Decisions made in roundabout ways

You know when you e-mail your new office-mate to ask if they plan to use the office 2 days a week, and oh, by the way, do they mind if you bring your 8-week old with to work? The best response: A hearty congrats on the baby and a note about how they used to bring their baby to work too but he's in preschool now. I got one of those today. Not something I expect in my profession at all.

And I'm going to visit my great-uncle. I know this is a convoluted way to explain a decision, but it's also sweet. Yesterday I received a package for TS from someone I have never met. I waited till JD got home (around 11, again) to open it, as I try to do with all presents for the baby. And it was a handmade quilt from one of my grandmother's friends with a long note about how she knew my grandmother and wanted to make a gift for her great-granddaughter since my grandmother missed her arrival (she passed away last year). And I just realized how much my grandparent's generation has to tell my generation (my grandparents and their siblings met and fell in love in a refugee camp after the war, for a quick example of how different their lives were from ours) and how special it will be for TS to meet her relatives of that generation, so we're going. Of course, that presumes that all the news stays stable for the next 10 days. And it does make this month even crazier. Not only do I start commuting several hours every week now to another city to teach, but we have out-of-town guests staying with us for the next 3 weekends straight so I will probably fly down to visit my relatives on a Sunday afternoon/Monday visit after hosting visitors all weekend.

Not that it's a great surprise, but within the next 3 months TS will have at least 3 long (domestic) flights and split her time between 2 large cities in different states. And then, of course, at the beginning of the summer we're off to my little corner of Europe for a good while. All I can do is to hope long distance parenting goes as smoothly as long distance infertility did.

And I want to add that for all that JD works long hours and misses most of TS's awake time, I think he has done a wonderful job of bonding with her. Much as it annoys me, the first thing he wants to do when he gets home is to wake the baby and play with her. And she sleeps on his chest for the majority of the night. Last week he was all about ousting her from our bed (might have had something to do with the great mikveh countdown 2009), but yesterday he conceeded that he'd miss having her in bed with us and that it's really no rush to oust her until she starts to roll over. I honestly think that 2 nights of solid sleep (when we're out of town) will make JD an even more involved parent. Of course, I wish I had the same option ...