Sydney comes back in a week, after a five-week absence. After a hello hug and a few deep, swoonish sighs in his direction (which will make him laugh), I’ll have to face the fact that the school year is barreling toward us. And I’m sure there will be one or two (dozen, thousand) things that I managed to mangle in his garden, so he’ll be busy even before he starts preparing to teach.
Before the madness starts, and now that I just sent off an article that I’ve been working on for a month (good feeling), I thought I should record for posterity that while Sydney has been away this month THE KIDS AND I HAVE HAD A GOOD TIME.
Scratch that: A VERY GOOD TIME.
I’ve had plenty of moments when I wished for my partner, but mostly they were prompted by my wanting him to have this kind of slow time with kids/house/garden/reading, which is awfully hard to come by during the school year. However, since he’s apparently having a great time in Colorado, even those haven’t been terribly numerous.
The kids and I have counted butterflies in Louisville, made mountains of potato salad and pasta salad with the herbs in the garden, refined our smoothie-making to an art, hosted other families for dinner, read several chapter books, learn to hide cherry tomatoes where the cats can’t play with them, and scootered/run nearly every inch of Wilmore. And the kids have played well on their own while letting me mow, paint, and cook.
If Sydney were here I would have simply called for help instead of repairing the tomato stakes, getting rid of Big Bugs (seriously, why do people live where there are cicadas? gross!), learning to use a drill (after staring sulkily at it for two hours), or tackling the never-ending mowing. Most importantly, I wouldn’t have been forced to sit down and just cuddle and care for my kids like I have this past month.
Not all of Sydney’s long-distance adventures have gone so smoothly, so I am grateful for this one–which has been helped by my not teaching at the same time, our being in a permanent home, and our kids being older and more fun. Seriously, why couldn’t they always be this playful, imaginative, and independent?
Erin
Alan Schmierer