Last weekend Tom was sick for most of the day, which left me solo with the kids. I realized that I’ve been orchestrating life lately to ensure that I’m not alone with both of them except for our normal night routine. I’m not sure why I see those two as different. Maybe because we have such a routine to our nights, I view that as normal and not hard. And it’s not like I haven’t been alone with them - over Christmas there were multiple days in a row where it was just me and both the tiny humans. And of course there’s been other random days here and there, but I always end the day exhausted and feeling like I failed both of them. So for whatever reason, we’ve just made it so that most of the time it’s either two on two, or one on one.
But Tom was sick and couldn’t really do much useful, and it was just confusing E why his Dad wasn’t playing with him, so I sent him to bed and took the day. And at the end of it, I realized something. The house wasn’t a mess, I wasn’t exhausted, it wasn’t that bad. I think I even had fun! It was a weird realization - I think it marks a milestone. That we’ve exited another hard time, that we’ve reached a place where we’ve grown and settled into our family a bit. Every day we move a bit further from survival mode, and closer to just enjoying our family.
I think we’ve been doing that, lately. As much as we can in the winter anyway. The latest thing we tried was going to the mall before it was open. It’s kind of a weird feeling - three hours before any of the stores opened, it was filled with mall walkers. But it was warm, quiet and kind of perfect for us. The kids could be loud or run and not be nervous of how many people were around. And the best part, is the food court playground was also empty. The kids lit up when they saw it, and they went nuts. Running all over, down the slide, exploring every corner.
A quick car update, Minnie is doing okay! We’ve stopped worrying about her driving, and are more focused on trying to figure out all of the weird technology things we’re not used to. For example, if you text me while I’m driving, Minne will read the message to me, and even let me respond. However, it matters whether I have my phone plugged in or not. It changes whether I can speak a response to you, or just select a pre-written message.
I know everyone’s been on the Alexa/Siri/Google bandwagon for a while, but I never have been. I’ve always had it turned off on my phone, because couldn’t I just google something if I needed to? Of course now that I have tiny humans I can both see how an Alexa could be helpful but also the worst thing to ever happen.
But now I have a reason to turn it on, since certain things in the car require it. The weird thing is that the phone can’t tell the difference between when I’m asking a real question and when I’m just talking about it hypothetically. Which is how we ended up in the car on the way to the mall listening to a five minute speech on what a flock of turkeys are called. I had used it as a hypothetical example but we got the answer anyway. Tom and I were laughing too hard to answer E, who kept asking us who was talking.
Of course we can’t seem to catch a break, so Tom’s the one currently driving around a rental car… it’s like the universe is trying to tell us to stop driving or something… But at least I’m feeling better about being occasionally outnumbered by tiny humans!
