Agita
I feel like I've been slacking off on the parenthood posts lately. I've abandoned the monthly updates—which is probably a bad thing, as they help remind me when things happen and how we got where we are now—and I don't blog most of the funny stuff the Beaner does these days. To assuage this guilt, here's something that happened tonight:
I came up to my desk around 7pm to check e-mail and see if there was any inspiration hovering about (it's been escaping me all day), and just then one of my team's managers pinged me to see if I was ready to meet tomorrow about an idea I've been working on. I rather hopefully said, "you don't need visuals, do you?" He responded with "well, that'd be nice." Uh oh. I suck at mockups. My only hope—and it was a slim one—was to find some graph paper PRONTO and start sketching out what I thought this thing would look like. WHERE THE HELL WAS MY GRAPH PAPER?
Within five minutes I was thoroughly stressed out, and after seven I'd given up the search for graph paper and pulled out a yellow legal pad. I started two drawings, then scratched them out. That's when the Beaner came up for bathtime and completely invaded my office space. He picked up the case for the little USB drive I got at BlogHer and said, "how you open this?" I showed him, and then went back to my legal pad. He closed the case and then said, "can you open it?" I opened it. He closed it again, this time pinching his finger. Oy. "Stop closing it," I said.
I returned to scribbling and scratching out. "What is it?" asked the Beaner. "What is it? [pause] What is it? Mommy, WHAT IS IT?" I looked up and saw that he was flailing the open USB case around. "It's a case for a USB... thing."
A few seconds pass, and he asks again, "Mommy, what is it?"
"{Beaner}, Mommy needs to get this work done. I love you very much, but I'm stressing out and you're not helping."
Al, from the bathroom: "{Beaner}, stop giving Mommy agita."
The Beaner responds by knocking over my tea kettle and spilling water all over the floor. I let out a growl of frustration and dash into the bathroom for a washcloth to mop up the spill.
"What happened?" Al asks from the shower.
I roar again and shout, almost coherently, "HE'S INVADING MY SPACE!"
Al: "{Beaner}, come in here and get ready for your shower."
I have about 10 minutes of relative quiet, during which a colleague tries to talk me off this mockup ledge I'm on, I try to come to some conclusion regarding the order of operations for the idea, and I read Maggie's birth story. The Beaner then pads over, hugs the front of me and the back of my chair, and leans his wet head against my thigh. "I love you, Mommy," he says. "I don't want your agita."
"Thank you, sweetie," I reply, understanding him to mean that he doesn't want to give me agita. "I love you, too." He squeezes me and repeats his anti-agita message a couple more times, then lets go. He's spotted something on the corner of my desk: The plastic maraca he left there a few weeks ago.
"There's agita," he says. And with an evil grin, he shakes it.