One of Those Days

Today started as yesterday left, just after midnight. I was sitting at my desk before bed, admiring the new brochure I designed for Sean's office. We were planning to send it out today as a direct mail campaign to 13000 people in Utah County, and I was thinking that if I were looking for a dentist, this would be exactly the kind of office where I'd like to go. Then I noticed the typo. The hideous, glaring typo that I had somehow missed over proofread after proofread. Right on the front panel of the brochure, our office address is listed as LAYTON, not Lindon. Those of you who live in Utah know that Layton is about an hour or so north of Lindon, and therefore people in Lindon will probably not be terribly interested in a dental office in *&?#$@& Layton. I ran into the bedroom, nearly in tears, to confess to Sean. He was his usual wonderful, understanding, downplaying self, and assured me it wasn't the end of the world. He convinced me to come to bed, where he held me while I spent the night tossing and turning, wondering how I could have made such an awful mistake, and having nightmares that I had gotten the phone number wrong too (I didn't, thank goodness). With some help from our great mailing people at World Wide Mailing, we can solve it. But it's not going to be the fabulous, polished, perfect brochure I had worked so hard for.

Ella was having one of those mornings when she woke up at 8:00. One of those, "NOOOOO! Go OUT! Don't get me out! Want DADDY!!!! Too bwight! Shut bwinds! Don't change my diaper! ELLA DO IT! AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!" mornings when she has her first full-blown fit in her crib seconds after she wakes up. I wanted to get her up and get to the grocery store early to get a jump on my errands, but she wasn't having it. We went anyway, and what should have been an hour-long trip took over two hours. Part of the problem was trying to rent a steam cleaner for my area rugs and dining room chairs. We're having a dinner party on Saturday and I'd like the place to look as nice as possible, and the rugs have needed to be cleaned for a while now. It was about as easy to rent this steam cleaner as I imagine it would be to rent a leer jet. We waited in line for ages, finally got the thing rented, and asked the service guy to hold it while I did the rest of my shopping downstairs.

The shopping went fine for the most part, other than me suffering from a bout of delayed-onset placenta head and having to run back and forth across the grocery store a hundred times. We finally got to the checkout, and Ella had had enough. Enough again. After the "enough" she'd had upstairs at the service desk, and the "enough" she'd had while we bought some pansies for the pots outside, and "enough" she'd had at the dairy case. Now she had had "enough" with the checkout. She was trying to stand up in the front part of the cart so she could push the buttons on the credit card machine, while I was quickly loading groceries into my bags to placate the impatient people who had been drawn like moths to a flame to the express checkout immediately after the sympathetic checkout lady had allowed me to go through with my 1.2 million items. In order to avoid a head injury, I lifted Ella from the front part of the cart into the main part, where she couldn't reach the credit card machine and couldn't get out. I finished bagging the groceries and turned to lift the last bag into the cart. There sat little Ella Mae unloading an entire carton of eggs around her, gleefully chanting, "Eggies! Eggies! Eggies evooeewhayooo!" By the grace of god, none of them broke and I caught her just as she was preparing to launch one overboard. As we walked away from the checkstand, she yelled, "Thank you, nice yady!" to the checkout woman.

The rest of the day went about the same way, Ella alternating between positively infuriating to totally disarming. The problem was partly Ella, partly me, and partly the Leer Jet Steam Cleaner that worked half the time and the other half puked out its contents onto an almost-clean floor. After taking over some groceries and flowers for Richard, our neighbor who is finally returning tomorrow from what seemed a very long winter away (we have to wait a few more weeks for Dennis, sadly), I sat with a glass of wine watching Ella and Maggie chase each other around, Ella half-naked, squealing and giggling with Maggie at her hip, while Sean got her bathed and ready for bed. Thank goodness for a fabulous partner who comes home from a long day at work and immediately takes over, rescuing a tired, exasperated wife from One of Those Days.