There are a lot of things about this situation that blow my kids’ minds. First, what is this crazy piece of plastic housing a mysterious, tiny photo? It’s as though I pulled it straight from a spy kit. “Details only visible when held to light.”
Read MoreA missing side to our square
Luke was away last weekend, in Panama, of all places. People kept asking me why Panama and honestly I have no clue. This is how strange our conversations are these days. I knew when he was going, who with, and when he was coming back, but I had no idea why they went there and what they were planning to do. Maybe he had a secret passion for canals as a kid.
He wasn’t gone long—in the neighbourhood of four days—but the littles acted like he was off on some round-the-world trek with no end in sight. She had an emotional breakdown the day before he left, thinking she hadn’t given him an adequate goodbye and wouldn’t see him again. And man was she pissed when she woke up on Sunday to find him not yet home. Clearly she inherited her calendar skills from the maternal side of the gene pool.
She talked about missing him much more than the boy, though that may be a factor of age and understanding. One minute, she was acting out about some random thing only to break down in tears a moment later, desperate for a hug from dad. Hugs from me were not an adequate substitute.
The boy was okay during the day but then kept waking up at night for more snuggles. I was okay with this the first couple of nights—who doesn’t want a warm, cuddly bundle of affection right next to them in bed— but by the last night I was in need of a little space. There’s only so much touching an introvert can handle, even if it is in the form of an adorable, nuzzling little boy.
The problem is I'm a sucker and the boy knows it. This is why Luke has been on middle-of-the-night duty ever since Judah was about 15 months old. I can’t fathom the idea of losing more sleep than is necessary, so I always just crawl into bed with him which results in neither of us getting a good rest. Somehow when he falls back asleep in the middle of the night it’s that light, not-really-sleeping sleep that causes him to jolt back upright anytime he senses my desire to go back to my own bed.
“DON’T LEAVE,” he whisper-yells as he reaches out to grab my arm. At 3 am, I don’t have the mental capacity to argue nor the physical stamina to resist so back down I go. This is partially the reason why his big boy bed is a double. I never understood why people got huge beds for little kids until this guy came along.
The night that Luke came home, everything came back around. The girl chilled out and the little guy slept in his own bed for the whole night, possibly because I told him he had to but that’s putting a lot of stock in my ability to influence the actions of a sleepy preschooler.
I always find it amazing how Luke’s return can bring them back down to earth, which is why I often hesitate to write these sorts of things. I realize how lucky I am to have a partner who’s here more often than not and who shares in a lot of the child-rearing when he is here.
So many parents out there are doing this on their own full-time, with either no end in sight, or with the moments of reprieve months away. I don’t give them sympathy—no one needs pity—but my compassion and empathy for the struggle that is managing kids on your own. It’s probably the same way people who have family support might look at me and wonder how I manage to get by every day. A lot of the time, it’s really friggin’ hard. But what other choice do we have?
The times when Luke is away are definitely getting easier, despite the afore mentioned struggles. It’s nothing like the trip to Nova Scotia a couple years ago. I think we’re all still traumatized by that one. But there is still something about having him missing from our foursome that sends them into emotional upheaval. It’s like we’re a square with a missing face. We aren’t a triangle, just a box with a big hole on one side.
With two more trips near on the horizon, I’d be wise to consider a strategy for managing the next hole. Perhaps a bit more patience when little man loses his shit over an uncomfortable sock. Perhaps a bit more empathy when she snaps at of me or gives Judah heck for not “playing right.” And, if all that fails, baking cupcakes in our pyjamas always seems to help.
Cookies transcend what it is to be cool
We had a nine-year-old over for a play date today and something traumatic dawned on me: I am so not cool.
The glory of having kids who are still relatively little is that they have no idea how out of touch we are. They don’t really care about being cool or hip or whatever it is. They just care about the possibility of eating candy before lunch and knowing when Daddy is coming home. I’ve been breezing by on this free ride with a vague understanding of Paw Patrol and Littlest Pet Shop without having to worry about whatever’s currently flowing through the zeitgeist of the pre-teen world.
Case in point, I just asked my husband, “What are kids into these days?”
“I dunno. Minecraft?”
“What about Snapchat?”
“I think that’s more university age kids… but maybe younger kids use it? I have no idea.”
Luke, the husband, always said he would know when he was out of touch when he stopped recognizing the people in the supermarket tabloids. That happened for me when the Kardashians came onto the scene. I’m still not entirely sure what their deal is. They’re famous because they’re famous? Or is it because one of them is handy with a video camera? Are they still even famous or have we moved on?
I’ve only just recently started feeling microscopically cool within my own age group, let alone trying to figure out what’s socially current to a kid who's been alive for less than a decade. I've owned my espresso maker for longer than that. So instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, or understand what the new wheel is, we did what the three-year-old wanted to do: bake shortbread cookies.
This makes me sound like a wonderfully wholesome mother. Trust me, it was not my first choice. It’s messy and fraught with technical difficulties. Everyone’s dough was rolled out to a different thickness, meaning everyone’s cookies baked at different speeds, and the three-year-old kept cutting out shapes on the same patch of dough then freaking out that his cookies looked like shredded cheese. It also results in children eating copious amounts of sugar while dropping copious amounts of crap on the floor. But, it keeps everyone occupied and in one place for an hour. You take the good with the bad.
The nine-year-old seemed to enjoy baking and left quite happily with her box of cookies, but not before taking over the Apple Music playlist and introducing us to some Katy Perry songs we hadn’t heard and Adele. Yes, I am likely the only woman over 40 who has never listened to an entire Adele album. I will refer you back to the part about me only recently coming out from underneath a rock.
I used a Betty Crocker recipe for the cookies. It was well-received, as any half pound of butter mixed with icing sugar should be. Despite the article that came out the other day about cookie dough being bad for you, I let my kids taste a bit. Judah then questioned the need for baking it at all and demanded the right to embrace the raw food movement on his batch of dough. His request was denied.
Shortbread Cookies, according to Betty Crocker
1.5 cups powdered sugar 1 cup butter 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 tsp almond extract (I didn’t have any. Oh well.) 2.5 cups flour 1 tsp baking soda 1 tsp cream of tartar
Mix the first five ingredients together on medium speed until well blended. Add the rest until mixed. Cover the dough and put it in the fridge for two hours. Prepare to answer the question, “Is the dough ready yet” every two minutes for the next two hours. Steel yourself.
Roll out dough to a quarter inch thick and cut out shapes. Bake at 375˚F for 8 or 9 minutes or until the edges are brown. Or bake some for 6 minutes and others for 10, depending on how well your bakers use a rolling pin.
For the icing, mix two cups of powdered sugar with a splash of vanilla and a few tablespoons of water until you have something resembling icing. We added some purple food dye (horrors) and I put it in ziplock bags (more horrors) with the corner cut out so they could squeeze it onto their cookies or, in Judah’s case, directly into his mouth.