Halfway down the Danube

Single Parent, Day One

So, single parenthood.

Claudia is gone for the next sixteen days. It's just me and the boys. Well, me and the boys, and Karine (who comes in the morning), Narine (who comes in the afternoons) and Xenia (the cleaning lady, three mornings a week). Cheap help: the dirty little secret of expat life. That's what makes this remotely possible.

Still, when the alarm clock goes off in the morning it's just them and me.

This first morning was complicated by the fact that we were up late last night looking for a small but utterly vital document that had mysteriously gone missing. We found it, but it took several hours. So I started a bit short on sleep. What can you do.

Jacob, bless his little heart, tends to sleep late. But David is an early riser. An early and almost unbelievably cheerful riser. I have no idea where that comes from. Certainly those are no genes of mine.

Meanwhile Alan has to be awakened and made ready for school. Alan's approach to mornings is much more like my own, viz., blurry but generally negative. "No, Daddy! I want to sleep more! Nooooo!"

(It is a good idea to keep David and Alan separate for the first half hour or so. Even at the ages of not-quite-five and three, the dynamic is well established: David doesn't understand why his big brother is so... nonresponsive... while Alan finds his little brother's chipper greet-the-day burbling entirely unbearable.)

Anyway. I got Alan dressed, fed, and off to the bus stop. And myself dressed, sort of fed, and off to the office. So, one morning down.

When we decided to do this, I thought to myself, "Hey -- I will keep track of the number of times I hear 'where's Mommy' and 'I want Mommy'! That should be interesting! Sadly, this slipped my mind in the morning bustle. But: about thirty, and about ten. I'll try to do better.

Next up: bedtimes.

Posted by douglas at January 9, 2007 07:34 AM