Vegan Goodness:
Today we ate:
- Breakfast: Smoothies for Dad and LP and pancakes and tempeh bacon – a super special treat from the G-man!
- LP and mom had some peaches for a snack
- Lunch: A quinoa, avocado and BBQ tofu “quesadilla” for LP and Dad, carrot ginger soup for Mom and then Mom and Dad shared a TJs black bean enchilada to round things out.
- Mom snacked on some potato chips and Dad and LP had some crackers for a post-nap snack.
- Dinner: Fusilli pasta with beets and red onions. A super fast and delicious dinner, and we used up all our beets from two CSA boxes!
Money Matters:
Today we were in for the day while Mom tried to recover from a rough night with IP. But that also means we managed to not spend a dime!
Mom Musings:
Time is a funny thing. It plays tricks on you. It seems so concrete, so logical, until you look up at a clock and realize that your internal time is completely wrapped up in your own experience of living. Technically, time is very structured. A minute is a minute. No matter where you are or what you are doing, a minute will always be 60 seconds, 1/60 of an hour.
Yet what a minute feels like is entirely dependent on context. When I’m teaching minutes fly by. So often I get half-way through a lesson, only to find that forty-five minutes have passed instead of twenty. However, when I was a student in a class that was all lecture, the minutes crept slowly, slowly past. I used to ration my moments to check the clock so that I wouldn’t be as depressed when it seemed like it had been half an hour and instead only five minutes had passed.
Parenthood seems to be made up of many of these moments. When I was pregnant the first time people kept telling me that “they grow up so fast.” They do. LP is a walking, talking, willful little dude with his own desires and opinions. It seems like just a few months ago he was pulling himself up on our coffee table and trying to toddle around. I look at pictures of him when he was just starting to talk, and I can’t remember if they are from two weeks or a year ago. I watch him grow up a little every day, and seeing this growth gradually gives me a warped view of how fast it all happens.
On the flip side, time can go so, so slowly. When LP wakes up with a lot of energy, and I am exhausted, the morning creeps by. There are days when I keep looking at the clock and wonder “is it nap time yet?” as we make lego trains, play outside or cook together. This time is wonderful, but there are some days I’m able to cherish it more than others. When I’m awake enough to focus, and LP is behaving well, it is golden. When these stars don’t all align, however, the minutes slowly pass.
I had these thoughts the other morning when I was trying to get IP to sleep at 4:30 am. She had been up since 3. She was fed, diapered and just needed to be walked to sleep. I was making laps around the house for what felt like forever! Yet when I started timing it I realized I had only been actually walking for five minutes. At the time this was a good reminder that I need to pick a routine and really stick with it to get IP to go to sleep. It was also one of those moments when you realize how our experiences of time are so much more rooted in our actual experience, not simply in the time that has passed. Yes, those five minutes that morning felt more like thirty, but IP is now five weeks old, and I can’t believe it. It seems like just yesterday we brought her home and tried to figure out what the heck we were going to do as a family of four. I’m sure I’ll feel the same way five more weeks from now, six months from now, a year from now. Time will keep marching on.
