Kortney and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

This day actually started yesterday. I knew I'd caught Korban's nasty cold. Yesterday wasn't so bad, but the story starts sometime around 9, after getting home from my hour long workout. I received a rather unfriendly email from one of the weight loss challenge participants, accusing me of being mean and breaking the "don't discourage others" rule, and taking people's money. Granted, sometimes I am mean. It's true. I have my moments. After reading and rereading what I had sent, I still felt like I hadn't been mean, but thought maybe there was someway it could have been received as such. I then realized that this email that was sent was actually sent to the entire group of weight loss contestants. I thought surely it was a mistaken "reply all." I sent out a very nice apology everyone in the group, and an individual one to the person who'd sent me the email. I was really bugged by it. I also was feeling awful and felt like my head was going to explode from the sinus pressure. Korban wasn't fairing too well either. I think I got maybe 3 hours of sleep that night.

Tuesday we had to wake up everyone early. The kids both had their well child checks at 8:20 at Ben's work clinic. My kids hate being woken up in the morning. We headed up to the clinic and got both the kids vitals done before Ben took off to work. Two kids in a doctors office is crazy. They want to get into everything. They were both screaming and fighting with each other. It makes it really hard to remember anything I wanted to talk to the doctor about. Korban, it turns out, has tonsillitis. She went ahead and wrote us a script for antibiotics, but said that we should wait another four days to see if he gets better first. We do have his tonsillitis recorded, and I will probably take him in every time he gets a cold to have it recorded again, because I think we are going to be fighting to get his tonsils out. The poor kid can't breath when he's even minorly sick, and we're pretty convinced he has sleep apnea. He's also a little behind on his speech. The crummy thing is, we can't even go see an ENT until he's two. Ugh. Six more months.

Then it was time for shots. I told Kennady she would be getting a shot (I was getting flu shots for the kids). What I wasn't aware of, is that they do all the pre-school immunizations at the 4 year check up. Korban went first and got his two shots. He didn't like it much, but cheered right up with some candy. Kennady started screaming while Korban was getting his shots. She had to get 7 shots. It took 4 people to hold her down. It was not fun for anyone. She didn't calm down until we were in the car and Ben came down from work. What I didn't realize is that Ben was working in the building. I thought he was up on campus like he has been everyday for the last several weeks. Had I known that, it would have made things so much easier.

I was feeling even worse by this time and really, really just wanted a nap. We went to brunch with Ben, to get Kennady a smoothie so she would calm down. After we dropped Ben back at work, we stopped at ToysRUs for Kennady to pick out a toy. That took forever. She picked out a couple of movies (which I scored an awesome deal on), and we headed home (after only a few small tantrums in the store). As soon as we were outside the store, Kennady started crying that her legs hurt. I had to carry her and Korban in the house. I set Kennady up with a movie and some snacks and started working on getting Korban down for a nap. For some reason the kid was wired. He refused to take a nap. He didn't take a nap at all that day, but instead ran around like a crazy monkey. Kennady fells asleep within 5 minutes of her movie starting and slept for 3 1/2 hours. When she woke up all she did was cry and said she couldn't walk. Korban, in addition to being hyper, was extremely grumpy and whiny.

Somewhere in all of this I got an email from that person. I was informed that the group email was to everyone on purpose, to teach me a lesson. This person also continued to tell me about how unprofessional I was being, because they work in a job where lots of money is involved, and anytime money is involved there is an expected level of professionalism. This person also copy and pasted definitions of all the big words they used. They said they did not appreciate me telling them that I was cranky (this is really only one person, and I know I am using my pronoun incorrectly, but I wanted to avoid calling this person "it"). Nor my sarcasm in saying that I wanted to eat lunch and my children needed attention. All in all it was one of the most patronizing letters I have ever read. Clearly they didn't know who they were writing to.

I informed them that as they were not paying me a cent, I was not willing to put up with demands, threats or patronization. That I didn't care if they didn't appreciate that I informed them that I was cranky, because it was true. That I really was hungry and my children did need attention. And that their expectations of a friendly challenge, with a leader who is unpaid, to be both professional and lenient with the rules, mindful of all human situations and yet void of emotion and human responsibilities was unrealistic. That I didn't appreciate them defining words to me, as I both owned a dictionary and didn't need one for the words they were using. That it was both rude and unprofessional of them to publicly flog me, instead of approaching me directly. That it was not their place to teach me a lesson. And that they could either stop with the public tongue lashings or they could drop out of the challenge and we could take a vote on whether their $20 would be refunded.

And that was the nice letter that actually got sent. It really peeves me when people assume that because I stay home with my children that I am an uneducated woman with no real life experience.

Did I mention I was sick and cranky? Ben also got stuck at work until 8:30. I somehow managed to get Kennady and Korban to eat dinner (they both only wanted PB sandwiches and apples). And I managed to make myself a healthy dinner. After I got Korban to bed, it really wasn't so bad. I just laid on the couch and snuggled Kennady while we watched Ratatouille, until Ben got home.

Today has been much better. I'm just taking it easy trying to kick this stupid cold/sinus infection/tonsillitis. Is it really only Wednesday though?