Tonight my husband leaves again. He will be back in six weeks, give or take.
We spent the weekend trying to get in as much quality time together as we could as a couple and as a family while still making sure that he wasn't leaving me with a house full of dishes and laundry and a yard that needed more attention than I would be able to provide flying solo for the next month and a half.
I think one of the reasons SG and I click so well is that we share so many traits. We are absent minded, we are easily distracted. We always mean well, but we are often clumsy. For example, last week he and Race Car Man managed as a morning project to drop my almost-brand-new laptop on the floor off the breakfast counter. Its about a three and a half foot drop.
As you might expect, the laptop did not appreciate this Big Adventure and all of its internals went on permanent strike to protest.
We made three trips to the big box electronics store over the course of the week to drop off the machine, drop off rescue disks, and ultimately to pay to have the hard drive removed and sent off to another location to have its data recovered because it could not be powered up to do the recovery locally. In the meantime, I've replaced it with something no one but me is allowed to touch, and when I have the time and funds to get the old one repaired, it can become the laptop everyone else gets to use.
Driving back and forth to the big box electronics store involved much negotiating with the Littles. Two parking lots away, the traveling carnival was in town. When its 8 pm on a weeknight and a 4:30 alarm clock is staring you in the face, the last thing you want to do is the carnival. But when you're seven years old and the lights of the ferris wheel fill up the sky, the ONLY thing you want to do is the carnival. We put them off and put them off, but finally yesterday afternoon I agreed to spend a small fortune on ride tickets.
While Amazon Girl and I rode the ferris wheel together, SG took Race Car man to ride the Jet Planes. When it got to be his turn in line, though, he was too scared to get on. After Amazon Girl and I got off the ferris wheel, I talked to him about the ride. I told him his sister would go on it with him if he would feel better. He thought that might be fine, so we got back in line, but when we got to the man running the ride, we were told that my Amazonian Princess was actually too tall for the ride. Race Car man would have to go it alone.
He took a few minutes to think about that. His desire to ride on the green jet finally overrode his fear and he clambered aboard.
This picture doesn't really do justice to the expression on his face most of the ride. It was a combination of joy and awe. He loved every second of it, almost as much as his sister enjoyed the ferris wheel:
Its hard to be unhappy about anything with that kind of joy sitting next to you in a bucket car.
As we were winding down, the little guy decided to spend his last ticket on another ride in the jet plane. He enjoyed it so much the operator let him stay on and have yet another ride even though he didn't have another ticket. I hope he knows how much his small act of kindness meant to us.
Sometimes I get my nose out of joint when I hear people talking about kids behaving poorly in public, blaming parents. I have a tendency to expect people to react negatively when we are having a particularly bad day with anxiety or sensory issues. But I have to admit -- people are often far more accomodating than I expect them to be.
It was a good way to cap off our Sunday afternoon. A little sunshine, a little fresh air, some carefree time laughing and soaring through the air -- sometime you just gotta fly.
