I am aware that this post is basically a mid-life crisis, though I hope that it’s mostly in concept a mid-life crisis, and not in math. Some people buy something extravagant that they don’t need. Some people go on a sabbatical. I apparently decided to get emo and write a blog post.

I’m not sure when it started exactly, but at some point in the last year I started thinking a lot about mortality. The topic in general, but most specifically mine. It’s something that I have pondered before, but typically in passing and not frequently. That shifted. I think about it a lot now.

Here’s where I pause to make clear this is not some write-up on my secret depression. I think I can make the distinction that I’m not dwelling on the subject. It’s more like wondering. Considering. It is something I would rather not be spending too much time thinking about though, and I am worried it’s the kind of thought process that may never abate fully. I’d prefer this not turn into my white whale.

I ponder what it would be like, the afterward. My main issue is that I can’t wrap my mind around it. The presumption of an actual afterlife requires me to make too many leaps in logic and faith. What’s left then is… nothing. And nothing is something I cannot envision. It’s as hard to grasp as trying to imagine everything. I don’t love the idea of simply not being able to think thoughts anymore. Of just not being. Or being not. It’s a bogeyman that I know is waiting for me and regardless of how much it scares me to think about, I continue to think about it.

It’s a problem, and I am in the business of solving problems, so I’ve also been trying to think what I can do about it. What can I do to either stop thinking about the topic, or at least have my thoughts about it be fruitful instead of frightening? There have been ways I’ve tried to reframe my thinking, but none of them took hold. I tried to think about my life not as a story I am the main character in, but as the story of my children, for whom my passing would be a painful but necessary chapter. Or thinking about how the whole period of nothing before I was born doesn’t seem to bother me mentally and if that didn’t bug me then I shouldn’t expect a bunch of nothing after to be such a big deal. Or figuring that maybe I’ll be lucky enough to live a nice, long, fulfilling life and then by the end I’ll just feel like “Yup. I think I can be done now.” Those worked only a little bit.

Trying to reframe my thoughts about death led me to reframe the entire idea of what I was trying to do, though. What was I really worried about? And, what’s more, what could I really have any influence over? I can’t change what’s waiting for me. I won’t be the guy who produces the neural interface that lets everyone live in robot bodies forever. I can create a legacy of some sort. I think the ship has sailed on my writing the Great American Novel or Screenplay. But I do have this suddenly super emo blog.

I’ve listened to too many heart-wrenching podcast stories about individuals losing a cherished loved one and being heartbroken that all they really have to remember them by is a single voicemail or some other flavor of lonesome memorial item to want to have that be the case for my family. I’m already in that trap, though. Much as everyone likes to gripe about the supposed narcissism of social media and “selfie culture”, there’s going to be an indelible record of the day-to-day lives of those individuals that will become absolutely priceless when they are gone. Janelle and I though are still in the standard mode of taking tons of photos of the children and photos of ourselves maybe a handful of times each year: anniversaries, birthdays (maybe), group photos at Thanksgiving and Christmas. These aren’t really representative of us and they don’t make a terribly rich portrait of how we lived and what we were like.

My plan is start taking photos of US more. Not the kids, but us. Janelle helping the kids with food. Me pushing Maya around in the stroller. The kind of small moments that will trigger little memories beyond the holiday/birthday monoliths that so typically fill the long-term landscape. Hand the kids the phone, let them pop off some goofy, off-kilter portraits.

That’s only part of the puzzle. Having the ability to browse through my life’s progression and look back to “remember when” is one thing, but it still only scratches the surface. It tells stories, but it doesn’t answer questions. Death feels like it takes a person away and leaves questions behind and I think that might be one of the biggest things that bothers me. How will everyone cope? In what ways will they remember me? Will they feel that things have been left unsaid or unfinished? I won’t be able to give answers after I’m gone, so why wait.

I will record instructions about what to do when I’m gone. Everything from the nitty gritty to how to handle… me… to what kind of funeral/memorial/whatever would work for me, to the kind of food and music it would be nice to have, to what to do with my stuff. Janelle and I already have a living trust that outlines those things, but that’s very clinical and may still feel difficult to interpret or follow through on. Providing that information in my own voice will hopefully go a long way towards clearing up any hesitation or confusion.

Again, though, that’s not everything. Sure, that may make some of the immediate aftermath simpler to deal with but it doesn’t solve those lingering issues. Was I proud of you? What did I think about my life? What was meaningful to me? I have these blog posts, but they’re pretty topical. I try to make them broadly applicable, even if they are about my life pretty specifically. So I’m going to write about my life and more specifically about, and to, the people in it.

Every year, on or around my birthday, I’m going to write a letter to each of the children, and to Janelle. It will be a breakdown of what in their life has been meaningful to me. Major milestones and what it meant for me to be a part of them. My hopes and dream and concerns for their future. It will be everything that I would want to be able to say to them if it turned out I was gone the next day. I hope one day to have these letters form a nice collection. A clear retelling of our lives, and of my frame of mind throughout them. I want it to be the case that if someone at some point down the line wants to conjure me up, they simply need to double-click a file and there I’ll be, clean and clear on the page. It’s a little selfish, because who doesn’t want to be remembered, but more than that I want those words to be the comfort that I can no longer directly provide. I don’t want to fade away a mystery. I would prefer to be, quite literally, an open book.

This has finally started to quiet my mind on the topic. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about death entirely, but I don’t think about it as much. What’s more, I haven’t smoothed over the issue or simply hoped that I’ll forget about it. It’s a direct, proactive solution. It’s a way to help keep my memory alive in a way that doesn’t involve heavy lifting from the ones I love. It’s a way that I can provide what I think they will need, the intangibles that gnaw through grief — theirs and mine.

It’s one of those boring posts about me before I come up with another one to write about the children.

Follow-through seems to have been one of the casualties of my having children, so it has been maybe more important to me than it needs to be to keep up on all my little resolutions.

I realized I didn’t make an “F” resolution name for the cleaning I have been trying to do. Let’s go with Finnicky. Our house looks at all times like a bomb has gone off. Janelle and I are not good at throwing things out. For me, it’s not a matter of attachment and more this sense that I should not be contributing to the world’s trash problem by throwing shit out. I’m getting over that, though. Obviously things we can donate we do. The rest I am learning to dispose of with prejudice. 4 days a week I have myself scheduled to clean something and I’ve been keeping pace with that. It can’t just be something like picking up toys Maya has scattered around or doing the dishes. Those are upkeep. This needs to be a new thing that I clean. So I’m making progress. A desk drawer a night. A little nook between couches that was starting to accumulate stray baby clothes. The top of a cabinet unit that makes a convenient “babies can’t reach this high” shelf.

Food – This is the one I am making the slowest progress on. I’ve been hitting my goal, but I made it too easy. So far the target was just to not eat dessert one night a week. I’ve done that, but I need to up it. So I’m going to do a night where I don’t have any snacks or anything after dinner. If that feels like too little, I’ll just toss in an extra day each week. It’s dumb that this is probably the hardest one to maintain.

Fitness – Five nights a week I have been doing between 10-20 pushups. For February I am introducing 20 sit-ups to the mix. Feeling pretty good about this one. Doesn’t take long at all, gives a nice quick pick-me-up.

Fun – I set up a board game group and started every now and then working on making the miniatures that go with the game. We had a gaming session a couple weeks back and have another scheduled for February.

Flirting – Janelle and I totally whiffed on finding a night for ourselves to do something, though. So that’s a bummer. We talked about it a couple times. *shrugs* I am less concerned about this one, but know that it would be better if we didn’t slack on it.

Focus – I don’t know that I’ve started using the phone less at this point, but I have increased other things. I have been writing more. I had set myself a pace of 5 nights a week, but I think with everything else I am cramming in, that was too much. I shifted to 3 nights a week, but with the caveat that I need to do at least one blog post each week. So, less writing required, but now with a deliverable. I have decided to shift some of my phone usage to crossword puzzles, which I really like doing. So, I’m using the phone, but at least I’m giving my brain a workout with it.

The other item I didn’t have down on the resolutions list was reading more and I’ve started doing more of that. Finished a book I bought YEARS ago and never got to, and then moved onto reading some of 2017’s best of winners in the graphic novel category. I love comics, so it’s a good way to both keep me up to date there, and reading in general. Plus, the best of lists tend to have indie darlings that I’d never hear about otherwise, so it branches me into some interesting new territory as well.

The application I use to track my habits, Streaks, is really great for building the momentum of habit tracking and provides a little carrot for me to continue hitting my targets… but it does have a bit of a flip side in that if I ever miss a single day needed (this past week I forgot to do my mini workout one of the days I was going to) and it takes my 25+ day streak and wipes it back to zero. So, makes sense, but also has a tinge of “what’s the point of trying to claw back to my previous record”. So I just need to try to uncouple the “achievement” in my mind from the value of the process, even with small setbacks included.

I never really had much of a vision of myself as a parent before I became one. I had always assumed that I would just be a more tired version of myself — direct and open, patient, chatty, eager to help and answer questions and generally pretty mild. I was not correct about this.

There existed a time in my life when I didn’t really know what I sounded like when I yelled. Prior to children, I honestly cannot think of more than a single time when I yelled in anger. When I worked security at the university bookstore (or as they prefer to rename it “loss prevention”) I got into an argument with a slacker coworker about the fact that he was a slacker coworker and our “discussion” in the little hidden back office of the bookstore could be heard by patrons walking the aisles. People were not terribly pleased about that one. That was it. I didn’t fight with friends or girlfriends. I didn’t (don’t) really have any nemeses. Janelle and I managed to go years and years only having mild disagreements (and even now I would count the number of actual fights we have had on one hand).

That era is long gone. I am now sick of hearing myself at volumes that do not qualify as “inside voice”. Joshua started the process by being a toddler who loved to have some fairly impressive tantrums. He’s pretty well behaved now, but he put the first cracks in the armor. Matthew delivered the finishing blow. He started out as our little tiny toddler man who loved to bite and so we would end up running across the room yelling as we went, hoping to distract him with volume before trying to pry him off his crying brother. He has grown out of biting but the principle of “yell to stop Matthew short from hurting someone” remains. Slapping his brother. Pinching him. Sitting on him. Kicking him. Now there’s also stuff like making sure he’s not squeezing his sister’s face or trying to put something around her neck or hiding her under a blanket by sitting on her with it. The start of it all is his boundless exuberance. Everything seems like a fun idea and the fun escalates without stopping until he’s in trouble or hurt.

It does not help that I have found there are certain degrees of stimuli that make me ripe for explosions. Our house is a constant mess and once it reaches a certain level, I start to not be able to handle it anymore. It bothers me to be in certain areas and if I don’t have the time and availability to just sit down and start sorting things back to how they should be, then I am much more likely to be in a bad mood. An auditory mess is sure to rile me up as well. I don’t just mean noise in general. I have three children. There is always noise. I can deal with noise, even loud noise. Even different loud noises by three different children at the same time. But then there is the whining. The boys (like many-to-most children I think) have periods where they are incessant whiners. And if they bring their whining to a fever pitch around the same time that Maya is screeching at someone to pay attention to her instead of doing things like preparing food for the family or attempting to get ready to go to work for the day hoooooooo boy. I don’t do well then.

I yell. I yell to grab attention. I yell to underline my seriousness. I yell to end the sound wars and bring about silence.

And I hate it.

I hate it for several reasons. 1) On one level I know it won’t register with the kids long-term (I maybe have like two or three memories of my entire young childhood where my parents were yelling at us for something), but on the other side I’m conscious of being remembered as this curmudgeonly ogre. 2) It’s repetitive as hell. You cannot avoid parroting the parenting tropes that you have both grown up with and also seen in media. We’ve absorbed so much of them that they feel like they fit. But because you’ve seen them in so many places, it means you also know exactly what you sound and look like when you say them because you too have hated that character in a movie. 3) It means that I have lost. It says I have run out of options and I have no choice left but to tap into my id and shake the whole god damn Etch-a-Sketch until it’s all blank again and we can start over.

I may not have had much of a picture of myself as a parent, but I think I at least imagined that I would be more savvy that this. And while I want to be careful to say that I don’t think I am a bad parent (because I am not trying to trigger a bunch of sympathy commentary pointing out the nice things people have seen me do with my children), I do not see yelling as a regular weapon in the arsenal of a skilled parent.

The gap between where I am and where I would like to be is fairly wide and while making a list of things I could do other than raise the volume or remembering to always count to five before saying anything or any other trick like that might seem like it would be a gigantic first stride towards fixing things, I think the reality is that it wouldn’t do much at all because the real issue is that I have lost all my chill.

There is now a near-endless list of things that I am not very relaxed about that children exist specifically to exacerbate. Getting somewhere on time is like conducting a deathmarch. Being calm and quiet in public places takes cajoling and threats. Getting a child to wash hands instead of rolling around on the floor crying about how they don’t want to wash hands is a ludicrous series of negotiations. No matter the hassle I can’t seem to budge on standards and norms. I don’t know that I can ever be comfortable arriving late, for example, and the children simply do not get the urgency. And why should they? They are very small and everything is fleeting to them. One day when they are older they will be late to something they have finally decided they care about and then they will get it.

Some things I don’t think I’ll be able to be cool about, at least not for some time. There are levels of disrespect (I just aged 10 years writing that) that I think will always make me go twitchy. There are dangerous, persistent behaviors that I’m probably going to reflexively yell about because I’m trying to preserve life and limb. The rest I’m going to try to relax about. Boys fighting? One of them make the other one cry? Both of them crying and actively fighting? Unless they’re causing real physical damage I’m going to sit out and encourage them to figure it out. Running late? I’ll give a timeline, outline consequences and then hang out. If I’m walking my way to a car to leave, they’ll hurry up (most of the time). Hopefully while I get better they will age out of their mad little habits and while they learn to find their voice I’ll be able to get back to my old one.

I have several post drafts that I started and abandoned that were all about the notion of my life being on pause and that being the fault of my children. I have started and stopped that post three or four times over the past year or so. I was probably chalking up my failure to complete those posts as the fault of the children as well. They sapped my willpower. I didn’t have time. They wouldn’t leave me alone. But it’s probably that I couldn’t finish those drafts because at my core I knew that it was a false premise.

In my defense, children are hard. And sometimes I feel like my children are harder than they need to be. The littlest is trouble simply because she shifts us into zone defense. When Janelle is busy cooking, for example, it turns into a 3-on-1. This would be less of an issue if the boys were better at either entertaining themselves or being better brothers. There are these flickering windows where they are the siblings I want them to be. Joshua sitting on the couch and reading something to his little brother. Matthew giving Joshua his last piece of dessert because he wants his brother to get to try it. Giant giggles as they hide under a blanket together on the couch. But those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Most of the time it’s Matthew asking to borrow a toy of Joshua’s only to have Joshua flatly refuse every single time without looking up from what he’s doing. Or Matthew getting told he can’t have an extra cookie so he walks over to his brother and slaps him to take out his aggression. Or giant giggles from hiding under the blanket turning to tears after Joshua gets kicked in the face by a little brother who can’t handle his own body when he gets too excited. Singly they are both fantastic little men with vibrant, distinct personalities and interests. Together they are juggalos.

Anyway, my point aside from the venting I feel I need to do from time to time, is that it is exceedingly difficult to do anything that isn’t “regulate on the children” when the children are all awake. To me this translated to my children basically causing my personal development to be put on pause. And while there is an extent to which this is true, in the way that I was trying to communicate it I was just using the children as excuses.

Yes, there is basically no chance that in the next few years I will be able to carve a couple hours out of the middle of each day to work on a screenplay, but nothing would stop me from writing for 15 minutes. Sure, it’s not like every day I have free time when I can have the bros over and drink beers and swear a bunch while we play boardgames. But I can manage to schedule a regular get together for a couple hours each month.

I’m not really considering it a resolution, but the last “f” on my prior list of resolutions is forgiveness. I don’t mean forgiving the children because as much as they make me insane sometimes it’s nothing I’m going to blame them for (yet). I mean to forgive myself for not being “better”. That’s hard to do. I am surrounded by exceptional people who seem to get a lot of great things done despite how busy or distracted they could claim to be. As a result there are times I find it hard not to say to myself on any variety of topics that I should do better, and not simply be aware that I could do more if I wanted to.

I don’t need to write a novel every few months. Sitting down to write for even a couple of minutes is enough for me to grow and progress as a writer if that’s what I want to do. I don’t need to clean the entire house in a weekend, but if I do one small project each day (ideally in a location that won’t be wiped out by children knocking things over the next day) then I’ll get there eventually. I don’t need to be reading constantly, I just need to be reading, you know, at all.

Taking care of the children doesn’t need to be the centerpiece of every moment of my day. If I want to take a little time to work on a project or clean or do anything for 5 minutes, so long as the baby isn’t in danger and the boys aren’t punching each other, then I should feel comfortable allowing myself to do that. It can be a little harder than you would think to avoid a bit of guilt taking even those micro moments. Maybe it’s a lifetime of watching family movies where a central theme is that an adult is not available to their kid because they are busy and that child is then crushed emotionally. Maybe it’s the deluge of media out there telling us we’re not doing as well as we could be in raising our children.

So I’m going to stop using the children as excuses for not getting big things done, and forgive myself for not always having the energy to take on the world. I’m going to take my small steps and hope they lead me to larger things.

Over the course of the first three weeks of December, I stayed home to watch Maya while Janelle went back to the office. We swapped for a bit due some persnickety scheduling for her at work, and so that we could extend Janelle’s leave to allow Maya to be a bit older before she heads into daycare.

Looked at objectively, this is exactly what Janelle did for the three months prior (and will do for the next month)—she stayed home to care for our baby. Looked at through the still pretty gendered lens of parenting, I’m a bit of a unicorn for being a father who stayed home to care for his child all by himself. This is something I would prefer normally to downplay… but I’m also eager to record a few of my thoughts on what it was like being solo with Maya. I’ll say this before I go any farther though: this is not laudable. This is normal. I had a baby. I cared for said baby. I know enough about caring for a baby that I was able to do so without assistance. That those things can still be seen as surprising for a father is a bummer.

I was worried leading into my time with Maya that I wouldn’t have the temperament for it. My job requires a lot of fast task-switching and a constant stream of new info and interactions with tons of people. Time with a baby requires the ability to do one thing for a lot of time, and to minimize distractions. And while Maya is a “good” baby, she requires a lot of attention. I was expecting to go stir crazy.

Obviously, I survived, thanks in large part to Netflix and Amazon Prime Streaming. I managed to watch the equivalent of 2 movies a day almost every day I was home with Maya and for someone who loves to watch movies and never gets the time to, it was pretty excellent.

This will of course make it sound like watching a baby is a total picnic. For those of you who have never stayed home with an infant, let me break it down on why it is not.

Babies are bad at everything. I have covered this pretty extensively over the course of my various bloggings. This means that you need to do everything for them. The list is not extensive, but it is constant, and so you have the specter of what the baby needs next constantly hovering over you.

Like some shitty Fast and Furious knock-off, life with a baby is lived three hours at a time. 30 minutes prior to Maya waking, I heat up water in the microwave so that I can give her milk bottle a bath to get it up to the proper temperature for her to drink. When she wakes, I get her up, change her diaper and bring her down to give her a bottle. For this period of time, I am trapped on the couch until she is done. Bottle-feeding is typically faster than breast-feeding, so my feeds were usually only around 15-20 minutes. However, there were occasions when Maya would be snoozy and it would take twice as long as she snoozed and woke and snoozed and woke her way through the feeding. This was prime movie-watching time.

Once she’s up, it’s time to burp her. Once she seems burped enough, it’s time to play with her by letting her “jump” up and down on me. There’s like a 95% chance I get thrown up on here. For the first couple of weeks watching her, my only other real option was to lay her down on her back on the ground. I would then immediately lay down next to her and talk to her, or lay on my back and show her things and talk to her about them to keep her interested. Because if she loses interest, she gets angry and wants to roll over and if she rolls over she gets angry and then throws up and rubs her face in it. It’s important to give her tummy time so she can work on her muscles, but it gets super old watching your baby do the same thing that makes them angry and vomity every. single. time.

After she’s gotten angry and started spitting up more than is feasible to continue cleaning up, it’s time to pick her up and make a little seat of my arm and walk her around the house. Now, hopefully I’ve gotten about an hour of time out of the rest of the stuff because now I’m walking back and forth in the house with her until it’s nap time. If I’m lucky, she let’s me walk around by the TV. But if she’s grumpy, I need to keep changing the scenery. Bathroom. Kitchen. Upstairs. Downstairs. Say hi to the baby in the mirror.

Around about two hours after her last bottle it’s time to get her down for a nap. That process is fairly painless, as she’s a good sleeper. But, the nap itself has an upper limit of about an hour, but can be as short as 15 minutes. This means that any time I want to get something done, I have a mystery clock to race against. Need to shower? Haul some ass. Trying to answer some work e-mails? Hopefully nothing too hard. Want to make a sandwich? Cram that shit in your mouth.

This is the cycle. 3 times, every day. Well, 5 times every day, but the morning and evening cycles are broken up by caring for the two boys and Janelle provides the milk. So, it gets repetitive. I tried to break up the routine as much as I could by planning for outings whenever it seemed feasible. Trips to Target or the grocery store. Trips to get myself lunch or do some Christmas shopping. Trips are tricky. They’re tricky no matter what with a baby… but they’re tricky if you don’t bring the food source with. I can’t feed Maya when we’re out, so everything I did out of the house had to fit in the roughly two hours I’d have before her next feed. Plus, typically she’ll fall asleep in the car on the way home, which is a short, unsatisfying nap for her, and a ruined “free period” for me.

Even if caring for a baby is not hard (and some babies can make it VERY trying), it is repetitive and it can be very dull and it most certainly does not allow you the freedom that one might suppose. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, though. Mid-way through the last week she began to do better rolling over. She wouldn’t spit up at all sometimes. And she got better at grabbing toys, so I could plop her in her baby seat, put some toys within reach and talk at her while I worked on e-mail.

And that was the thing that I realized I had been missing out on with the boys. I stayed home with both of them when they were very little. So, my time at home with them each was when they were both sleeping like 90% of the time. I didn’t get a real sense of their development. And I had Janelle there to back me up all the time. But spending all day with Maya made very clear where her gains were being made. I could see her get more control over her arms. Or try out new grasps. I got to figure out what toys she liked to look at and what tricks would put her to sleep. I was an active parenting participant with the boys, but I became a Subject Matter Expert with Maya.

There’s also the battlefield camaraderie with Janelle. Obviously her time with babies alone will outnumber mine something like 56 weeks to 3 so it’s not quite a comparison, but I got a taste. We climbed our way up and slipped all the way back down the same slope over and over again for days at a time.

And it wasn’t hard. It wasn’t special. I didn’t need extra help. It was parenting. I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

There are now three children that live in our house. Well, really, there are two children and a little cry-larvae, but the net result is that there are three things to take care of in the house. The math changes now.

All children are different. Some children are super easy and make it so that increasing their numbers in relation to the number of parents watching them won’t really make a difference. Some children are super hard and no matter how many adults are assisting, they will make things tough. But, in purely general terms, having one or two children is pretty straightforward for any one parent to manage. Three makes it tricky. Even in your best-case-scenario, you’re outnumbered.

So what has changed for us? What’s really different now that we have three? That will evolve over time, but here’s where it stands for now.

Big Brothers: So far, we’re not seeing too much trouble here. The boys are excited to have a little sister, but she can’t do anything so all of the “problems” of a little sibling are not a factor. She cannot move around. She cannot touch their stuff. They get home and they get cleaned up so they can take turns having her in their lap. Matthew wants to touch the baby every time he sees her. When she cries they try to give her little hugs and kisses and to tell her she’ll be okay. At every tiny noise she makes, they are convinced she is agreeing with something they have said, and every time she accidentally touches them with her flailing little limbs they think it’s both hilarious and a sure sign that she is trying to hold their hands or play with them. They both are excited for her to be older when they don’t need to be quite so careful about not touching her or getting her sick. It’s pretty cute.

Mommy: Life for Janelle goes on pause while she’s caring for the baby since her schedule for now is tied very closely to Maya’s sleep/feed schedule. Maya is still too little to really take her anywhere, and Janelle’s body is still recovering so even if she could be out for very long, she probably wouldn’t want to be. Even a solo trip to the grocery store for about an hour was pretty taxing. All things considered, though, she’s doing well. She’s not in a lot of pain, and Maya sleeps and eats well. So, while Janelle’s night is bisected by feeding, she’s been able to manage around six hours of sleep a night. There is a bit of expected emotional fallout that comes with your body reordering basically all of its hormones after a birth.

Daddy: During the day, my life goes on pause while I hang out at home taking care of little things and helping to shop and run errands and give Janelle breaks from the baby. I’m also trying to keep up with work from home to better enable me to both maintain more time at home and ensure that I will not be buried upon my return. Life for the boys does not slow down, though. The boys still have swim and gymnastics class in the morning and a birthday party in the evening and they need to get to Target to get some shopping done for that party and then the next day we have plans for a playdate and etc. etc. etc. So right away Janelle and I are working separate gigs. She will be stuck solo at home caring for an adorable-but-let’s-be-honest-pretty-boring baby while I’m out hoping that Matthew decides not to flip his shit over something while he’s at swim class.

Free Time: This is where the biggest hit is, at least for now. I know, big surprise, right? Evenings are fast. Boys get home with me around 5. Dinner is around 6. Upstairs to start bedtime around 7. Bedtime by 8. Normally this is where Janelle and I would relax… but now Janelle goes to bed essentially immediately (or as soon as Maya allows us to) and I follow suit shortly thereafter. This will be going on this way for at least several more weeks.

Weekends are hard. Our boys have always been tricky when they have too much unscheduled time, mostly because they cannot play together without fighting, so when they are home with us it’s basically a countdown to raised voices and crying. Not really something I spend my week looking forward to.

The Final Verdict: At this point things are not too much more difficult than I recall them being last time when we had Matthew. The boys will need to learn to entertain themselves a bit better on their own, but they haven’t really changed their behavior for the more difficult. It’s tough feeling like Janelle and I can’t team up as much as we normally would since we are more-or-less inseparable the rest of the time, but that will melt away with time.