The First Week "Solo" Days

If Atticus looks a little sick in these photos it's because he is. We started our first half-week with Brad back at work with Atticus sick with a high (103F) temperature and my sinus/throat cold back "at it". Despite that, and probably because of that, our first day was quiet and I was able to get a lot done (in between all the diaper changes) mostly because Atticus couldn't do much but sit on the couch and look at books or watch movies.

Eating an apple slice and kinda mad at me for unknown reasons...

I would like to say that navigating two small children in and out of a car and in and out of a mall/stores in the mall is insane. The scene that unfolded Monday was either from a dumb slapstick movie or in an utterly solipistic narrative -- a ludicrous catastrophe. The low point was nursing Dietrich in a fitting room at the Gap (which I have since found out, not so uncommon amongst mothers with multiple children who need to be "penned in" while a baby is nursing). Atticus was smashing peanut butter crackers on the floor crying because he wanted to then eat them -- but mean mother that I am, I wouldn't let him (only the unsmashed ones that kept falling on the germ-ridden, nasty floor were fair game for snacking on)...and then throwing a cheese stick at me because he couldn't get it out of the package but wouldn't let me help him with it -- and then he didn't want to eat it anyway. sigh. Oh, and meanwhile the right side of my shirt became sopping, dripping wet because I was using my only free hand to try and referee Atticus. Then we got all our stuff together and bumbled our way through buying a pair of jeans while Atticus yelled "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" in the stroller and Dietrich -- on my shoulder -- threw up half of what he had just eaten into my crazy (un-combed) hair and down the only part of my shirt that was still dry (the back). Meanwhile the very nice shopgirl tried to look as if I was a completely normal customer making small talk about the band Wilco (my shirt had their name on it right across my leaking chest) being one of her favorite, being from Des Moines (where Brad is from) and having tickets to the show there in February....

Thankfully I pulled it together enough to let Atticus run through the amusement park in the mall, sit on an airplane thing and play with some blocks in the Lego play yard.

My mother listened and talked to me for half an hour after I got Atticus put down for a nap, fed the baby (changed him 4 times in 20 minutes -- one of those times, all of his clothes) and then had a sandwich. She helped me see I needed to laugh or I wouldn't make it through this -- An Adventure, is what I'm supposed to be looking at this as. It's all good...we're gonna make it. Thank goodness for my fellow sojourners -- moms (and dads) taking on this crazy thing, raising and loving our kids, A Family. Thank goodness for my folks and all they went through and for all the times they laughed with us and still do.