Dishes, mice, and playground chatter

I just wished my first dishes in 6 weeks. Six delightfully long weeks when I occasionally cooked, frequently cleared the table, and yet managed to not wash a single dish.

Which is also to admit that JD's leave has come and gone and we are slowly sinking back into our regular routine. We have instituted Sunday evening cooking for the week (this week baked pasta, bean burritos, wilted spinach and bbq chicken. Variety: yes. Nutrition: meagre), outsourced the laundry, and even had a cleaning team in twice (that would be 2 times total 8 years together) and thus far it is ... ok.

My work stress remains and will build in the coming weeks. We have had many long talks and the time has come for us to start to prepare for new careers/a new city/being homeowners someday/living someplace we will need a car/leaving our warm little cocoon of similarly-inclined parents. And while it is nice to have the time to prepare, a small part of me thinks that this may very well be just like IF: I wish no one had told me until I really had to deal with it.

But before we get to the big things, I have learned how to minimize the steps between light switches in our new apartment in the hopes that turning the lights on will inspire the rodents of an unusual size (thankfully not rats, just rather large mice) to flee prior to my arrival.

The baby continues to slide down on the growth charts (now 16th percentile!) but looks exceedingly robust and meets every physical benchmark despite his noticeable lack of interest in eating. Some day I may just bash the pediatrician's scale. For now, we smile and nod and politely decline any invasive tests (i.e. anything beyond the scale and fairly frequent checks for ear infections. Beats me why they are worried about ear infections, but I don't really mind and neither does the dumpling).

My neighbor confided at the playground today that she'd had a "scare" recently and it convinced her that they are not at all ready for #2. Let's hope the daggers of jealousy went unnoticed. Another acquaintance waddled by when I was running errands. Due next week! I smiled and chatted politely. My mother was ranting about someone's planned homebirth and I accidentally let slip that we might just consider that in the future if there is no mid-way option like a birthing center available. Long silence on her part. So yeah, even from where I stand with 2 adorable healthy children I know that we will someday dive back into this mess again. And in part I want to keep my blog going so that when we do I will still have that support network out there. The more obvious reason is that my readers are just incredible and I am lonely. But then I keep reading about privacy and awful things on the internets and I want to be careful about saying things here which I would not say to someone's face. Eventually someone from my family will find this blog and while I hope they will have the perspective to understand it, I do not want to deliberately hurt anyone. So I won't really be talking about couples therapy or worrying that my toddler is screaming at me because she's heard one too many fights at home or the immense fear that giving up my career will send me into an utter tailspin of depression. But it's all there somewhere and PPD really sucks.