My weekend has been awesome, and it’s not even noon on Sunday yet.
Dave had to work on Friday and Saturday night (that part wasn’t awesome) so I have decided to make game nights like that a mama-Ingrid funstravaganza. It worked out pretty well, actually!
Friday night, I picked her up from daycare and drove straight downtown. We parked, and I went to the Thai restaurant to order takeout. (Former locals: it’s in the old Bagel Shop.) It was going to be fifteen minutes or so, so we walked up one side of Main Street and down the other. She LOVED it.
It was already dark by then, of course, and the big tree is still lit in the square. A toddler’s eye view of Main Street is fascinating. People in restaurants, sitting in the windows. Brass instruments lined up. Rope lights. Bongs. Country Crafty Crap like dogs and snowmen. We waved at the museum staff, closing up for the day, and to the jewelry store clerks, cleaning out the window for the night. By the time we completed the loop, our food was done.
When we got home, there was a package for Ingrid from her online Secret Santa — two books, neither of which we had, and fuzzy slippers for both of us. ("Sooz!") We put on our slippers, and I set up our dinner at the dining room table* and we read "Goodnight Gorilla" and ate supper. We read several more books, of course, after dinner, and she went to bed happy. Yesterday, we had swimming in the morning (I did wrangling, Dave did the actual water part) and she ended up taking an early nap in my arms afterward. When Dave went to work, we headed to Target, but it was PACKED. Insanely so. I didn’t even TRY to find a parking space, instead, ended up at Kohl’s and LLBean, when I realized "Wait! I have a museum membership now!!!" We hustled out of there and went downtown, and spent over an hour in the museum, which was GREAT. Exactly why I wanted a membership, honestly. We came home and had supper, and then ventured out to Target again (I really HAD to go, as we needed diapers) where Ingrid had fun counting everything she could see. ("Waaaan, CHREEE, fie, nein, ah ah ah ah. Yay!")
When we got home, we read and played some more, and then Ingrid helped me clean up the living room (a first! She even made a pile of books!) before bed. Ahh.
A few Doh! things I’ve realized in the last week: Ingrid likes spicy food. She always kind of has, and there’s a little bit of pride in the fact that she happily eats curry or whatever, but I never thought to translate it at home. IE, she often gets an egg at dinner, but lately hasn’t eaten it, so I started peppering it all up, and "MMMMMM!" she eats it. Also assisting her eating? A fork. Um, yeah. When she doesn’t eat the peppered egg, I hand her a fork, and she does. Sorry, baby.
A lot of that leads to my asterisk:
*It is my goal to get us all eating together. Dave has this ridiculous lack of hunger until 10 or so, and Ingrid eats at 5:30, and I’m somewhere in the middle, annoyed at eating so late and having two separate mealtimes. Now that she’s heading towards 2, it’s time to make that shift to Family Dinner, Goddammit. The plan is to have dinner at the table at 6. You don’t have to eat it (DAVE) but it will be there and so will you. (That’s sort of unfair, as the nights I have the group power class, I may not eat til later — the class is at 6:40, and it might suck to be doing disco barbells on a full stomach.) It’s going to take some planning — I’m thinking of looking for meals that can be prepped the night before, and cooked between 4:30-6, to serve at 6, to help — but I think we can do it, if we commit to it. Plus, all of us eating together means that Ingrid can eat more Real Food, as opposed to eggs and fruit all the time or whatever.
I tend to feel like I ACED infancy with her — that nursing and babywearing and nurturing like that is my strong point, and that toddlerhood is fucking ruining me, with trying to figure out the meals and stuff. I am not a Cook, so I really struggle with it.
Either way, a totally fun weekend with my girl. Wish me luck on the food thing.
It won’t be easy to do. . making the whole meal thing the way you want it to be. . but it is SOO worth it. Once ou have established a routine that works for your fmaily, you will not let it slip. .you just won’t. You will have a few times where things get crazy, and you will suffer from that. . .then you realize just how wonderful it is. . .just how worth the initial stress it was.
We swear by our meal/bed times. We try like hell to make sure that nothing gets in the way of that.
Especially the bedtime part.
It’s the only time of day when the grown ups can have that time to be grown ups and spend time with ech other.
Dawn use to bot have a schedule, and she came to visit – tried it at her house and would NOT, for anything, change it back.
What time does Dave get home from work?
Can he skip lunch so he is hungry earlier? Maybe he has to do a complete day of starvation to make it happen.
I’m sure that you guys can figure something out. . .you could eat, and still have that time to get your belly in a better place before hitting the gym.
Not a good idea to go on a FULL belly, but on those nights you could limit yourportions, and just go on a smaller meal, and have a protein bar or something on your way home, or whatever. Drink an extra glass of water, and trick you stomcah. . .just sit at the table with them and pick at your food.
For wahtever reason, this is the part that I have been waiting for you to do (in the parenting thing) you know? It’s one of those, “ok, now I have mastered THIS” moments.
Nothing makes me feel better at the end of the day than knowing that we have had that time together. . .
I pretty uch can’t stand my family suring hte rest of the day, so this makes me feel less like a piece of shit when i drink my quart of vodka before I go to bed 🙂
Oh man. Meals! It’s so hard! We’re trying to establish a Family Dinner, Dammit right now, too, especially since whenever we’re in a store N will run over to the dinner tables and make us sit down at them and pretend to eat dinner together. Um.