When Jeff goes out of town, I tend to be a really great parent for about three days. After the third day, I get tired and cranky and “IF YOU CAN’T HELP YOUR SISTER, THEN I CAN’T HELP YOU!!!” Bedtimes go from 8:00 to 7:45 to 7:30 when Jeff is out of town. Today is Day Five of Jeff being out of town, and I’m spent. He’ll be home tomorrow. He’ll be home tomorrow. He’ll be home tomorrow.
High five to all of the single parents out there. I honestly have no idea how you do it without help from others. It takes a village and all of that, I suppose.
I could sing songs about all of the things that went wrong yesterday, but songs about dogs needing to be lifted over a bad fence and Couch to 5K applications updating unexpectedly and kids fighting instead of practicing the piano? Yep. Those songs don’t travel very far.
I remember being a kid and hearing this song for the first time. I think it’s the very first song that really affected me. (The piano. Ahhh, the piano.) Thirty years later, and the song is still traveling with me. (It has absolutely nothing to do with dogs and fences and kids. Oddly, it has everything to do with practicing the piano.)
Ah, but there was a “scars into stars” moment yesterday evening.
The UPS guy stopped by with a box from Zappos! This is definitely my new favorite pair of shoes. (They take the place of my favorite pair that I purchased a few months back, which replaced the favorite pair I purchased last year. Here’s my analogy: Gymnastics in 2012 are totally different than gymnastics in 1976. The flips are wilder. The beam routines are more dangerous. Gymnastics in 2042 are going to be preposterous. There is no time for laziness or backstepping. I cannot jump over a horse or bend myself into unnatural angles in order to fly onto a high bar. Therefore, I try to seek out cute shoes that I feel won’t trick me into falling down, and then I outshoe myself. Are you with me?)
Best of all, with green Mary Janes on my feet, my soles will be bouncing.
This is vital right now, as I feel a HUGE wave of introversion coming on. (It always hits in January.) With a bouncing sole, I won’t feel quite so guilty about staying home.
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That’s exactly how my Good Parenting Graph goes when my husband is out of town. He’ll be home tomorrow, and you have bouncy shoes!
Um, I just bought 2 pairs of Fluevogs (one olive green, one in a color he calls cinnamon) for the same reason. Only they’ve got higher heels than I’m used to, and they’re not Dansko clogs. (I’m trying to be more feminine.) I’m going to have to wear my Danskos for daycare dropoff, because I don’t think I can carry my 29-lb 10 month old up the stroller ramp in 3 inch heels. Maybe I’ll get some very white Reeboks and do that 1980s shoe change thing that all the girls were doing in the 80s. When I was 10.
Damn you and your cool shoes…. DAMN YOU!!!!
Luckily I’m obsessed with finding a new pair of glasses that are different than my other pairs of glasses that I thought were different than the other pairs of glasses, but then I got home and realized I bought the same damn pair of glasses!
Those are super cute shoes. I am sporting my first ever pair of Doc Martens this winter, in the form of black boots. Single parents are superheroes; my husband is gone for the weekend, and I’m loading my 2 kids in the car tomorrow and heading to a friend’s house for the night.
There were 2 periods where my dad worked away from home for weeks at a time and my mom would start getting c-r-a-z-y. Eventually we devised the game of sticking her in the closet when she got super cranky (we were 14, 13, 10, and 8). It always ended with laughing and helped to break up the clouds, but now I can’t believe that something horrible didn’t happen (like a complete maternal melt-down and refusal to come out of the closet, feed us, or in any way continue to sustain our lives, not to mention not beating us).
And the time I stayed with my tiny nieces (2 and 5 months) for 5 days I nearly had a psychotic break. By the last day I’d become semi-mute. I felt horrible about it, but my introvert self just shut down under the constant onslaught of little people needs. Later my sister in law said she’d never seen anyone flee the scene faster than I did when they got home. My brother said there was no way that it could have possibly been so bad until I challenged him to consider whether he’d ever spent longer than 12 hours alone with his children.
LURV GREEN SHOES….AND THAT’S WHY WE LOVE YOU MRS PUDDING…WE, AS IN ME N ISABELLA
Introversion? I can’t get enough of it.
Who needs Prozac when we have cute shoes?
Oh, how I love January. It’s a low pressure month.
Totally adorable shoes..wear them well! January is the height of cold and flu season…a perfect excuse to introvert.
I am in complete denial about having to pull off the single parent thing for six+ weeks. I know there are people who do it with more small humans than I have but…there’s three of them. And one of me. And probably not enough Xanax in the world.
But in brighter news – cute shoes!