Nutmeg, Preschool Delinquent

After I put Pebbles to sleep tonight, I walked to the drugstore and bought some chocolate. It's been that kind of day.

You know it's gonna be that kind of day when you wake up and you have to steam your eyelids open because that icky allergy thing is back, and then you get on the machine at the gym and find out that the President is preempting Oprah. But it actually went downhill from there.

The problem is Nutmeg. When I picked her up from school today I was told she had spit on one of the teachers, after being asked for the past two days not to spit on the floor. And she's been hitting kids.

I think she's the naughtiest kid in the school.

In a way, it's validating to see someone else have trouble with your child, because for the past two years I've been struggling with her at home on certain days. Seeing her get in trouble at school tells me, yes, this is a difficult child. It's like if you keep getting low scores on a math test, and later find out it was a college-level calculus test and you only went up to geometry.

But in another way, I'm all overwrought and beating my breast and asking, why, why, why? Why is my kid like this?

She's in a kind of stressed-out, naughty, prone-to-hysterics period, which seems to happen for several days at a time now and again. More pronounced since she started preschool. She's having a lot of crying fits and contrariness at home. She took a nap this afternoon, thank the lord, but then she woke up crying loudly. I had already had enough of Overwrought Nutmeg before this, so I just shouted up for her to come down when she was ready to stop crying and talk, and then I turned up The Shins to drown out her hysterics. Eventually she did stop and come down and communicate, with a few teary relapses.

Then tonight, she is crying in her bed, saying she's scared to be alone. Scared that it might thunder.

WTF????

So of course now is when we start wondering, what are we doing wrong? Is this a matter of not getting enough sleep at night or not getting a good breakfast? Have we disciplined her too harshly or not enough, or is she exposed to too much anger at home? Or are her high-strung, anxious genes just bubbling up?

There have been many days when she's done just great at preschool. I'm not freaking out at this point. But I am keeping a concerned eye on the situation. I am also keeping a spare Cadbury English Toffee bar in the refrigerator for my personal use during the rest of this episode, or, if I'm lucky and it's over, for the next one.