Family Outing

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A Small Light of Optimism

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I don’t think it’s a secret that life has been hard for us lately. Really hard.

It’s not that we didn’t expect life with 3 small children to be difficult, but I think in my mind it was going to get easier when the youngest hit 18 months (which granted she’s not quite yet), and in early January we realized it felt like NOTHING was even getting close to better. In fact the past 6 months have felt the hardest we’ve ever had as parents, which is saying a lot.

I think we did okay the first year of having 3, but then everything started to change and it all chipped away at our equilibrium bit by bit. Work called us both back into the office, which directly took away time from our day to do things like laundry, or clean, or cook meals. And then sleep got worse. Our wonderful sleepers suddenly weren’t sleeping like they used to. Sickness hit over and over again, too. We went from having children in one school to two. The baby started walking and got older and her siblings saw her solely as a person who messes up their toys. Winter hit and we couldn’t go outside as much.

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4th of July Weekend

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I had no desire to celebrate this embarrassment of a country, but we had a three day weekend and needed to do something with three littles. So we shut off the news, and had some quality family time in our little bubble. We went to a playground and had our first run in with an ice cream truck. It worked out since we were leaving to go get ice cream anyway, so we let the kids decide. Did they want to go get ice cream, or eat from the truck? The truck overwhelmingly won, and E picked out an orange creamsicle and G got a strawberry shortcake popsicle. They were incredibly happy, eating in the trunk of the minivan.

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Strawberry Shortcake for Breakfast?

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Sure, why not?

Right now nap schedules pretty much keep us home from 9am until 3pm. Which severely limits what we’re able to do or where we’re able to go on the weekends. It’s a lot of staying home, playing in the yard, or splitting up kids and leaving the house with just one at a time.

Which is fine. That’s the season we’re in, and I rank sleep as more important than almost everything else, so I don’t mind staying home. But every once in a while we want to do something special, and it takes a bit of creativity. Which is what we did last weekend.