Sunday, July 7, 2019

Plenty of Time

Let it be said that the title of this blog post is entirely sarcastic.   I didn’t have a chance to get to my emails before leaving.   I was out of contact in the air, or hopelessly engaged with luggage or a blind child or other travel-type tasks that don’t remotely lend themselves to reading emails, much less responding to them.

I fell asleep early last night and when I woke up in the middle of the night I couldn’t do much on account of the Wifi for the villa here not extending into the room we’re occupying.   This morning was up, children, breakfast out and then drive to downtown to have my hair and my daughter’s hair done in corn rows for the duration of the trip.   That took five-and-a-half hours due to several complicating factors.  

Here’s the thing: before children I can see me getting lots of things done on vacation that I couldn’t accomplish at home.   Children are wonderfully fun and expand your lives in directions you’d never expect, but they’re also massive time sucks.   My daughter, for five-and-a-half hours today, needed verbal stimulation.   We played games, we talked to Anna, who was doing our hair.   We talked to other people, but mostly she talked with me.   Asking me endless questions.

I did the best I could, which was a pretty good job I think, but after not having any lunch and it was 4:45PM and my daughter needed us to stop a send time, hair all askew, to go to the bathroom at a restaurant I had to ask if we could please use because the location with the public restrooms had burned down apparently and were closed.  

About that point, I couldn’t take it any more.   I told my daughter I needed time to think, to not talk to her, that my brain needed a break from questions every seven seconds from her.   She wasn’t upset about it, she tried and I think made it fifteen seconds a time or two between telling me something, asking me something or saying, “mama…mama…mama?”

I missed all the grocery shopping and stocking up everyone else did today.   Thanks to them for everything they did while we did nothing aside from have our hair braided.   We’re headed to dinner and then showers and then sleep and then tomorrow we get up, transfer everything to the boat, return cars and then head out…and I will have gotten zero emails read or responded to and I’ll be out of communication for the next while.

There’s just not as much time as there used to be.   I hope like hell there isn’t major important things that need to be done in my inbox.   I’m going to do a run-through quickly tonight if I can get the time.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son does not want you to know this.   But I’m going to tell you.   For some unknown reason, on this trip where we have no ability to wash laundry once we get on the boat so we’ve packed enough clothes, hoping to rewear things other than underwear.   On this trip, my son has decided to poop in his pants (well, badly streak them) three, yes THREE, times in the first twenty-four hours since we left.   Two of those times are in the new pajamas I just got—pajamas which we don’t have replacements for.   He has lost screen time entirely at his choosing.   I strategically told him he could lose screen time for the rest of the day of I would explain to Andrew and Julia why he was having troubles and we hoped they would understand and help him out.   I would not have done the latter, but I wanted to scare him enough that he’d take seriously going to the bathroom.    Today he was very bored he said, but he hasn’t gone in his pants.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and son were talking this morning and I think I said ‘hell’.   My daughter said she knew a bad word—the one that starts with ’S’.   My son said he knew the one that started with ‘F’.   My daughter asked me if I knew the ’S’ word and I said, “do you mean the word that’s like ‘shoot’ but stronger?”   She said, “no, I mean the word, ‘sexy’.   I don’t know what it means, but it’s bad.   It has something to do with marriage."

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