologized with an explanation of my mood. For the most part, they recognized it as a warning and decided to behave better.
I hate it when I behave like that. And sometimes, while I am acting like a raving lunatic, there is another part of me observing the behavior and tsktsking me all the while.
I'm feeling a little better today, Thank God.
I made the pumpkin bread again and it came out looking even worse than the last batch. It tastes ok, it just looks really ugly and the top doesn't look bread-like at all. It looks like what I imagine lava would look like on the ground after it had cooled.
When I had recovered from my PMS-type behavior, the kids and I had a fairly good time last night. Bryan, Carrie and I made the pumpkin bread (the batter tasted much better than the finished product). Stephanie and Johnny were coloring Christmas scenes and later, Carrie, Johnny and I spent some time visiting a Christmas site on the web.
Shortly after the littles were in bed, I went up to my room, made myself some tea and half-watched a taped episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and then I rewound the tape and hit the mute button for the first hour and a half while I immersed myself in Death of a Traveling Man.
The reason why I hit the mute button was because one of the kids had hit the record button at the beginning of the tape and recorded over a couple of Star Trek episodes. So, the beginning of that tape has an episode of Fraggle Rock and a couple of epidodes of Duck Tales on it.
This is one year that I am grateful for reruns. I missed several episodes of Voyager at the beginning of the season because I couldn't get the UPN channel in correctly on my TV. The problem has been solved now, and I am looking forward to taping what I had missed.
for the border background.