Day 51

Conservation and the Art of Planning Ahead while keeping your eye on the Rear View Mirror.

Sunday was really more about surviving than living.  This day would be a nice contrast to the day prior.  It would serve as a good reminder of what a wonderful day Saturday truly was.  The weather turned for Sunday.  Grey skies returned and there was a bite to the air.  Not cold, just not quite warm enough.  We wouldn't be in any rush to roll out of bed since we didn't have any plans for the day.  That, as you know, is the way our Sundays are now spent.  QUIET.  Well sort of.  The children did wake at a later hour this fine morning, but unfortunately, when the exited their covers, they apparently did so from the wrong side of the bed.  Ill tempered isn't the word for it and it would stretch papa bears patience to the edge.

As you are also aware, I am back to life as a single dad.  Experience has proven that the first couple of days are always the toughest.  I have to fine tune life to a degree in order to manage it on my own.  Fortunately the eldest always rises to the occassion and can sense the change in expectations without a word being spoken.  This day would be like all others of its kind, a bit of tinkering to make things work.  The only exception being that I didn't really plan ahead on going to the grocery.  That is a daily vigil here that we are still adjusting to and I somehow let the fact that we had absolutely no food in the house slip past my attention.  Fortunately we did have a couple of items in bulk supply, so it would be a day full of bananas and cereal.  I am not a big cereal eater, but my wife is insistent on keeping a years supply of the stuff on hand at any given time.  The rest of the family does consume a fair amount of cereal, but the amount in our cupboards usually seems like overkill.  I was thankfull for this idiocincracy on Day 51 or we would have been quite hungry leading into Day 52.

Life as a single father and the trials that this brings always puts me in a philosophical frame of mind and I begin to think a bit more about life and what is truly important.  I think my children's current movie of choice will be the focus of my attention.  It would also be a part of the slow Sunday afternoon.  You all know the type of movie . . . the one that gets played over and over again until everyone in the house can repeat it from memory.  Anyone who has had children can feel my pain here.  Fortunately, I am a big ass kid myself so some of the titles I don't mind so much.  This is one such movie.  My eldest has read every book in the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series at least 3 or 4 times over.  The film version is now receiving just as much attention.  I quite enjoy the film as it makes me very nostalgic.  It sounds a bit silly, but I can sort of just become lost in it and revert back to the 6th grade version of myself.  A time in which my biggest concern was whether I was in fact too old to go trick or treating or whether the child-like fancies of my youth would bring scorn upon me from my peers.  It is a time of intense internal turmoil that I miss greatly.  It was a time for remembering all those wonderful parts of your youth while accepting that the transformation from larva to pimply faced butterfly is not going to be an easy one to come to terms with.

It is one of the watershed points in your life that you hope will pass quickly, but look back upon and wish it hadn't in fact moved by you in the blink of an eye.  It reminds me of the parts of life that you idealize in your mind.  The daily pace of life trivializes these events and you get lost in the minute details at the time.  The small events overshadow the overriding theme.  It is in your memory that you get to truly extract the joy from these events.  It is in the way you can close your eyes and feel the fall wind on your skin and smell the autumn in the air.  The way you can look back in your minds eye and feel the joy of a glowing summer evening when you didn't have to worry about mortgage payments and tax returns.  You sort of dismiss these underlying items at the time, but it is what make these events special and it is the thing you must imprint on your children when they too get to experience these wonders of life.

So I leave you this evening with a piece of advise.  Remember the good times.  Don't get bogged down in the daily events that seem so stressful.  This too shall pass and you will remember the tough times as fondly as those that seemed so much more rich at the time.  Perhaps this Sunday wasn't as eventful or as delightful as the day prior, but I can promise that one day I will look back and a piece of this day will live in a very warm corner of my heart.  Right now, I can't honestly tell you what that memory will be, but I am sure it is in here somewhere.