What's with today today?

I rarely have truly crappy days but today was just one shitty annoyance after another. The kids, luckily, were not bad. Poor Elliott was sad-fussy most of the morning, though, which was a bummer. He also screamed through his bath, even though the water wasn't too hot and he usually likes baths well enough. Poor guy just screamed and screamed and arched his back and screamed some more. I felt awful. I think it's hitting me pretty hard that in ten days I'll be back at work. The boys will have a great time with my parents and I do like my job but I'm going to miss the snot out of these guys.

Then the angst of the day was elevated by the repeated thwarting of my not-unreasonable desire for things and processes to fulfill the purpose for which they are intended. To whit:

I called my insurance company before Elliott was born to double-check that they cover breast pumps 100%. I was told that they do and that I just needed to buy mine at a medical supplier and have my OB fill out a form. So I bought mine at the hospital, filled out the form, and sent it in the week after E was born. Now the insurance company is refusing to pay because the receipt I got at the hospital lists their location as the customer instead of me. It's a catch 22 because I needed the new pump so we had to buy it, but we were counting on the reimbursement to pay off Nico's ER bill. Plus, the principle of the thing. They told us it was covered, now they're not covering it. I'm pissed. After I talked to the lady from the insurance company I had to call the hospital shop to see if they could look up my customer record and reprint a corrected invoice, then had to talk to someone from billing. The billing person was somewhat helpful and gave me a little bit of hope they might be able to fix this, so I'm crossing my fingers here.

The baby monitor we bought for Elliott crapped out pretty much as soon as we got it out of the box. I exchanged it last Thursday so we'd have one that worked for our weekend away, and the new one was defective in the same way. This is the fourth monitor I've bought from Babies R Us in three years and every one has failed. I have a replacement plan for it but when I called to file the claim to get replacement money I ran into one of those obnoxious voice-activated systems. I hate those on good days and today I flat out refused to even attempt it. I hatefully hit zero on my phone over and over until it connected me to a live person, then was told that my product wasn't registered. It was a fairly simple process to register it then file the claim, but really? This is twice I've followed directions to register a BRU replacement plan only to be told later my item wasn't registered. I'm pretty sure I'm done buying monitors from them forever. Which means we have to shell out cash to buy another monitor someplace else and GRR. Was it so much to ask that the first (or second) monitor just worked?

Nico asked for bologna for lunch so I got out a Lunchable we bought him for our trip and then forgot to take. Now I recognize that Lunchables are hardly quality food, but I expect them to be edible. This one had a best-by date of May 20 and all the meat was moldy. They need to do a recall or something, because this exact thing happened to MB's officemate at work last week. I'm trying to decide if it's worth calling the company to bitch about a $1.50 Lunchable.

Oh, and on the subject of irritating failures of inexpensive items, I bought MB a little keychain bottle opener at Target yesterday. He opened two beers and the opener broke. It was only $3 but still. Two beers? Lame.

I applied for a medical research study to get some cash. I did my initial screening on Monday and haven't heard anything, which I'm assuming means I didn't qualify. It's a sad commentary that I was trying to get into a medical research study to help pay our medical bills, but there it is. (It wasn't a scary study - I would've just had to give blood once a week for 24 weeks.) I had been trying not to daydream too much about what we'd do with the money, but I'm still cranky.

Okay, to be fair, the day ended better than it started. The kids were cute, we all had a nice enough time hanging out this evening, and I got a haircut. Nico gave me the Mother's Day present he made for me at school and it's so cute - it's a keychain with a photo of him on one side and this on the other: