Life Moves On

It seems that the past few weeks have been nothing but work. This is evident by the paucity of entries herein that are about anything other than work. Nevertheless, life does move on. For example, last night, after we had gone to bed, we got a call from our neighbor. His wife had gone into labor with their third child and my wife had previously offered to watch their other kids when that happened. Well, here it was 11 pm at night and they needed to drop their two boys off so they could get to the hospital. All went well and the boys passed out right away in our currently unused bedroom. However, my wife and I were so stirred up that we couldn't go back to sleep for about an hour.

Well, about 2:15, my youngest, who is potty-training, woke us up to tell us he had to go to the bathroom. Happily (for me), he insists that his mother help him on the toilet in the middle of the night. (The last time I tried to help him instead of my wife, he screamed bloody murder, and it just isn't worth that kind of noise in the middle of the night to try to let my wife, who gets woken up anyway, try to go to sleep sooner.) Add another 30 minutes of non-sleep time in the middle of the night.

Then the neighbor boys woke up at about 6:00 to go to the bathroom, and they didn't go back to sleep -- and woke up our youngest in the process. So, in what would have been more than a nice 9 hours of rest (from 10 pm to 7 am) turned into 6 1/2 hours of sleep. Since I'm already sleep deprived from the week's work, I'm pretty beat; I've been moving in slow-motion all morning.

So despite the fact that my work life may be chaotic and busy, outside life still goes on. Kids potty-train, babies are born, the sun comes up and goes down every day (though I missed noticing a few of those in the past few weeks ...). Today, I still have to face the facts of home life -- the lawn needs mowing, our strawberry patch needs to be harvested, everybody needs haircuts, my car desperately needs to be washed, and the check engine light on our van turned on yesterday ... and this is what needs doing on the rarest (really, it happens, like, twice a year!) of Saturdays with nothing on the calendar.

It's a busy life, but a good one.