Sometimes things are not what they appear to be. Sometimes they are so completely different than what you thought, you just have to sit awhile with your mouth agape and wonder in your heart. And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, hope rises up from the ashes.

I should start this by saying Thank you to the Universe for grandmothers and grandfathers who babysit out of love. We are very, very fortunate to have two sets of grandparents within a few miles of our home. This means our kids see their family often and occasionally Ian and I can leave the children with trusted grandparents for an evening of grown-up time. This arrangement isn’t exactly string-free. And we can dip into this well only so often because these generous grandparents have a life, too. But, for the most part, it’s worked very well for us for the last almost seven years.

Last night, Ian and I attended a friend’s 40th birthday party. For the first time ever, we hired a teenage girl to babysit the boys at our home for the evening. She is sweet and seems responsible; she is the oldest sister of one of Lucas’s classmates and my kids have been around her several times before. They really seemed to like her. Asher gushed this morning about her "yellow hair."

But damn! We paid $60 for just over five hours of freedom! With our relatively modest dinner out, that brought the evening’s expenses to more than $100—a huge chunk of our month’s entertainment budget.

It was worthwhile, definitely. And I feel good about now having a sitter I’ve already used, whom I can call for future evenings when the grandparents say no to my pleas. In a way, it’s a kind of an investment in my own sanity—a Get-Out-of-Jail-for-$10-Per-Hour card, if you will. But I don’t think we’ll be able to do it very often.

Asher now sings the Elmo Song to himself. "La la la. La la la Elmo song. La la la. La la la Baby song!"
…

I think this means I’ve shown him the YouTube clip from Sesame Street too many times. Now you can sing it too.

Oh this baby! He held out two extra hours before going to sleep today. What a stinker! Put up such a fight.

"No. No. No. No. No sleepy! No sleepytime! No. No. No. No NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP! No close eyes! No, Mommy! No sleepytime. NOOOOOOOOOOOO!" … < zzzzzzzzzzz >

This is odd:  https://www.timecmg.com/mine/

Time magazine is offering to customize a magazine just for you, depending on your interests. You choose five out of eight magazines from which content will be drawn and placed in your custom magazine, called Mine. You get five free issues and all you have to do is answer five simple questions. Advertising will be "tailored" to your tastes, too.

Those print media folks are thinking outside the box on this one.

… and yet I’m dizzy with all of this and much, much more:

This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. Am I right? Am I wrong?

Went to bed before 10:30 p.m. last night. Slept well despite Ian’s hacking and coughing fits. Eventually the codeine cough suppressant he took kicked in and he slept, too. I didn’t even wake up the one time Lucas needed assistance in the night. Ian handled it. So it was a good night.

At 5:30 a.m. Asher wandered into our bedroom.

When this happens, early in the morning, I have a choice. I can either banish Ian and the baby to Asher’s room, where it is pretty likely that neither of them will return to sleeping, and there’s a better than even chance Asher’s hollering protests at being deprived from my sleep-warmed skin will wake Lucas up. The other option is to reluctantly let the baby into my bed and hope to quiet him back to sleep. Rarely does this work, but when it does, it’s pretty sublime.

Not so this morning. At 5:30 the nipple tweaking began in earnest. A certain amount of this is inevitable. He is no longer allowed to nurse in the mornings, so his hands on my breasts are his coping mechanism. Sometimes, if I can bear it, he’ll eventually find a good handhold and become still. Still hands are fine. Groping, pinching, grabbing, fondling hands that make no distinction between touching with fingernails and touching with fingertips are NOT. I endured as much as I could. I remained peaceful on the outside while seething with tension and frustration on the inside. I did my very best to weave that magical sleep spell around us all.

At 6:15 I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got up, dressed, and left the screaming baby with the sleeping daddy. Asher followed me out into the still-dark living room to shriek at me for not letting him feel me up. And yes, after a few moments, he woke Lucas, too.

We are now into the season of birthday planning, for Lucas’s seventh birthday is one month from today. He seems to have settled on a theme. (What’s wrong with birthday as a theme, some of you may ask. Well, to Lucas a party equals a chance to wear costumes. He is our kid, after all.) The theme this year is …

As far as I can tell, Lucas is completely unaware of that new animated movie "Monsters versus Aliens," or whatever it’s called. That’s good, cuz we’re not having a movie birthday party.

We are gathering supplies and decorations, goodies for goodie bags, and planning the food. What would Aliens want to eat, do you think? We are saving all sorts of boxes and egg cartons to make a giant silver robot. We are planning games and entertainment.

We are also ironing out the invitation list. I’ve discovered that one of the few opportunities a small boy has to exercise absolute power is the invitation list for his birthday party. With regularity, the names on the list change, depending on who is on the outs with Lucas. He’s got about one more week to fluxuate, then the invitations go out!

For this small moment, this one fleeting magical phrase, I have worked tirelessly, selflessly, sleeplessly, and often lonesomely for two years and two months exactly:

"I love you."

Asher said this to me tonight for the first time.

IMG_0688
Originally uploaded by SarabellaE

“Ian, have you seen my hard drive anywhere?”

p.s. I think this is a hard drive.