Mental Illness - scratch that - Mental Health Day

I'm generally a very cautious person. My husband will want to go do something and I'll have a list a mile long of possible bad scenarios. Okay, so maybe cautious isn't the right word. Maybe hypocondriac or whatever the word is for the person who always fears the worst. So, like I said I don't normally go and do things. But today I had a form of mental illness come over me. I even had the thought on the way out the door that something could go wrong and for the one time in my life I thought bravely and decided it would be fine. So out the door I went. With a six month old (today, even... happy 6 months baby!). To the beach. By myself.  What drove me to such insanity, you ask.

Mental illness I tell you.

Mental illness that stems from a teething baby, weeks of 2, 3, or 4 hour sleeping stretches, a walking partner that hasn't been able to go walking for 12 days, stress and anxiety with details we won't go into, and 4 walls closing in on me.

So we walked out the door, trudged through the rain to the car, and prayed the beach wouldn't be rainy. We arrived and I sat the baby down and was distracted getting something when I turned to find the baby stuffing her mouth full of sand. No worries, I thought. All babies eat sand. So I got out a wipe to get it off her hands and mouth. Meanwhile she decides that sand is the best thing she has ever tasted and starts shovelling it in with both hands. The wet-wipe was doing nothing to get the sticky wet sand off of her so I got the bottle of water to wash it off. I'm sure by the time I managed to do this she had already downed her 5th handful. So I get her cleaned off and try distracting her with bubbles when a woman walks by and talks to the baby. The baby does an about-face to see the woman and head plants it into the sand. I pick her up to discover her face is covered in sticky sand and all I can see are her little eyes peering back at me. Well, I am not okay with this because the sand is right by her eyes and can very easily get into them and scratch them. So I grab the bottle of water and try rincing off her face. But it's no good. There is too much. So I grab up all our stuff and head for the shower. I then become one of those parents I swore I would never become and strip my child to nothing but her birthday suit so the whole world on the beach and those driving by can watch me shower her clean. Thankfully my child loves showers, even freezing cold ones, and thouroughly enjoys it. Also thankfully I have a extra onesie packed away since the first on got soaked with the water bottle attempt.

We finally made it home after having to stop twice... to get the teething ring that had got caught around her leg and to close the door by the car seat that I had only partially closed. Once home I discovered multiple grains of sand in her eye and spent quite a while flushing those out.

Sigh. All I can say is I'm tired from my day of mental illness insanity. The only thing that makes it better is I know that someday I'll be able to laugh at it all, thereby improving my mental health!