Fussy.

I'm fussy today. It was my turn to host our playgroup this morning, which I usually look forward to, but not today. I know my house is a mess and that bugs me. It's a mess because the puke tsunami has been swirling around in here for a week. My main priority has been to control the spread of germs and nastiness, so my focus has been toilets, sinks, doorknobs, light switches, and toys. Right? That's what I'm supposed to do, but I still don't like people to see my house when it's not swept or vacuumed or dusted. It just feels gross. Additionally, I hadn't had time to shower. Also gross.

So there was that.

And then Ear-Splitting Mom came. It's this girl that's really nice and a lot of fun, but OH GOOD LORD SHE'S LOUD. No one can talk over her, so she just talks louder and louder until she's the only one you can hear and you have to listen to her. And she uses the word "awful" a lot. Repetitively. Everything is awful. Awful, awful, awful. It's all just very tiring on the ears.

And I'm watching this whole event evolve around me like I'm an outside observer watching it on TV or something because I'm so spacy. The lack of sleep from the past week has finally hit me now that I'm starting to sleep at night again. When I'm in the trenches, up every hour changing sheets and wiping puke, I guess I'm hopped up on adrenaline, but when things calm down, I crash. So, there I am spaced out, kids whirling around, toys flying, Piglet trying to talk to me over the Ear-Splitting Mom's blastingly loud series of "awfuls" and Pigpen all sleeping trying to climb all over me. That was a good time.

Pigpen is part of my fatigue. I've been carrying him around for over a week because he just wants to be held all the time when he doesn't feel good. He's feeling better, but when he gets sleep-deprived, he's always worse before he gets better. He's truly one of those "sleep begets sleep" kids. I know they aren't all, but he is for sure. So, all these nights up puking and trips to the ER have him pretty deep in the sleep hole. At night, he goes to bed, but wakes up several times early on screaming like he had a bad dream and has to be comforted before he can get back to sleep. For some reason, these events seem to be immediately preceded by my drifting off to sleep. It appears to give Pigpen bad dreams when I fall asleep. It's all quite curious the way it works out.

Then in the morning, he wakes up crazy early (read: 6:30am. I know this is not early, but it is around here, my kids are more like 8:00 kids and so am I.) because he can't sleep because he's tired. [Try to follow here.] So....since he woke up early, clearly he gets very tired early in the morning, but when it gets to be morning nap time, he struggles to fall asleep because he's too tired. [I know, stay with me.] Which makes for a poor morning nap, so at afternoon nap time, he passes out, WONK. Just like that - WONK. Gone. For, ohh.....30 minutes. Then he wakes up screaming. Why? Because he's so tired he can't stand it and he can't sleep. So I have to rock him back to sleep, which I never do, but he's so fried that he can't relax himself. That will happen a couple of times during nap and then we're back to bedtime.

So all of that is kind of making me fussy. Piglet never had these issues. When he's tired, he goes to sleep. When he's not, he stays awake. It's pretty simple. Today, judging by the enthusiastic and tuneless singing of a blend of several Lady Gaga songs and the crashing of Lego buildings being hit by the crane's wrecking ball, I'm guessing he's not so much tired.

Then there's the dog. Yes, the dog. I can't grace him with his given name when he's acting like a complete freak show. For three days now - while I have been completely tired and busy - he's turned into some spastic yap dog. Whenever I come down the stairs during naptime, he thinks it's time for dinner and starts twirling in circles, scratching up the hardwoods with his nails, racing back and forth as though possessed unless I feed him as I just did at 1:45. As in his dinner. As in, he won't eat again until tomorrow morning at 8. He's seriously disturbed. Every single time we let him out, he breaks into full on howling. HOWLING. At the top of his lungs at absolutely nothing....just into the air to let the world know he's here. Plus, he keeps trying to sneak upstairs to eat diapers out of the champ and if I leave my bedroom door open, he gets in my bed every time and ruins my Very Neatly Made Bed that helps me feel all organized and together.

And then there's the dread. I'm dreading this girls' night gig tonight. Normally, I look forward to this kind of thing, but I'm just not in the mood to go tonight. Plus, they changed the venue from a slouchy, comfortable Mexican place right by our neighborhood to a yuppity, British pubbish, schmancy place where I have to actually wear make up and decent clothes. ARRRRGH. I haven't even made it to the shower yet today, and now I have to get pretty? Come ON. Grumble, grumble. And a couple of these girls are the type that despite the fact that they are approaching 40, they derive pleasure from giggling loudly at inside jokes that no one else understands or cares about in an attempt to make people feel left out. It's rather reminiscent of about the 7th grade, but with wine.

To top it all off, the fax machine at Honeybaked Ham won't stop calling my house. When I call the number on the caller ID, it's their fax machine. I can't find a store number to match the fax machine number and so I can't call anyone to tell them to tell their fax machine to stop calling me. I've spent way too much time already on the Honeybaked Ham website trying to figure it out. It's just the thing that might send me over the edge.