This week was difficult hard please-medicate-me-because-I-am-going-to-lose-it painful hard. I went back to work (really, not that bad), Steve, Stella and Porter all shared a cold (difficult, but manageable), and the realization finally set in that Stella is showing outward signs of revolt against the fact that she is no longer the center of the universe (where things start getting ugly).

In looking back over the last 2 or 3 weeks, the signs have all been there, but crisis management is a very task-oriented thing, making it easy to lose sight of the big picture. I have been asked over and over how Stella is reacting to the new baby in the house, and have been consistently telling people, with some amount of confidence, that she is doing pretty well. Denial? Ignorance? Whatever the case, this has not really been true. One of the huge lessons I learned this week is that the basis on which I have been evaluating the situation is significantly flawed. Just because she isn’t freaking out each time I pay attention to Porter, doesn’t mean she isn’t resentful and bitter that her life has been turned upside down – and letting us know in random and unrelated ways.

There have been so many signs that, when taken in aggregate, make it painfully obvious that we are dealing with a toddler on the edge: the odd days where she wets her pants for no apparent reason, the fact that she is now – with increasing regularity – terrorizing all of the other kids at day care, the fact that her attention span – on a scale of 1 to 10, ranks somewhere around -4, and that she finds so much pleasure (and power) in her ability to find new and innovative ways to push us to the very edge of our sanity. I guess you could say that she has officially invoked the “Minimum Attention Hours Required” clause in her contract. She has been continually lowering the threshold as to how far she will stoop just to get a reaction. Then, last night she did it: she laid in wait for the perfect moment (when we had company over) in which to use Porter as a bongo drum – beating on his chest until he screamed. The entire episode took less than 3 seconds, and it all seemed to be happening in that only-in-the-movies slow-motion kind of way: I saw it, turned, and leapt towards her yelling a low-gutteral “NOOOOOOOOOO”. Andrea and Brian stood there – mouths agape. It was like a giant punctuation mark on a week that already had us questioning our abilities to make it through each day without complete and total emotional breakdown.

As all of our manuals are quick to point out, Stella can’t really reconcile what is going on. It’s not like she can sit us down and say, “Steve. Natalie. I have come to the conclusion that this just isn’t working for me. I am feeling emotionally and physically displaced, and I really need you to understand the feelings of confusion I am experiencing.” Instead her approach is to spend each day on a seek and destroy mission.

We have been trying so hard to be aware of the effects that a new sibling were going to bring, and tried to mitigate them wherever possible. Whenever we can, we take time out to spend with her, and her alone. We have spent lots of energy emphasizing the idea of our “family” and have tried to downplay her grasps at negative attention. Not to be outdone, she spends her time thinking up new and more outrageous things to show us that she means business. Sometimes I feel like I am just days away from waking up in the middle of the night to find her poised over my head holding a pillow. Luckily, she has the stealth capabilities of an ape in ski boots, so at least I’ll hear her coming.

In the end, I guess this all falls into the if-it-doesn’t-kill-you-it-makes-you-stronger category. Let’s just hope we are able to meet the first criteria in that statement.