Author Archives: Cindy

at least there was funnel cake

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I have this love for the state fair. For one, it’s usually an indicator that the heat of summer is over and fall is underway. For another: FOOD. I have a weakness for all of the fried, terrible foods.

(Except the Krispy Kreme burger. I’m sorry, but no. I love Krispy Kreme donuts, and I love sloppy joes, but put them together, and just the thought makes me want to hurl. I actually saw someone eat one of those and I couldn’t stop the involuntary gagging.)

Catie loves the state fair, and Lucy had never been before. This past Friday, the kids’ daycare was closed for a teacher workshop day, and it was Catie’s last day of her track-out break (she started her 2nd term of first grade today). So since I had no childcare options, I decided to take the day off work and take the kids to the fair.

And this is where I learned two major down sides of taking a two year-old to the state fair:

* The stroller. OMG the stroller. The fair is far too big and spread out to NOT bring the stroller, and it is damn near impossible to navigate the crowd WITH the stroller. I usually have a “bob and weave” approach to crowds, I like to move quickly to get where I need to go. Pushing a 30-pound toddler with a 20-pound backpack (supplies for the day) in the storage compartment makes it impossible to move at anything other than a snail’s pace.

* The rides. I didn’t realize this, but all of the rides, even the tiny baby rides, all have minimum height requirements. So we go to the Kiddie Land part of the fair (because Catie is a chicken about rides and won’t do anything too adventurous or scary anyway), and they both see this ride that is basically five little boats that go around in a circle at about 4 miles an hour.

Like this:
boat ride at the fair

So they both see it, and they’re both, “BOATS!!” Ok then. We get in the line for the boat ride, and when we get to the front, the ticket lady points at Lucy and says, “She’s too little.” Wait, what? This is one of the most babyish of baby rides! How can my ginormous toddler be too little for it?

Because the minimum height is 36 inches. And Lucy is maybe 33 inches tall at the most.

So Catie got on the ride and Lucy cried, “Boats! BOOOOOOOOATS!” the whole time. It was pretty awful.

(And I mean… seriously? Look how HUGE Catie is on that ride? It was DESIGNED. FOR. TODDLERS. WTF, fair people?)

That continued for pretty much the rest of the day. Lucy could only go on the rides where I could go with her (so, the merry-go-round and spinning teacups and things like that), and she sobbed and wailed for all of the rides that she couldn’t go on. I felt awful for her.

[Aside: one of the rides that Lucy and I did together? Was a little mini-ferris wheel shaped like a fire truck. Lucy freaking LOVED it, and it scared the crap out of me. I am not a fan of heights. And Catie takes after me in this regard, because she stayed on the ground with Chris while Lucy and I rode the fire truck, and looked at us like we were crazy.]

On Saturday, Chris was going to the fair with his kids and his two nieces, and we decided to drop Lucy with my parents so Catie and I could go to the fair to meet up with them. I felt bad leaving Lucy, but she loves getting her grandparents’ attention all to herself, and I figured that I was saving us all a lot of frustration by not bringing her. No stroller, no worries about height requirements, we’re good to go.

(For the record, that boat picture above is from Saturday. I didn’t take any pictures at the fair on Friday when I was trying to comfort Lucy the whole time.)

So! Me, Chris, and 5 (count ’em) kids at the fair. Although, his nieces are 11 and 12 years old and they’re SO well-behaved, there wasn’t really much supervision needed there at all.

Catie really likes Chris’s kids a lot, and she seemed to like the nieces too, but the problem was that the other 4 kids are a lot braver than she is about trying new things, so while Catie would’ve been happy to stay in Kiddie Land the whole time, the others were wanting to go on rides with names like the Ring of Fire and the Zipper.

I talked Catie into going on the Tilt-a-Whirl with me. It was one of my favorite rides as a kid, and I figured, hey, it’s not scary, right? It just spins you around, but it’s not like it involves heights or flips you upside down or anything.

I took a selfie of us right before the ride started.

Tilt-a-whirl! (Oh lord I'm so sick now.)

Ok, so I forgot that the Tilt-a-Whirl kinda sucks. Catie screamed, “OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OHHHH MYYYY GODDDDD MOOOOOOMMMMMMYYYYYY!!!!” the whole time. (Note that she NEVER says “oh my god,” ever, it’s usually “oh my gosh,” so this was basically my kid’s version of major profanity.) I held onto her tightly and kept laughing the whole time so she’d think it was ok, but seriously? I was ready for the ride to be over after the first 30 seconds.

When it was over, she said that she hated it and she was never going to trust me ever again about trying new rides. Fair enough, kiddo, I’ll be ok if I never go on the Tilt-a-Whirl again either.

I told her that I was proud of her for trying it, even though she hated it, because that’s what life’s all about: you try new things. Sometimes you find something you love, sometimes you find out that it’s something you hate, and you never have to do it again. But at least you’ve tried it, so you KNOW.

It started to rain on us before we left the fair on Saturday, but we didn’t really mind it all that much, and overall it was a really great day.

Hopefully next year, when Lucy is a little bit taller and we don’t rely on the stroller as much, it’ll be even better.

Born in the wrong decade

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Catie has a lot of nerdy “gamer girl” tendencies. And honestly, I’m ok with that. For a while, I was concerned because it seemed like she didn’t have any other little girl friends at school. She says that the other girls “only want to play dumb princesses.” And while Catie will watch a Disney princess movie if it happens to be on TV, she has no other interest in princesses or fairies or Barbie dolls or anything like that.

Case in point: in the movie about Rapunzel, “Tangled”? Her favorite character is Maximus the horse. (I’m personally partial to Pascal the chameleon, but that’s just me.)

More for her Geek Street Cred: the past year, she’s seen all six Star Wars movies. It started off with the original trilogy, which I owned on DVD, because hi, I’m a nerd and that’s my childhood right there. Then she wanted to see the other three movies, and I kind of hemmed and hawed, because, frankly, those movies just aren’t very good. And Episode III (when Anakin becomes Darth Vader) is pretty violent and dark. But she begged and pleaded, and I found out you can buy episodes 1-3 on DVD for less than $30 on Amazon (which should be a good indicator of just how beloved those movies are by the general public, which is to say NOT AT ALL), and I caved. She loved all of them.

    [Allow me to insert an aside here on how rage-filled the ending of Episode III makes me. Padme is in labor with the twins, Luke and Leia, and she’s dying of “a broken heart”?? Seriously? The robot-doctor says she’s just lost the will to live. And oh well, that’s that, nothing they can do. OH REALLY, PADME?! So the guy you married turned out to be nothing like who you thought he was? Yeah, you’re the first person that’s ever happened to, in the history of forever. How tragic for you. Now suck it up, get your sad mopey ass off that sterile delivery table, and go get a damn job because you have two kids to raise. For the love of the Force, George Lucas, HIRE BETTER WRITERS.]

    *ahem* Sorry. Needed to get that off my chest.

Anyway, Catie now draws the characters whenever they have “free art” time at school. It’s pretty amazing.

Catie drew Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. And I'm pretty sure she's a better artist at 6 than I am at 37.

But to continue on that whole “not wanting to play dumb princesses” thing – Catie doesn’t even want to pretend to be Princess Leia, who is actually kind of a bad-ass. (She shoots stormtroopers! She strangled Jabba the Hutt with a chain!) If she’s playing Star Wars, she wants to be… Chewbacca. Yeah, I don’t know.

And hey, I consider myself a nerdy type, and I think it’s awesome that she does her own thing. But I really did wring my hands and fret that she was going to be lonely and friend-less through school. Then, one of the other moms pointed out, “she’s going to grow up with a hundred big brothers, she’s going to be fine.” And it’s true, she plays really well with the other little boys. As long as they’re kind of nerdy little boys who don’t expect her to play sports.

(Chris’s take on this: “She is going to grow up to break a lot of geeks’ hearts.” Which is sweet, and he might just be right on that one, who knows.)

Anyway, for the past year or so, Catie’s other major passion has been the Skylanders video game. She got it last Christmas and she’s been in love with it ever since then. She has a ton of the action figures, she has dog tag necklaces with the different characters printed on them, she takes her Skylanders backpack to school every day, and she also sketches pictures of them (which are comparable to the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader picture above – she really makes them detailed and it’s pretty amazing work for a 6 year-old).

And really… it’s fine. At first I was a little concerned that maybe the game was too violent for her, but it’s really not, and there’s a decent amount of strategy that has to be applied in order to play the game successfully. I wouldn’t necessarily call it educational, but it’s not damaging either. I mean, it’s not like she’s playing Mortal Kombat or Grand Theft Auto, you know?

Lately she’s been watching movies about the various Skylanders characters on YouTube, and sometimes she comes across mash-up videos like this:

So she’s now asking me to put some of these songs — like “Numb” by Linkin Park and “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence — on her iPad. And… I mean. I guess it’s fine? There’s nothing obscene about the songs, certainly. But DANG they’re a little dark for a 6 year-old, no?

I kind of can’t decide if it’s cute or disturbing when I hear my first grader singing lines like, “wake me up inside, call my name, and save me from the dark.” It’s just… odd.

(Also, too bad Catie wasn’t around in the 90s, since she’s apparently a big fan of that music era.)

I hope this doesn’t come off like me worrying (or worse, complaining) about her. I celebrate all of her little quirks and odd passions, because they are what makes her my Catie. Sort of like the fact that since she was three years old, she’s been saying she wants to be a paleontologist when she grows up. It’s weird (why dinosaurs? Where did she even pick up on that?), but it’s also fantastic.

And I do fully realize that this is a fluke. Lucy, at two, is already gravitating toward pink EVERYTHING and talks about princesses already. I predict she’s going to be my girly-girl. Which is also totally fine! It’s just funny to me how each kid develops their own “thing” over time, and we really have no major influence on how they turn out. Just luck of the draw. But either way — tomboy-ish sci-fi loving video gamer chick or puffy pink tutu-wearing frilly girl — they’re still the most amazing little people I’ve ever met in my life.

my life without kids

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Catie goes to a year-round school, so she just finished her first term of first grade, and is now on a three-week break. (That’s how it works, more or less – 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off.) Since it’s her track-out period (that’s what they call it, I don’t know why), Dave flew out for a visit. It’s easier on everyone if he comes to visit when she isn’t in school, since it doesn’t throw her routine off as much.

So, last Thursday morning, I dropped the kids off at daycare and kissed them goodbye, and I haven’t seen them since then. Dave stopped by to pick up my extra car seats (I keep a set in my garage so he doesn’t have to deal with adding them to his rental car every time), and all of the clothes and toys and other gear that they’d need for a few days with their dad. (Which, let me tell you, is a metric crap-ton of stuff.)

Dave flies out tomorrow, so I get the kids back tonight. He has a morning flight, so it’s easier to have the kids here, rather than wake them up at 4 a.m. or whatever.

So, basically, the last six days or so have been a little glimpse of what my life would be like if I didn’t have kids. It includes things like:

* Sleeping late on the weekends.
* Sleeping without a certain little girl (cough*Lucy*cough) climbing into bed between me and Chris in the middle of the night.
* No wiping butts and/or changing diapers and/or cleaning pee out of the carpet (again: cough*Lucy*cough).
* No breaking up fights.
* No cutting up someone else’s food.
* No negotiating at mealtimes.
* In fact, mealtimes can be whenever and whatever I want. Last night, we went out for dinner at 9:30 p.m. It was fantastic.
* Getting to watch whatever I want on TV, and it doesn’t have to be either animated OR child-appropriate.
* Shopping alone.
* Being able to leave the house without the need for a sherpa or a pack mule to haul all of the kids’ stuff along with me.
* No packing lunches or rushing to get everyone dressed and out the door in the morning.
* Working out whenever I feel like it.
* Sex in the morning.
* Sex in the afternoon.
* Sex pretty much whenever and wherever because there aren’t kids in the house so WOOHOO! NAKED TIME! (Side note: sorry, neighbors.)
* I know I said it before, but seriously: sleeeeeeeeeeep.

And it’s funny, because that all sounds pretty nice, right? And I won’t lie, I have really enjoyed having a break for the last few days.

But the thing about not having the kids around, is that it also means:

* No spontaneous hugs and kisses and “I love you, Mommy”s.
* No little voices singing along with the radio from the backseat.
* No big girl who cracks me up with her stories every day.
* No tiny girl who climbs up next to me and says, “Mama snuggle.”
* No watching my girls hang out with Chris (which seriously does make me melt; when Lucy pats her hands on his cheeks and says, “you MY Tiss,” it just gets me every time).
* No hanging out at my parents’ house and seeing how my girls adore their Mimi and Pop-Pop, and how they have them both wrapped around their tiny fingers.
* No listening to my two girls play and giggle together.

So, although the break has been great, and lord knows I needed the downtime, I pretty much can’t wait to pick them up from daycare this evening and cover them with hugs and kisses.

I guess the point is: being a single mom is really hard, no doubt about it, but I can’t imagine my life any other way. Because yes, my kids can be a pain in the butt sometimes, but man, I miss those little boogers like crazy when they’re not here.

anxious days

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I have days where my anxiety will flare up for no apparent reason. I’ll be cruising along, job is going well, the kids are great, I’m eating well, working out, things are good with Chris, and then… boom. Suddenly my brain is spinning and I feel like I can’t catch my breath.

When this happens, and I tell Chris that my anxiety level has gone up to 11, he’ll very patiently say, “Ok, babe. And what does your phone have to say about that?”

That’s his gentle way of telling me to check my iPeriod app (because, yes, of course there’s an app for that). Nine times out of ten, my anxiety is related to my hormones (seems to happen both when I ovulate and when I have PMS, so I get hit twice a month – fun!). Knowing the source makes it a little easier to take. I can’t fix it, but at least I can remind myself that it’s temporary and that I’ll feel better in a couple of days.

Right now, though, I do have a justification in feeling anxious. I don’t feel like I have the freedom to tell this whole story, but there are about to be some major changes happening with Chris and the amount of time he has his kids. And it’s a good thing – he loves his kids and I know he’s missed them a lot over the past few months. But it also means a major shift in our little routine that we’ve fallen into, and it means we’ll be seeing each other less (or at least having a lot fewer sleepovers).

It’s ok. It will be ok. It’s just that I don’t know exactly what changes are going to occur. And although I’ll know more soon, I don’t deal well with uncertainty. I want to know what to expect in advance, and this isn’t something that I can predict in any way. And really, whatever happens, I know we’ll work through it and make it manageable. It’s just scary for me to not know.

To use sort of a clunky metaphor: the horizon is blurry and I don’t like it. But there’s nothing I can do about it except wait for it to get closer so I can see it more clearly.

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Last night I realized that Catie may have inherited some anxiety from me. Although I wasn’t very anxious as a kid, so who knows. But she was in this worry spiral and I couldn’t pull her out of it.

It started with the carbon monoxide detector. Its battery ran low and it beeped, so I put new batteries in it. Catie asked what the carbon monoxide detector does. I explained that there’s a kind of gas that can get in the air sometimes that’s very bad for people to breathe, and you can’t smell it, so if it’s in the air, the CO detector will beep so we know to get out of the house.

Catie: Can the gas kill you?
Me: (thinking: well technically, yeah…) Most likely it’d just make you really sick.
Catie: And you’d have to go to the hospital?
Me: Right. But that’s why we have the detector, so we know to get out of the house before it makes us sick.
Catie: But where do we go?
Me: Just to the driveway. And then I’ll call the fire department and they’ll fix it and make us safe.
Catie: What about Beaumont? Can the gas make cats sick too?
Me: We’d take him with us when we leave the house.
Catie: You mean you’d put him in his cat carrier?
Me: I’d probably just carry him.
Catie: But what if he scratched you, and you dropped him, and he ran away because he was scared, and then he got hit by a car, AND THEN HE DIED?

Oh. My. God.

When I was repeating this conversation to Chris later, he started to laugh, and said, “Yeah, that whole ‘coming up with the most extreme worst case scenario’ thing doesn’t sound like anybody I know.”

Ok, fine. So maybe I do the exact same thing to him on a semi-regular basis.

Later, when I was putting her in bed and I’d finally gotten her off the damn carbon monoxide kick, she went in a different direction.

Catie: When is Tracy’s wedding?
Me: In November.
Catie: How many days is that?
Me: Ummm… about 40 days, I guess.
Catie: Is that a long time?
Me: I don’t know, Catie. You know how long a day is. Think of 40 of those. Is that a long time to you?
Catie: But… but… I have to get a flu shot before then and I don’t want to get a shot! (starts to cry)

Seriously, kid?

I tried to talk her down for a while, and finally I just said, “Baby, you are determined to find something to worry about tonight, and it’s going to give you bad dreams. So let’s just stop, and think about nice things so you can have good dreams when you go to sleep, ok? Let’s think about unicorns and rainbows and kittens and cute little baby bunnies that poop cupcakes.”

Catie stopped and looked at me with big eyes and said, “bunnies that… poop?… cupcakes?!!” The fit of giggles that ensued pretty much killed the Worry Spiral. And ok, maybe it wasn’t my best joke, but if you say the word “poop” in front of a 6 year-old, it’s pretty much guaranteed to get a laugh. So, mission accomplished there.

I should tell Chris to try that on me sometime, except I don’t find poop jokes nearly as hilarious, so I’m not sure that it would work. Ah well.

I’m a better mom when I’m not sweating

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One of my favorite things about summer is when it ends. I am not really an outdoors girl and I don’t do well with extremely hot weather. If it’s over 85, I’m probably going to be cranky. But now is the time of year when it starts cooling off in North Carolina, and it’s my favorite.

Funny thing is, when the weather is nicer, I’m a lot better about having spontaneous outings with the kids. When it’s hot, I’m more like, “Ugh, let’s just go home where it’s air-conditioned and I don’t have to sweat.” When it’s mild out, I’m all, “Hey, I know I just picked you up from daycare and it’s technically dinnertime, but LET’S GO TO THE PLAYGROUND!!”

(In a couple of months, I’ll go back to being the Lazy Mom again. “It’s too cold, we’re only going somewhere if it’s heated.” Yes, I am a big whiny crybaby, I know.)

Yesterday, after our normal weekend trip to IHOP, I suggested that we head up to the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. The kids hadn’t been there in a long time — I wasn’t sure if Lucy would even remember it, it had been so long — and it seemed like the perfect day for it.

I forgot the stroller (it’s been living at my parents’ house for ages, since my dad takes Lucy for walks in it fairly often, whereas I almost never use it because hey little girl: YOU HAVE LEGS), but it worked out fine. The museum is big and spread out, but Lucy is a kid that needs to burn a lot of energy anyway. And when she needed a break, or when she just wanted to get up high to see the dinosaur exhibit, she managed to find a pretty sweet ride.

Lucy has the best view for checking out the dinosaur exhibit at the Museum of Life & Science.

By the end of the day, I was tempted to ask Chris to piggyback me around, but I was afraid that with his whole Southern Gentleman thing, he’d probably try it and end up injuring himself. I do weigh just a tad more than Lucy, after all.

(About the Southern Gentleman thing: Chris is the type of guy who still insists on opening car doors for me, and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even argue or tease him about it anymore, I just stand there and wait for him to do it.)

In case you wouldn’t have guessed it: yeah, the dinosaurs are pretty much Catie’s favorite thing about the museum. (Same as it was last year.)

Making friends with Mr. Dinosaur.

The barnyard exhibit was probably Lucy’s favorite because they have real animals there (goats, pigs, a cow, etc). She was a little scared to get too close to them, but she pointed at each and told us what each animal says, and it was pretty cute.

Side note: Lucy was a little bit freaked by the butterfly house. Apparently butterflies are very pretty from a distance, not so much when they swoop down right in your face.

After we left at the museum, we stopped to get pizza for dinner, and then frozen yogurt for dessert.

"Mama, I wear you sunglasses!"
At the fro-yo place, Lucy said, “Mama, I wear you sunglasses!” Oh, child.

My plan to wear them out actually worked pretty well. Lucy fell asleep on the couch immediately after her bath, and Catie didn’t last much longer. Chris and I were able to lay on the couch and watched Breaking Bad together without any interruptions.

It was a really good day.

Hopefully the nice weather will hold out for a while so we can have more of them.

In which I nearly get hauled off to the pokey

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(This title is such a tease. You know I’m WAY too boring to go to jail for anything interesting, right?)

Sometime back in June, I got pulled over on my way to a doctor’s appointment. I was running late, the left turn arrow was already on yellow, and I tailed someone through the intersection even though I knew it’d be red before I could clear the intersection.

Of course, a cop just happened to be there. And he pulled me over.

He was going to let me off with a warning, but then he ran my license, and he found a notice that I had no car insurance, and that he was supposed to take the plates off of my car.

Important side note: I did have insurance. What happened was an overlap with my car insurance when I changed over from a joint policy with my ex-husband to a solo policy by myself. So I was basically double-insured for a while. Then I figured it out, my old joint policy was canceled, and the new policy was in effect. But, hey! Boring-but-critically-important detail: my new insurance company never informed the DMV that they were covering me. Whoops.

Apparently the DMV sends you notices about these types of things when they happen. But the address that they had on file was my old house, not the one I moved into after my separation. And even though I had a forwarding address, for whatever reason, those letters didn’t get forwarded to my new house.

So, yeah, it was basically a giant clusterf**k of miscommunication that led to that Wednesday in June when the cop got a screwdriver out of his trunk and took the license plates off of my car.

I called my insurance company in a panic, they apologized profusely and immediately faxed a letter to the DMV, I drove my plate-less car to the DMV, paid for my new tags, and that was that.

Or so I thought.

I sort of missed one important detail there: the ticket that the cop wrote for my lapsed insurance? Apparently the ticket didn’t disappear once I straightened things out with the DMV. Court system & DMV are two totally different systems. Which I guess I knew, but never really thought about?

There was a court date a couple of weeks ago. Which I missed, because I assumed that there was no reason for me to be there. You know, since I’d paid my fees with the DMV, proven to them that I was sufficiently insured (and always had been), and gotten new license plates.

And all of that boring backstory is what led to this tweet tonight.

ticket

I had gotten home with the kids, heated up dinner, and I was in the bathroom taking a much-needed pee break when my doorbell rang. I saw the cop car outside, and… well, my general rule is that I don’t answer the door for strangers, but if a uniformed cop rings your doorbell, YOU ANSWER IT.

He told me that I’d missed my court date and that because of that, there’s a warrant that’s been issued for my arrest. When I started to freak out that I was home alone with my two kids because I’m a single mom, he shook his head and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not taking you anywhere.” (He really was very nice about the whole thing.)

He gave me a card with the number for the district attorney’s office, and told me that I need to call and set up a new court date. He said that if I have proof that my insurance never lapsed & that everything is ok with the DMV, it’ll likely all get dismissed.

Moral of the story: I’m apparently an idiot and need to pay closer attention to fine print. But it’s fine. I’m fine. Not in jail. All is well. Just… that was not exactly what I was expecting for a typical boring Tuesday night in the suburbs.

a different new normal

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Random side note: I started to just call this post “the new normal,” then realized I already had a post with that title, written a few months after my separation, and about a month after moving into the rental house I currently live in. Even though that was less than two years ago, it’s a bit surreal to go back and read blog posts from that point in my life.

It’s strange how quickly life can shift and you can fall into a new routine. Over the past few months, Chris has become such a part of my daily life, and the transition has felt completely natural.

On the evenings he comes over, he walks in the door and the girls run to give him hugs. Lucy is particularly attached to him. She can’t say his name quite right – she calls him Tiss instead of Chris – but she wants him to carry her everywhere, she’ll snuggle up to him with her face in his neck, and she’ll put her hands on his face and say, “You MY Tiss.” (She does the same with me – “you MY mama,” and my dad gets a, “you MY Pop-Pop,” etc. It’s basically her way of saying “I love you” in Lucy-speak.)

He keeps Lucy distracted for me while I help Catie with her homework, and he does the dishes and cleans up while I give the girls their bath. Lucy always wants me to snuggle with her at bedtime, so Catie will ask Chris to come snuggle with her, and I’ll hear them across the room in her bed, whispering about video games or dinosaurs or whatever as I get Lucy settled to sleep.

When he sleeps over, he helps me get the kids ready in the morning by getting Lucy dressed, brushing out her hair, and getting her shoes on.

A lot of times on the weekends (like this past Sunday), we take the girls to IHOP for breakfast.

IHOP on Sunday. I like these little traditions.

We even have our little IHOP routine down: Catie gets her create-a-face pancake (no bananas, extra strawberries), Chris gets a chicken fajita omelet, and I order too much for myself and share with Lucy because she can’t eat a whole kid’s entree by herself. I take Lucy to use the potty before the food comes, because it keeps her distracted so she doesn’t get grumpy in the restaurant. It’s like a drill that we have down pat.

Both kids hid from my camera at the same time
(No reason for this picture, I just think it’s funny – Catie was hiding from my iPhone camera, so Lucy decided she would hide from my camera too.)

And it’s totally easy and everything just sort of falls into place. People see us and just assume that we’re a normal couple with 2 kids. Unless they check our left ring fingers, I suppose.

Having Chris around so much makes my life easier in so many ways, and for that, I am so incredibly grateful.

It’s also incredibly scary, because it makes me feel so much more invested in our relationship. Before, my only concern was about my own heart getting broken if things didn’t work out with us. But now, I also have to worry about Catie and Lucy too. They really have gotten attached to Chris, and I love that they love him. But they’ve already lost one father figure (ok, Dave is still around, but he’s 3000 miles away, so… yeah), and while Chris is not their dad or even a step-dad (and won’t be, since I’m still firmly in the I-will-never-get-remarried** camp), I love that he’s a positive male influence in their lives, and I don’t want them to lose that.

But then, maybe it’s a good thing that it scares me. Maybe it’s a good motivator to do the work to make sure our relationship stays healthy and strong, to make sure we keep communicating well, and that we don’t take each other for granted.

Because honestly? I really love where we are right now, and I don’t want it to change.

And then Lucy clocked me in the eye right as I took a pic.

Even when Lucy clocks me in the eye right as I take a picture.

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** About the not-getting-remarried-ever thing: a lot of people have mentioned this to me, because it seems like a lot of y’all want me to get remarried. And I kind of get that. But there are a couple of factors here: one, that my own personal experience with marriage is that it pretty much sucks. And two, I have to consider how something like that would affect my kids. My rule for now is that marriage is not for me, but I reserve the right to change my mind when I’m 53 years old. Which is how old I’ll be when Lucy turns 18. So for all of y’all who want to see me get married again: ask me about it in 2029. Until then, no thanks.