Catching Up--January 7th

Internet's back.  Q went back to school, so I forgot to post anything.  School days are rough.
Get up at 7, get myself fed and dressed.  7:30 get Q up, fed and dressed...or at least put food and clothes out for her and let her do her thing.  7:45 get Leeloo up and dressed.  8:00 get them into coats, hats and gloves.  Drive over towards the school.  8:15 get the girls out of the car, set up the stroller, walk the rest of the way to school.  8:30 Leeloo and I head back to the car, drive home, and I get her out of her zillion layers and accessories.  8:45 Get her something to eat. 9:00 Leeloo's usually sleepy enough to go back down for a nap quickly, she doesn't eat much right off the bat, so she's down for a nap.

But seriously, that's 2 hours.  2 hours of routine for me surrounding getting 1 kid to school.  Sure, Leeloo and I need to eat at some point in the mornings and we need to get dressed at some point too, but I actually cannot WAIT for Curt to be back to his grad school schedule instead of this nutty break schedule with his temp internship/job.

Even dropping the work schedule back to part-time while he's in school means I get 2 mornings a week that I don't have to spend 4 hours of my day getting people ready for and ferrying them back and forth between school and train stations.  Because that's the thing, I do the whole nutty morning routine, then I have to get Q back home from school at 2:30 and at 6:30 I have to go get Curt from the train station every day, meaning I have to pack both kids into the car AGAIN, coats and hats and all of that as well. 

I'm so tired.  I'm running all day.  It's overwhelming.
All of this is usually after I'm up all night with Leeloo, who has grown rather...assertive...about not liking to be put to bed.  There's a lot of kicking and headbutting and full-body arching.  I have bruises on my thighs and cuts in my mouth from her protestations where she pounds me with her heels and headbutts me in the face.  So I do that 2 or 3 times a night on the bad nights, she must be teething again.  I get 4 hours of sleep, maybe, and not typically consecutive.  Then I do the school routine.  Then I come home and try to get stuff done.  Not much, but SOMETHING, ANYTHING, because the apartment is crumbling around me.

I'm running on.  I'm not unhappy.  I'm not.  It's hard to explain.  I'm just so tired this week, the week is only half over and I just feel very swamped by all of this.  I know some people do this kind of stuff routinely, and I'm sure you get used to it.  I'm sure you get the kid on a better sleep schedule just through persistence and routine, and maybe some acetaminophen.  You develop shortcuts and tricks for what you can.  I just don't feel so much like a person right now, I feel like a taxicab.  Not the driver, but the cab.  I've lost person-hood and have become the vehicle that keeps people moving in the right direction, I'm the alarm clock that wakes them up, I'm the high-tech gizmo that prepares their meals.  It's frustrating, it's dehumanizing.

As I said, I'm not actually unhappy.  I just need to reclaim a bit of my own personal identity.
It's tough, though.