Sunday

We somehow managed to time nap to hit both the children’s museum and a friend’s first birthday today in addition to the usual cleaning and laundry, and now at 7pm are feeling both pleased with the success and supremely exhausted.  Commence Sunday downtime to prepare mentally for the work week ahead.  When I first typed that out, I capitalized “nap” which says a lot about the life of a parent and its relative importance.

K had a blast at the birthday party – she loved playing with the other toddlers there, the balloons (we brought a few as our gift since it was a presents not requested party, and coincidentally managed to match colors to the ones the mama had bought already – yay!), and she also loved seeing the family’s chickens and bunnies.  The mama who’s baby turned one is a friend of mine from 20 years ago, which is still hard to absorb.  I was warned that time accelerates as you age, and really rushes by when you have kids, but it’s still hard to internalize even while living it.

We had a little break from teething, but two new ones are just starting to poke through and K has definitely been feeling them.  Lots of frozen treats – favorites include  ice chips, frozen blueberries, peas, and frozen deiced bananas (her nanna’s idea, which reminds me of last month when I offered her banana and she started cracking up.  It took me a minute but I asked “banana? Nana banana?” and she laughed harder and nodded – it was so cute).

Home

Last weekend we got coffee and went down to the river for a walk and some puddle stomping even though it was raining on and off all day.  I didn’t want to say here while he was gone, but G just got back from traveling for work for 5 weeks and we are so glad to have him home. Being the sole parent for 5 weeks was hard.  I didn’t expect it to be easy, but man I am exhausted. I have a whole new respect for single parents and for military families who had long deployments with little kids, which we haven’t had to deal with yet.

K did pretty well with it, but it definitely didn’t breeze by her.  He left at 4:30 am so we were still sleeping, but she knew something was up and that morning when he wasn’t around she brought me his shirt from the folded laundry and waved it at me asking “dada? dada?”  A few days later, when we got home for work/daycare she dug though her books and brought me one, sat down in my lap to read but push my hands away as soon as I opened to the first page to start and skipped to the last page with a family of birds.  When we read this book, she usually points to each bird and I say “mama bird, daddy bird, baby birds” as she points.  She pointed emphatically to the daddy bird, then stood up off my lap, turned to me, stomped her foot and held her hands up open on either side of her to demand “where is my daddy?”

I did talk to her a lot about how he was on a trip, like being at work, just for longer than usual.  We also did skype and talked on the phone, but for an 18 month old to a large degree there is “there” and “not there” so those things were minimal to her. She’s very happy to have everyone home again now (as are we).