As the warm summer days continue to bring opportunities for our kids to swing until the later hours of the evening, feel the sand between their toes, and splash in waves of both chlorine and sea salt, I’ve found that returning to story telling hasn’t been on top of mind.
Without a current story, I thought a status update may do.
The kids are all in school: Alex in full day, and the twins for an hour a day, three days a week, providing some semblance of a routine. We’ve gone from the mentality where every day simply ends in a “Y”, to having some structure to our week, and that structure has grounded all of our behaviors, emotions, and anxiety.
Monday gets us back into the week’s routine. After school, the boys and I venture back home, tidy the house, play in the back yard, swinging for hours to “Who Let The Dogs Out” or “That’s What I Like About You”… eventually returning indoors for lunch and some quiet time. By the afternoon we visit the pool before heading out to get Alli.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays we find a shaded playground to share with our friends that are in class with us that morning, elongating that morning routine with needed companionship, laughter, and play. We make it back to the house for lunch, and like most afternoons, spend the beautiful weather by the pool or in the sand box, and of course, those awesome swings were the boys can fly “higher and higher”, squealing with delight.
Thursdays and Fridays are for adventures to Papa’s Beach or up to the Lake with friends. Full day adventures during the hours while their sister is at school allow us to enjoy our weeks, chasing down the “thrive” factor, vs when COVID made us feel fortunate enough to simply “survive” each day.
The weekends we get with Mama, and most often, Auntie Sammy and Granny and Pop Pop. We try to keep them low key so the kids can relax but enjoy the sunlit hours together.
Our status quo has caught it’s breath lately… in the most needed way. Life is not exciting, but peaceful. We are working on calm bodies and quiet voices in doors, and patience on all ends - both for the boys, but for me as well. I’m learning how to ask Jack to whisper his secrets to me, and to hide his hands in his pockets when I can see him jumping out of his skin.
Luca’s words are coming every day, and the song in his heart has found it’s way out in the most bold and confident arrival. When it rains, he’ll sing “Rain, Rain, Go Away” or “The Itsy Bisty Spider.” When he wants to dance, or is in the pool simply enjoying the weightless movement, the words “dance for me, dance for me, dance for me” from “Dance Monkey” escape his lips with the brightest sparkle in his eyes; and when he’s playing in the sand box lately, the words “what the world needs now, is love, sweet love…” are on repeat, as he’s recently rediscovered “Boss Baby” and the song plays in the credits.
As for sleep, because if you’ve followed our journey, you’ve seen us coin the term “sleepless nights with autism”, Luca’s been on Colonodine for the five weeks, and it’s made such an incredible difference. Even though he will still get up in the middle of the night, instead of a 4 hour stimm, we can get him back to peacefully asleep after 45-60 minutes. I know others who are not as lucky, so for this, I’m truly grateful.
Being a full-time mom, juggling supporting my wife’s business, and trying to chase down a writing career, while working a side hustle with Rodan + Fields has had it’s moments of wonderful, challenging, terrifying, and beautiful. If I’ve learned one thing during COVID and the world shutting down as we know it, only to remind us all that sometimes, what we ask for we shall we receive, is this…
The one thing in this life that we never have enough of is time.
It’s what people wish for as they face their last days, what we waste while we are young and don’t know any better; what we devalue during the days we waste wishing our lives were something different; and what we wish we could freeze in the moments we hope to never forget.
So here’s the status quo being an enjoyment of the current time we have together. I hope to write to you again soon, but until then, you’ll most likely find me pushing an eager child on a swing who just wants to go “higher and higher” until the sun sets.