Hot Exciting Nights!

The small people in our home are finally asleep.  One child in particular has decided sleep is something they've done plenty of in life and see no reason to mess with it each night.  It's quite darling.

We stumble into our room and had the most exciting, connecting conversation as we prepared for bed.

Husband: I thought about stopping at Redbox on my way home tonight.
Me: Why? Were you wanting to make a donation?
Husband: Yeah, I didn't stop. I laughed. 

I flop onto my side of the bed. 

Me: Are you reading or do you want me to turn off the light?

Husband: mumbles incoherently... already asleep.

Tis the Season, we aren't unique. Friends liking different articles called "Dear Husband, I miss you" remind me of our isolated solidarity in my social media feed.  There are so many of them! This one is good... and this one! Everyone is worn and tattered from parenthood!)

Another ttwd blogger shared the same weariness here... It's just life right now. But the small people we've been entrusted to raise are thriving, growing, learning so our weird, half-finished conversations aren't totally in vain.

Summer, you're dismissed.

September, I love what you bring but this year is especially wonderful... Outlander is here! A friend spied this magazine in a waiting room. She didn't know those "time travel books had a sexy love story." Oh what a tale she is missing!

September also brought a rare couple outing! Dominic and I had the glorious treat of a trip to the home improvement store and grocery store! (Pinterest that hot date night idea!) Aren't these trips easier when your dynamic changes?

My back is doing just fine since I haven't bent over a thing since that mishap. I am missing that connection fiercely. Our back to school transition has had some major hiccups and adjustments. While not appropriate to dive into here, I will say that I have the utmost respect for those in the teaching profession. It is hard work and I know even harder with all the changes in the world, funding, curriculum, national mandates, testing, etc, etc. We've luckily had phenomenal teachers who truly felt called to the classroom to mold young minds. Unfortunately we've run into one who fits those rude viral posts disparaging teachers. The past few weeks have been non-stop figuring out how to improve the situation and then research our options and make a big change after barely a month of school.

Those big decisions impacting children have made for some testy times. I'd use those Hurricane Madeline analogies, but with so many suffering from Harvey, Irma, Jose, and Katia, that seems quite insensitive. What a horrible storm season!

This kid around needed a considerable amount of attention from us after school, her sleep was disrupted, and we're off to work during the day. Having big discussions in passing makes for a stressful environment. We feel good about where this situation ended up, made some big adjustments for us in our budget that we ended up with time to discuss eventually. But we're blessed to have schooling options where we live and have room to tighten our budget at all.

Obviously for our child's sake, I'm praying this all works out. For other reasons, we need some calm here, some time at night for Dominic and I to at least finish a sentence or two, maybe even watch TV together? Dreaming big, perhaps we'll have time to figure out the positions you've all suggested!

This dynamic requires some margin to do well. Very little time together makes it easy to feel like adversaries when you have different views and solutions. Things we can discuss and together find a good answer for seem like huge problems without that time.

Summer, I'm officially kicking you out. Along with the fantastic line up of new seasons you'll bring, (Poldark comes back next month!), I need a bit cooler weather, pumpkin patch field trips, fall festivals, and happy settled and secure children. All these things will be much more enjoyable if I'm regularly well-spanked.