Tough Mama Moment

This afternoon found me sitting in my truck outside Ft Campbell’s Hourly Care giving myself the same pep talk I’ve given to plenty of my friends in the last year-ish.

He’ll settle down in a minute and be playing away. 

He’d rather be playing in there then being chased around while I’m trying to get something done. 

It’s just a stage.

I need a break. 

He needs to burn some energy. 


See, we’ve been stuck indoors for the last week or so. Snow, then rain, then snow again. Monkey has been bouncing off the walls. He’s in this stage of vacillating between fierce independence and desperate, whining clingy-ness. I was starting to go a little stir crazy myself from chasing him around. Our roads were cleared by the time of his hourly care reservation so I figured he’d go, I’d run some errands, visit the pony and we’d both be better for it.

Back to that parking lot.

When I got there, the ladies in his regular room suggested that we try switching him to the toddler room today. He’s supposed to switch over on Friday (they do it around 18 months) but there were very few kids because of the weather. Their thinking was that with fewer kids, he’d have more one on one attention if he struggled with the switch. (this is why I love the ladies at hourly care, esp in the infant room. They are lovely.) Monkey wasn’t so thrilled about the whole new-room-new-people-different-routine thing.

By “wasn’t so thrilled” I mean high pitched screaming, clinging to whatever part of my clothing he could reach. It was slightly traumatizing (for me).

I gave him a hug, handed him over and left.

And sat in the truck, in the parking lot, debating on whether or not I should just go back and get him and take him with me. I mean, most days I do my errands with me, we could just do that. Right?

No. He needs to learn that I’ll go and come back and he’ll be OK. And when ArmyMan is gone, I *have* to take care of myself. I don’t have the option of getting worn out and run down. Spending time with my horse, even taking care of errands is part of that. After some mental steeling myself, I ran my errands, went to the barn, then picked up a happily painting Monkey.

Now, he only stayed two hours instead of the four he had reserved but oh well.