the underwear drawer

life with two

I'm still in the process of learning as I go, but so far life with two kids is fine, so long as there are two people available to take care of them. When Cal is at school--fine. Easy. When Cal is home in the evenings and Joe is home from work--man-to-man defense takes care of most things. But having both kids when it's just me is a little on the challenging side right now. Yes, I know lots of people have two kids or even more, I'm not saying it's the most challenging thing in life, and not impossible, just a little logistically difficult until we get our routines down. Especially this Saturday, when Joe got called into the hospital late in the morning and both kids were ready to eat lunch at the same time, so I had Mack crying increasingly frantically on one side of me while I was rushing to fix up some soup and bread for Cal, who wanted that plate, no, not that plate, the other plate, and why was there applesauce with his lunch, he didn't ask for applesauce. Kid, you will eat what I serve, or it's MREs for you.

Cal has been good with the baby, very interested and concerned and eager to help (or at least "help") with a number of things. The thing that I've noticed with Cal (and it's not that I wasn't warned that this would happen) is that everything about him seems to be MORE than before. More big, more loud, more words, more flailing limbs perilously close to the baby's head, more everything. I know this is mostly a relative change of scale--I have a hard time seeing Cal as a baby anymore when seeing him next to, you know, an actual baby--but there is some readjusting taking place as we figure out how to exist as a family of four. Some of this is going to involve me being a little more patient. Some of this is going to involve Cal recalibrating his energies and expectations now that he has to share his parents with another kid. And some of it is going to involve Mack just getting a little older, a little bigger, a little sturdier.

We're all working on it.

(Two week photo set here)