Y’all I feel like Superwoman, today
Disclaimer: I need to celebrate a bit after the insanity that took place this morning and the other parenting subs won’t understand the gravity of what went down and how hard it really was. Please don’t read this if you’re not in a good headspace to hear me brag just a lil bit 💜
I hate August. It hasn’t dipped below 80 degrees F in a couple weeks now and recently the highs have been over 100 so I’ve been a bit more unregulated than usual just due to the heat. To add to the fun, we’ve been getting rid of flour beetles in our pantry over the past couple of days which has literally never been an issue for us for the decade we’ve lived in our house. I figured out where they were nesting (rip to my almond flour 😭) took care of that and we sorted through all of our dry goods, put the remaining ones in airtight containers, and cleaned the pantry shelves. Awesome, right?
Y’all, I woke up to a swarm of fire ants (many of which were absolutely gigantic!!) on my pantry floor this morning 😭😭😭😭.
Fun fact about me: I cannot handle an excess of bugs in my home, of any kind. We’re usually pretty on top of things like this but yenno how it gets when you’ve got a little one (mine is 14 months and has been super active since he achieved mobility so a few of our deeper cleaning chores have fallen by the wayside, I admit).
Instantly I’m in a murderous rage and feel like crashing out into a meltdown…but that’s not what happened.
Instead, I somehow managed to:
Exterminate a large portion of the ants, figure out what was attracting them (a giant bag of skinny pop from Costco that my husband got for me as a lil treat but somehow had a tiiiny opening in the bag) and get rid of that, completely clean out my pantry floor, deep clean the area, caulk up some tiny openings along the base boards where they could get in, set a pet and baby safe poison trap for any stragglers so they could take it back to their nest and kill the queen.
All of this on top of feeding myself and my baby, completing our usual morning chore routine together (prep baby meals for the day & milk/water cups, unload the dishwasher, do a load of laundry, and fix my hair in my usual sensory friendly style), coordinate details for an upcoming visit with the in-laws, and SOMEHOW got the baby down for his nap with 5 minutes to spare. We even had time for our usual pre-nap silly cuddle routine to reconnect since he spent a large chunk of the morning playing independently while I dealt with The Invaders 🐜 .
Y’all I’m so freaking proud of us. My son was so patient and resilient with minimal complaints; what a little trooper! I managed to keep my temper to an absolute minimum (only had one quick outburst in the other room when the toilet also clogged in the middle of all this because of course it did 🫠).
When I was growing up, my own mother would have been terrifying to be around if all this happened to her in the span of one morning and I, as a result, would’ve been close to shaking in fear of being the reason that she snapped entirely. But my son was giggling and chatting with me for most of the morning while I took care of the problem(s). 🥹
I don’t know how I managed to do all this, honestly, the morning is kind of a blur outside of the broad strokes. But the crisis was handled and I’m now back in my routine, burning off my extra adrenaline on my walking pad, like usual.
Just wanted to share this because parenting/running a household can be so difficult, especially for us as autistic people, but I love knowing that I can still do hard things if life throws me massive curve balls like this…now hopefully everything in my house can calm the fuck down for 48 hours or so 😅…
Mama needs a minute lol.
I might book a massage this weekend…I think I’ve earned it 🥰