As much as we wish for the opposite, there comes a time when your
spouse/partner/significant other will need to go out of town for longer
than overnight. In other, more rare times, this length of trip extends
to longer than a week. Whenever these times come up, it really makes
you appreciate a lot of things that you are forced to live without
temporarily. Now, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate Alison being here
every day and every minute and normally don’t do well without her when
she just leaves for a girls’ night out. I subject myself to violent
sports or reality shows with either pizza or wings and random grunting
until she gets home. Okay, I still do that when she’s here but usually
skip the wings. Anyway, here we are at the tail end of two weeks
without my spouse, counting down the three days until her return. There
have been some lessons learned and some traits that have changed over
the years.
The first lesson learned is that kids are like wolves. They can
sense when they have the advantage and will take the opportunity to get
away with everything they can, every time. I usually caught that when I
would step away from them for any amount of time during the day for
things like getting a glass of water, but have noticed it more now that I
have to spend every waking moment with them and the amount of things I
need to do increases. I do my best to stay where they are all of the
day but I have discovered that I need to eat too.
Something else that is learned is how much an infant going through a
growth spurt can put down. There are times where I can’t even finish
cleaning out the bottle and throwing away the diaper that I just changed
before he is rooting around, looking for the bottle and will down
another entire bottle. The boy must have gained seven pounds since
Alison has been gone. No kidding, the boy ate three times from the time
we got home from the zoo yesterday and when I handed over the torch to
Grandma four hours later. I think he is part pit. The bottomless
variety.
One of the traits that have changed for me as I get older is the
amount of time that I like to see dedicated to cleaning. On regular
days, we have cleaning times between breakfast and lunch and before nap
if necessary. I haven’t swayed from that at all but I have increased
the area of affected cleanliness to include the rest of the downstairs,
including the laundry room. In olden times, like last time Alison had
to leave for more than two days, which I think was three years ago, I
would let it get messy because I was focused on other tasks that I
needed to complete and cleaning wasn’t very high on the list of
priorities. That is, until it was the day she was coming back. I
always said I was the King of the largest nation in the world,
Procrastination. Now I find myself taking little breaks over lunch and
dinner and find some area of the house that needs some special attention
and doing a blitzreinung to get it cleaned. Small steps, you know.
T minus three days. The best thing that I have learned in this
self-made social experiment of mine is that it is coming to an end in
three days. Three days until I can have someone to entertain (read:
guard) the kids when my blitzreinung targets an area bigger than a
dinner plate. Three days until I have someone else that can take care
of the leach when I’m trying to make lunch for everyone else or when I
just got home from work and have been asleep for thirty minutes. Best
of all, three days until the missing void in my daily life is back where
she belongs.
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