It’s always a toss up what rides home from daycare are going to be like. Some days G will be singing slippery fish to himself, hand motions and all while E is mostly quiet. Other days it’s the opposite. G will be looking out the window, oohing and ahhing at whatever catches his eye, while E tries to tell me stories from the day.
And then there are the other days.
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.
Tom and I were talking recently, and realized just how packed our years have been recently. Kind of the opposite of taking things slow. There have been a lot of big milestones, every year, which made us realize that there wasn’t really one this year. It feels weird, it feels a little bit like we’re slacking, but most of all… it feels good?
I saw it stopped at the cross street ahead, and started hoping. As it slowly pulled out, I got excited and sped up just a tiny bit. Pretty soon we were side by side on the road, me purposely matching their speed, and it hit me. Wow we do weird things for our kids. Still, I called out to E and told him to look out his window, and got exactly the reaction I was looking for. “Bus! Bus! BUS BUSBUSBUS!” Yes, I was in the passing lane, speed matching the slow transit bus on the drive home from daycare so my son could see his latest obsession.