Thankful For Unmitigated Gall

So, Friday night, hubby decides that he wants Chinese. Normally this gets absolutely no objection from me, but...

Thing is, little man, who is now two and testing his boundaries and all that crap, has figured out that if he acts up or gets even mildly loud-fussy, Daddy will remove him from the premises. Hubby's reasoning is that he doesn't want to be rude to whomever else is there. However, in his consideration of others he's destroyed our ability to have a decent meal in public as a family. Mainly because I'm raising a less homicidal version of Family Guy's Stewie.

Knowing that behaving like a troll monkey will get him both attention and give him the control to decide when we leave a place has turned our son into a little bad-attitude dictator. And Daddy falls for it every time. Mama, however has had enough... btw I know I'm right in this assessment cause as soon as we get in the car, demon-child stops almost instantaneously, and the child reverts to angel status.

At this point, you're saying, "Hel-lo!?! Have ya ever heard of a babysitter? (eye roll)" To which I reply, "Yes, we finally found one (two years later, but hey, I'm a stay at home mama out in the country with no one nearby that I feel I can leave my son with)."

However, I promised the new babysitter, (out of an understanding culled from many, many years of personal babysitting experience) that I would always give her a couple of days notice. Therefore, I have reserved her services for this upcoming weekend, because I was not expecting to go out to dinner this past Friday, hubby threw me a curve ball. OK, that explanation out of the way, let's get back to the story...

So, when we left the Chinese restaurant after barely a plate of dinner ~ again~ I was ready to stab them both in the forehead with forks fit to be tied. Because not only had my dinner been ruined yet again, I knew, from prior experience, that I would not be getting my leftovers the next day... they tend to 'disappear' right into hubby's gullet when I'm not looking. Which irks me to no end, cause it's bad enough to have to endure nuked-day-old-Chinese-food, but to have none is simply unacceptable. I mean, where the hell is the courtesy he showed all the other diners in the restaurant when it comes to leaving my leftovers alone? It evaporates in direct proportion to the strength of his hunger, that's where.

Half an hour in the car to get home from the restaurant had done nothing to improve my mood. I was ticked, and determined to get my leftovers this time. When we get there, hubby is still hungry, and proceeds to eat his leftovers straight from the carton. I plate mine up, noticing that it's way too much food, but, as I said, I was still ticked and by now, thoroughly determined to eat my food, so I give it a quick warming and eat the rest of my dinner... all of it.

I calm down after that... for a minute... until hubby tells me that he's going to bed ~ at 9:30 on a Friday night. Mind you, I haven't had more than 5 hours of continuous nighttime sleep in months now. Ticked Off returned with a friend. Turns out my lousy attitude was only out picking up his buddy Self-destructive Vengeance so they could come back to my house and keep me company. With those two bundles of ugly whispering in my ear, I made an egregious error.

I headed for the pan of homemade brownies. I cut a huge swath and poured a very large glass of my son's whole milk to wash them down with. They were de-friggin-licious. No lie. OMG they were good. But I was too full before I ate the brownies... then I angry-ate too many brownies AND washed them down with at least 20 oz. of whole milk. It was kinda the sweets version of Thanksgiving dinner. And I was hurtin'. At least I thought I was hurtin', I had no idea...

No idea whatsoever that my body would say, "Alright woman, these are your internal organs speaking. We have had enough of this reckless eating in quantities that would feed a third-world family for weeks. We are tired of bearing the brunt of your anger and non-existent self-control. Obviously, you've lost your mind. Therefore, we are staging a coup. Maybe a bit of our mutinous behavior will remind you who is really running this show."

And it would say it at 6 am Saturday morning. The spokesperson would be my gall bladder and it has one hell of a commanding stage presence. It is the E.F. Hutton of the digestive tract; when the gall bladder speaks, people listen! I spent the next three hours praying to the Porcelain God. I won't go into details except to say that if the shoes of my grandchildren had come out of my mouth I wouldn't have been the least bit surprised ~ and I don't have grandchildren ~ 'nuff said. However, surprisingly, this is not the worst part of a gall bladder attack. The worst part is the pain. Y'all, I have had two children by Cesarean section. This was worse.

My only saving grace was that hubby wound up with ten stitches a few weeks back and they gave him Darvocet. When the puking stopped, I took one and within half an hour I was pain-free enough to pass out for a couple of hours.

When I emerged from my drug-induced coma, the pain was still gone. But apparently, I'm allergic to Darvocet. I deduced this from spending the rest of the day with a throat so swollen that if I still had tonsils, I'd have suffocated to death. The swelling went down sometime that evening, and obviously, I'm still here.

But then I turn on the news this morning, and hear about the killing spree at the language center in New York State and the devastating earthquake in Italy, and the woman with the flat tire on the freeway in Houston who died after getting out of her car and being run-over several times, and the father in Oregon who killed himself and all 5 of his kids because his wife was leaving him...

I gotta tell Y'all, I am so thankful that all I had to deal with this weekend was a bad-attitude baby, and a harsh lesson from my gall bladder. Considering what was floating around the Universe this weekend, I got off light.

And how was your weekend?