Baaaad mother

I've come to a realization. Either I am now a bad mother or I have been a bad mother for a long time. See, Liam requires a huge amount of hands-on, face-to-face, entertain-me, hey-mom-hey-mom-hey-mom attention. And I don't know if I was a better mother when I was giving it to him or not. Because I certainly can't keep up with his demands these days. And the resulting fallout isn't always pretty.
Luckily, it has been nearly 50 degrees for several days now, sunny, and the snow is melting all over the place, so I feel very little guilt when I shove him out the door.
To keep things running this week, I have lists of lists and lists to remember the lists. There's the dinner food list, the daily activity list, the work list, the trying-to-start-my-own-business-so-I-never-have-to-work-for-anyone-again list, the housekeeping list, and I've even got a don't-forget-to-pluck-your-eyebrows list. It's called pampering, but at the end of the day, even maintaining my eyebrows is a bit above me.
Even with all the lists, I still lose my cool a bit, usually when Liam asks why exactly he can't play with the box that I told him he couldn't play with because it has my jewelry in it.
And adding to the confusion is the fact that I have lost my dishwasher. It happened like this: On Friday, when Matt came home and found me chiseling grime from around the bathroom sink faucet, he banished me out of the house. So I went to a restaurant, ordered a nice glass of red wine and an appetizer with cheese in it, throwing caution to the wind. My friend Karyn stopped by and we chatted. It was bliss. Then the phone rang.
As I was leaving for this escape, I heard an odd sound near the fuse box in the bathroom. Couldn't figure out what it was, though. Matt figured it out. There was a wire that used to connect to a warning light for our water tank. Somehow it had broken close to the ground, and we had wrapped electrical tape around it and forgotten it existed. Well, that spot now has about a foot of melted ice water in it. Sooo, the wire started making all sorts of neat snappy, sparky noises and steaming or smoking, we couldn't tell which. Either way, we had to turn the power off to the whole house while we searched for the cover to the fuse panel, which was also buried under the snow.... and once we found it, we found out it was wrong, and the fuse was actually inside. So we turned off the fuse. And what else was on that fuse, you ask? The dishwasher. The washing machine, too, but luckily, I was able to use an extension cord to plug that in elsewhere. The dishwasher, sadly, is hardwired in. So, there you have it.
And the only way to fix this problem? Chisel the ice off the cover to the water tank, and climb inside down to an electric box in there that we pray has the other end of the zappy wire in it. I have never wanted snow to melt so much in my life.
Oh, yeah. Thea.
She's doing really good. Teething like crazy. Hates laying down, wants to sit in her walker most of all. Very laughy. Giggles when you clean under her armpits. And I gave her some cereal yesterday and today and she opened her mouth for it repeatedly, which is how I determine that I am not, in fact, torturing her.
Photos coming soon.