Mommy's meltdown . . .

This weekend sucked. (Sorry mom, but that's how I feel) Friday night Robert left for the Indiana Democratic Convention. My mom and step-dad decided it was a great night to take all the grandkids to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate school getting out. You see, my mom is weird, she LOVES Chuck E Cheese. They take the whole family there about 4 times a year. That means eight adults and ten grandkids. My kids were wild and worn out. They slept well Friday and I thought I was in for a great weekend.

We got up on Saturday morning and needed to make a serious trip to Meijer for shopping. It is not often that I take all 3 kids shopping alone. In fact, hardly never. I should've bagged it Saturday because it was awful. Dustin was in rare form. His Fetal Alcohol Syndrome was in full alert status. He was impulsive, whiny, obsessive and argumentative. At one point I was ignoring a tantrum and walked away. Usually he follows me after he sees that it is not working, but this time was different. I non-chalantly turned around and he was gone. I freaked out. I went to the front door of the store and sat on the bench until he showed up. I was so angry, but showing him I was angry does nothing but fuel the fire, so I stood up, gave him the eye and he followed. We finished shopping and stood in line for about 15 minutes behind an amish family that had about 3 trillion coupons. FINALLY, we exited the store. I could almost hear and audible sigh of relief from the store as we left.

Robert came home about 3 hours later, and Dustin was still going strong. He wouldn't take redirection and was actually quite beligerent. I told him to go in his room while I was changing bed sheets upstairs. This is rare lately as he cannot be left unsupervised. A few seconds later I hear the phone ring and Robert asked if I called 911. I had no idea what he was talking about until I opened Dustin's bedroom door and saw the phone laying on his dresser. He was mad at me so he called 911 and hung up, our city has the capability to see where the call is originating from, so they called back. The operator informed Robert that if we could not expalin the call, they had to send out a car. I had all our neighbors gawking as 2 squad cars pulled up in front of the house to check us out. I asked one officer to give Dustin a talking to about calling 911 unneccessarily. He talked completely over his head talking about "wasting the resources and assets of at least two patrol cars . . . " The rest of the night was just as bad.

Sunday we decided to go to our neighborhood park and take some pictures. This park is a rose garden and has fabulous flowers, so off we went. Dustin was horrendous. McCartney and Harrison had to be bribed at every step. We dumped the camera into the new notebook computer and when we sat down to have asecond look at the 70 pictures we noticed they were GONE.

I had a meltdown.

A full fledged, FAS, whiny baby, can't be called nothing but a true BABY FIT. It was simply the last straw. I freaked out like a small child in a candy isle. After going to the car and crying, we simply went to the park side, let the kids play and then went back over to the rose garden and repeated all the pictures. I had my little hissy and now I am better. ** and by the way the pictures are fabulous **

I realized today that not only does Fetal Alcohol affect the child, and the other children in the home and their behavior, but it also affects mine. I have always heard it said that when you live with someone long enough you tend to develope their physical characteristics, well apparently I have lived with Dustin long enough to develope this portion of his disorder . . . or maybe I just need to freak out once in a while. . .

Thank God for my husband. Neither of us seem to freak out at the same time.