maybe i need more chocolate

My patience is seriously lacking these days. I hate to admit it, but I find it terribly hard to deal with a toddler while pregnant. Some days things are fabulous- Gabe is easy and sweet and compliant, and then other days, like today, I want to lock myself in the bathroom and scream.

We walked to the park that is over a mile away because it's his favorite, which was probably a HUGE mistake because I almost melted from the heat and humidity. On the way, we stopped at one of my favorite coffee shops. They have multiple little bead maze toys at the coffee shop, so I unstrapped Gabe to let him play while I ordered. Big mistake. Within 30 seconds, he was running around the cafe like a madman and ignoring the bead mazes completely. In the meantime, 3 other children who were around the same age sat around quietly with their mothers/caregivers and played nicely at the tables. I sat at the table to get him to calm down and in his haste to get away, he knocked over my full iced coffee onto me and all over the floor and then took off across the coffee shop again.

It took all my mental fortitude to keep it together as I'm chasing him around and then getting down on my hands and knees and wiping up the coffee. It didn't help that the workers at the coffee shop were totally unsympathetic and pretty unfriendly to me when I told them about the coffee spillage.

We left shortly thereafter and headed over to the playground, where we played nicely for 20 minutes before slipping off of a rocker and getting a bloody lip. Back to the house we went, kicking myself for not thinking through this heat and humidity thing. We arrived and I got distracted answering an email for a minute or so, until I heard water running in the kitchen. Gabe had dragged a chair over to the kitchen sink, turned on the water, taken the sprayer and SPRAYED THE WHOLE KITCHEN DOWN. We're talking some serious flooding. And I felt that I couldn't even get that mad, because I'm the one that wasn't supervising him in the first place! It was so much water, I had to run to the basement and grab all our beach towels to mop up the mess, and I'm still finding piles of hidden water everywhere. Inside drawers, under the sink, under the stove.

It's moments like these that make it so hard for me to hold it together. Before being pregnant, I would laugh it off in most circumstances, but these days, I either get furiously angry or break down in tears. I've never wanted to spank Gabe before, but these days I find myself wanting to give him a smack on the hand or a swat on the behind. I find myself yelling more too, and this just isn't the environment I want him to be in. I certainly think there is a time and place for me to raise my voice, but lately it is happening more and more often.

I hate myself for being this tired, this impatient, this frustrated, but it isn't something I'm doing intentionally. I'm doing my best to hold it together, and there are just days when it feels almost impossible.

Tell me this is a typical pregnancy thing. Tell me it's going to get better once this baby comes. Or at least will I learn to cope with the frustration?

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In other happier news, today marks 6 years from the date Josh and I walked down the aisle together. I'd do it again in an instant. He is my best friend, my confidante, my sanity keeper, and everything else in between. On the one hand, we cannot possibly have been married for 6 years already, and on the other hand, it feels like we've always been together.

I am so unbelievably, impossibly, shockingly lucky to call him my husband. I don't know what I did to deserve him.