Blueberries for K

At two years old (!) K is a wonderfully sweet, inquisitive, and strong willed person. She is building her sense of humor, and independence (favorite word: no!), and very engaged with everything that goes on around her (goodbye doing the dishes while she plays in the other room, hello to toddler helping with everything).

She has tremendous empathy for the people in her life as well as for animals, and characters in books. Even for my phone, with its poor shattered screen – she will point to it and say “Bump! Bump! Oh no!” and get sad. My phone did have a bump. On the concrete. I really need to get a new one. Tangent.

Her language is changing so rapidly now. The usual metaphor I hear is ‘exploding’ but it has more of a ‘quick, quick, slow’ pace for K that reminds me of time-lapse videos of flower blooming – still, still, ten petals all at once, pause, more unfurls, pause – bloom! She will go a few days with no new words, and hours with just her core 10 words or so, then bust out with three new words, a full sentence, and some connection I had no idea she’d made.

Life lately is slow and fast at once in the way time with small children is. I quit my job last month and we are just now starting to settle into the change but our quality of life is so much better already. It was very tough to leave a great, challenging and rewarding job with a truly fantastic team, but after over two years of my commute averaging around 3-3.5 hours a day round trip, and in the last two months there were 5 days where the round trip commute crept up over 4 hours in a day. It was just too much time away from family to keep going that way. I had days in a row where I wouldn’t even see K awake as she was asleep when I left and asleep when  I got home. I started looking for work closer to home, but realized quickly I was hoping not to find the perfect fit just yet. I always wanted to take a few years to stay home with young kids, but career is important to me as well, which made it a very tough call. We took a hard look at the budget, practiced life on one income for a few months, saved up an emergency fund, and I put in notice.

In the few weeks I have been home, we have already done more fun outings and playdates than in the last year combined - blueberry picking (pics above from this morning), raspberry picking, and blackberry picking - all multiple times. Long walks, many parks, trips to the zoo, the river, the children's museum. Visits with friends and family. I am treasuring this time, and I think she is too.