The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I need a do-over of the entire week to this point. At the moment, this is because I'm SO UNBELIEVABLY STRESSED and running on nothing but adrenaline. I'm at my desk and I have eighteen gazillion things to do, but none have a deadline of 5 pm today, so I'm taking a moment or ten to blog. Please forgive that this will be little snippets that don't fit together in a coherent whole.

***
Last night was one of the worst nights Sabrina and I have had in quite some time. I truly thought that my face was going to be black and blue this morning. When she starts with the smacking/hair pulling/biting, I don't think she actually knows what she is doing. (I am reluctant to say that too affirmatively, because I don't think that it's an actual dissociative thing. But I don't think she has any control over her ability to stop.) Anyway, last night I succeeded in getting us into a seated position with my arms around her and her legs between mine, and I breathed slowly and counted out loud, hoping to calm her down. I thought she was calmer and had loosened my hug a little when she squirmed out of my arms and started hurting me again. She actually climbed on my back so that I couldn't get away from her, and just smacked the cr@p out of my head. I stood up to carry her to her room, and she grabbed onto a door in the hallway so that I couldn't go further without her falling off my back. (Okay, that sounds pretty conscious of what she was doing!) (This was all after she was supposed to be in bed.)

This morning, unfortunately, was not good either. When she snatched (her word) my glasses and I thought she was going to break them, I did manage to find my old pair. Wow is the prescription different in one eye. Oh well.

***
But what WAS good this morning was that after over a half hour of walking around the apartment in JUST her pajama shirt (as in, no underwear or anything) and following through repeatedly on her threat to "don't tell me what to do or I'll smack you," I succeeded in getting Sabrina to school in her pajamas. I handed her the clean pair of underpants we had picked out to wear today, said "put these on," and she did. I then said "we're going to school, get your bookbag" and her diversion to put on her pajama pants was very quick and without any complaint. She picked up her bookbag, not a complaint. We walked to the outside door, I picked her up to carry her to the car, we drove to school, she put on socks (she thought she would be embarrassed if anyone saw her feet, so cute!), I carried her to her classroom, we went into the bathroom, and she put on her clothes. Of course, I would have been happier if she had gotten dressed at home.

***
Since we ultimately got to school early despite the clothing debacle, we sat down to do her homework after she was dressed. We haven't done her homework since I started working. She is supposed to do it in aftercare, and if she doesn't do it there, I'm not going to take our limited time to do worksheets. We'll do other educational things. But we did her homework this morning, and I was SO IMPRESSED with her! They were introduced to subtraction, and she totally got it. We did the first problem (4 take away 1 is ____) with me counting and then covering over one, and then she did the rest all by herself. Yay Sabrina!

***
It took 18 minutes for me to get from school to the parking garage at the subway station today. You might recall that school is literally ACROSS THE STREET from the subway station. Yeah, I wasn't a happy camper.

***
In the five months that Sabrina has been with me, I've never had to do her hair. This week, she came back from her dad's with a note "here are some bowrettes [sic]. Please do [Sabrina's] hair if you can." School picture day is on Thursday and Sabrina started undoing her braids last night, so I made us an appointment at a kids' salon for tomorrow. I don't feel 100% confident that this place will know what to do with her hair, but if I get a bad feeling once we're there, we'll just leave.

***
I got a smart phone yesterday, another adventure that I hope never to repeat. Seriously, over an hour at Radio Shack. I think it was a combination of RS employee stupidity AND cell carrier stupidity. They can share the blame equally. Anyway, my phone number still isn't working, and it was only supposed to take 24 hours (and the cell carrier person I spoke to yesterday while at RS said that it was "done porting" which I thought meant that it should work right away, but maybe not).

***
When I finally got to work this morning, I had three voice mails and about 20 emails. I realize that none of this is terribly bad, but I'm used to NO voice mails and about 3 emails.

***
I can't find my camera-to-computer cable. So I can't put my most recent (really cute) pictures on my computer.

Sabrina broke my netbook last week (not on purpose, but she did pour water on it on purpose); the computer works but the track pad doesn't.

And on top of all that, I need some of the pictures to make the Mother's Day present for Sabrina's mom that I wanted to make. But since I forgot to go to the craft store on Sunday, I don't have the materials we need anyway.

So you can see why I'm a little adrenaline-riddled. Deep breaths.