Day 2 in the trenches

Day 1 of single parenting was a big success (had to pry a cold, shivering child forcibly away from the swimming pool - he's really getting into spending time in the water doing swimming-type things, as opposed to solely wanting to jump in and out and eat snacks and watch the big kids)!

Day 2 is also shaping up to be successful so far, with a very fun time at a birthday party on the mainland and some very conveniently-timed ferry arrivals.

Some more random notes before I join Jolly in his napping:

Amount of caffeine consumed to facilitate an energetic, cheerful single mum: one cup of green tea (yesterday), a third of a cup of coffee (today). I am really looking forward to breaking my 4.5 year (trying to conceive-induced) window of very severe caffeine restriction. (It was really mostly no caffeine, broken only by very occasional fractions of a cup of coffee or tea when really, truly necessary.) That silliness will finally be ending when Iceman is off my blood supply, though, because caffeine is totally my drug of choice. 

I'm also looking forward to sushi, which is (along with an epidural) one of the few things on the "birth plan" this time around, as in, baby comes out (by whatever means necessary), sushi goes in. 

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If your child randomly announces that he sees deer on a regular basis, it is very hard to avoid being desensitized by the repetition when you are behind the wheel of a car. I am trying really, really hard to avoid being taken in by the "Boy Who Cried Deer" syndrome, though, because there very well MIGHT be deer. This morning, when he said "It's a DEER!" there was in fact a deer calmly decimating our shrubbery.

If he announces tigers, though, I know not to slow the car down to a crawl.

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I think our child might have a touch of synesthesia, or perhaps just a case of toddler silliness. He's been referring to cds by color, as in "Want the BLUE CD." And no, this does not refer to color of the box or the CD. Candyband seems to be blue, and the Boogers seem to be orange.

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The next installment in Raising a Polite Child: as we were disembarking from the ferry in our vehicle, I coughed (I think the exhaust from a passing car set me off) and Jolly said "GESUNDHEIT!" and I said "Danke!" and he laughed and said "Gesuuuundheiiit!" again, and we repeated that cycle for most of the (very short) ride home, until we saw a deer. (It was real, not imaginary.)

My cough did sound rather like it could have been a sneeze, so I am counting it as a proper application! This is a new skill. Very charming!

We're also getting better on the use of "please", to the point that it very occasionally has been tacked on without prompting to "Can you please ask nicely?" Next after that will come "thank you". I consider both please and thank you to be much more critical lessons in manners than responding to someone's "achoo", but hey, it's nothing to sneeze at!

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Anyway, so far, flying solo as a parent has been working well, even though we obviously all miss Ephiny very much. Jolly was even more interested in the military stunt flying over our fair adjacent city than usual because "Mama on the flugzeug [airplane]!" and he's definitely very excited to see Ephiny on Skype again tonight.

The only struggle I anticipate is that in about a day or so, we're going to run out of the jeans diapers.