I don’t remember her saying it very often when we were growing up but it became her refrain after her pancreatic cancer diagnosis when our visits increased in frequency and became less about seeing old friends and more about spending time together as a family.

At the time I figured Mom meant that she loved having a house full of family and hearing happy sounds instead of silence as she drifted off to sleep at night.

But now that my seven-month-old son is developing a personality of his own, I’m starting to understand what Mom actually meant.

There’s nothing else I’ve experienced in life that quite matches the experience of seeing my baby’s face light up when he sees his two-and-a-half-year-old sister.

It definitely melts my heart when he reacts to seeing either my wife or I that way, but part of my brain always rationalizes that as a natural response any baby has for their caregiver.

I can’t use that same explanation for his reaction to his sister.

Sure she gives him toys from time to time but she also snatches them out of his hands just as often. And while she will help give him bottles, she also smushes the entire nipple into his face making it nearly impossible to actually drink.

Because of this, the love in his heart for her feels more pure to me.

My baby may or may not only love Mama and Dada because of the things we do for him but he clearly loves his sister DESPITE the things she does to him. That’s pretty awesome.

The wildest thing about having a second kid is watching the development of a sibling relationship.

It helps that my daughter is often just as excited to see the baby as he is to see her.

She definitely gets annoyed with him sometimes, but if I’m not carrying him when I get her in the morning, it’s the first thing she asks about (followed immediately by wanting her milk).

I know things are going to change eventually, but right now it’s perfect.

She’s teaching him to crawl and loves to stand behind me shaking a rattle shouting, “come to Dada, baby.”

When he eats baby food in his high chair she wants to sit next to him in a booster chair eating yogurt so he can see her using a spoon and she can see him drooling all over the bib she insists on picking out for him before each meal.

I’m constantly wondering how much longer this can last.

A little piece of my heart broke when a friend of mine described her challenges raising a 13-year-old daughter and it occurred to me that when my daughter hits that incredibly vulnerable and difficult portion of her life she’ll be saddled with having an 11-year-old little brother.

“My God,” I thought to myself, “What have I done? Nobody should have to be burdened with an 11-year-old little brother, especially an 8th grade girl.”

Though maybe if I cross my fingers and close my eyes, wish upon a shooting star, or blow an eyelash off a ladybug, they’ll find a way to navigate those years together as siblings and best friends.

Or maybe I’ll just have to settle as Mom did for enjoying those fleeting moments, late at night when everyone’s feeling silly, where the house echoes with their laughs and our house feels like a home.

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I love my kids (2.5 year old daughter and 6-month-old son) with all of my heart, but post-bedtime life is just a little bit easier.

Consider this: I’ve never once told my wife, “Let’s wake the kids up a little bit early today, we could use a break.”

In an earlier column, I described the universal exhale all parents make after closing their kid’s bedroom door for (what you hope is the last time of) the night as a “restorative sigh that feeds tired parents’ souls.”

If you don’t have kids, the best analogy I can use is the moment after a landing airplane safely slows to taxiing speed on the runway. And not after a smooth flight.

After a flight with at least three bursts of turbulence that not only caused the pilot to turn the seatbelt sign back on, but also had the flight attendant scurry to the back with an abrupt but not panicked stride.

The sort of landing where at least five passengers burst into applause including one who’s clearly dumbfounded when the other people in her row don’t join.

That exhalation sheds an alertness-based tension you weren’t even aware you had until you felt it’s release.

I hesitate to immediately dive into a new activity once the kids are in bed because it’s still too fresh.

Knowing I could be immediately sucked right back into either kid’s room, I typically collapse onto my couch and scroll through my phone, then get shocked at how quickly the night is passing when I next look up forty minutes later.

It takes a good-sized buffer between my pre-kid-bedtime and post-kid-bedtime lives just to regroup. It’s the closest thing to being “off duty” I get outside of the one hour a month I spend going to get a haircut.

When we were expecting our first child and I imagined my life as a stay-at-home dad, I had big plans for all of the things I’d get done during nap times, but naps aren’t bedtime and my kids know it.

My 6-month-old son never demands to be held all night long but at least once a week he makes it clear that if I want him to nap, I’d better clear my schedule and get comfortable in our La-z-boy rocker.

My daughter keeps moving in and out of “I don’t need a nap” phases but my sanity requires it so I’m going to keep grinding out the naptime routine for as long as possible.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done some awesome things during my kids’ naps. Once I even assembled an entire lawn mower AND a standing cooler cart during the same simultaneous nap!

But I can never depend on their naps lining up. That’s why I never EVER take it for granted when I’m able to get their daytime snoozes to overlap.

With one kid I could plan on accomplishing basic things during nap time like showering or eating. But, with two, I can only assign that time to things I’d like to do but usually don’t actually get to do, like: reading the newspaper, writing, or refilling the ice cube trays.

Our naps aren’t defined well enough like bedtime. They miss the natural boundaries that natural darkness provides.

Blackout curtains and white noise machines are great but even a two-year-old can see through their ruse on a bright summer day with birds singing outside and trucks clattering past the windows every few minutes.

Try as I may to convince them (and myself) otherwise, there’s only one bedtime a day. That’s why it feels so nice when you stick the landing.

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Lately every time I look at her I just hear The Steve Miller Band singing “time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. (doo doo doo doo)”

Her vocabulary has exploded. She understands jokes. She’s formed her own free will and has an entire personality of her own.

We have conversations, which is crazy, because it means she’s really piecing things together.

Every single one of those things fills me with immeasurable pride but also carries a little bit of sadness and an undercurrent of panic.

Parenting a toddler is like watching the water crest then spill over the top of a clogged toilet before realizing there is no emergency shut off valve.

It doesn’t help that my son just turned six-months-old and we’ve started saying goodbye to things it feels like he should still need like the bassinet, newborn seat attachments, and a liquid-only diet.

How, with one kid in a booster seat and another in a high chair, am I suddenly the shortest person sitting at my dining room table?

It’s all just happening so fast.

Similarly, how is it that my cousin’s kid, who was born while I was in college, is now in college?

And that another cousin’s kid whose wedding I went to while I was in college, is starting college this month?

College used to be the pinnacle of adulthood but now it’s just a marking period that we might as well just round up to twenty. Which, through another cruel twist of fate, is now less than half of my age.

I’m worried that I’m running out of time.

Warning signs are everywhere from the leaves showing up in my pool to the sounds popping out of my knees every time I use the stairs.

I thought about contacting the guy who installed our bedroom floor to ask why the floors made so much noise before I realized it wasn’t the floor creaking when I wake up every morning, but me.

Even the moon is on it. It shifts from waxing to waning and from full to new in the blink of an eye instead of in the provided 28-30 days.

No sooner do I notice how big a full moon looks than the following day there’s barely any left. Every time I see the moon it’s shifted significantly more than it should have. The moon I grew up with took forever to turn full again.

I know because I tracked it for a while when I was a kid, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you’ve got plenty of time to spare.

It’s said that time accelerates as you age.

If that’s true, I feel like Lucy Ricardo shoveling conveyor-belt chocolates into my chef’s hat, probably because I’m old enough to know that reference (even if only from reruns).

I now say things like “I can’t believe it’s already August,” or “how are we already halfway through June,” with the same predictable regularity that I used to say things like, “I’m SO BORED!” or “are we there yet!?”

It’s also said that when it comes to parenting babies or small children, the days are long but the years are short.

Truer words may never have been spoken.

What’s left unsaid, however, is how disorienting it feels comparing and contrasting the two.

At least the changing seasons have built-in reference points. What makes raising a child so disorienting is that I literally don’t know what to expect next.

I just know it’s coming, whether I’m ready or not.

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As I vividly imagined this fantasy on Monday (due to a very difficult morning that started at 2 AM, then 4 AM, then pivoted to a second child at 6 AM and wove them both together at 7 AM), it finally dawned on me that it’s a horrible fantasy because I don’t like gambling.

If I’m going to abandon my kids, squander two peoples’ life savings, and essentially blow up my marriage, it oughta be for something I’d enjoy.

It would be just my luck to abandon my mid-life crisis because I can’t get past the room service prices. $18 for an egg sandwich, what am I the Queen of England!?

Even when planning to throw my life away, I’d like to do it responsibly.

You might be wondering why, if I’m planning to abandon my family and spend my remaining days as a degenerate gambler, I would share this information with my wife. That’s a very fair question.

It’s clearly a cry for help.

I secretly want to get caught before blowing through EVERYTHING, but not before I get the rush of feeling completely free. That and it’s just a joke, like a “celebrity hall pass” for evading the responsibilities I’ve packed onto my life.

I’ve always been attracted to fantasies of an unencumbered life.

As a boy I dreamed of running away to join the circus. I don’t have any circus talents but I figured I’d make friends with a chimp like Toby Tyler did and everything else would just fall into place.

As an adolescent I was drawn to movies like Easy Rider and books like Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that found meaning from the simple act of leaving itself.

The solo one-way road trips of my early adult years will always hold a special part in my heart as the time in my life where I scratched that existential itch and leaned into the freedom an unattached youth provides.

I retired that vision of freedom when Mom got sick and I learned that family obligations aren’t impediments to freedom but rather they’re the best possible outcomes.

Still, when it’s a Monday morning smack in the middle of a heat wave and my kids are being especially difficult, it’s fun to dream of running off to try something new.

Any parent who says they’ve never imagined walking out the door (while leaving a capable guardian behind) is either lying or the last person you want to sit next to during parents’ night at your kid’s school.

On Monday, I traded in my Foxwoods plan for a new one of fleeing to Ireland and living as the eccentric American who’s always looking for leprechauns.

I plan to get a gold-plated shillelagh to distinguish me from any other leprechaun seekers. Not only will I look fantastic walking through forests and glens with it, but the gold might serve as irresistible bait for the leprechauns.

As I formulated this plan and started researching whether leprechauns gather gold or merely protect it, my two-and-a-half-year-old toddler snapped me out of the fantasy with an uncharacteristic request for me to rock her to sleep.

This surprised me since she hasn’t wanted to be rocked for about a year (minus the one time she fell off a bottom step and spooked herself).

She might have asked because she’s teething two more large molars, or because her sleep schedule got savaged over the weekend, or because the heat wave sapped her of her strength, but it put her difficult morning behavior into perspective.

I happily obliged, although it was heavily complicated because I was already rocking my five-month-old son to sleep.

I shifted him onto my right side as she climbed onto my left and for a while the three of us silently rocked.

In the quietness of that moment without any tantrums or crying, soiled diapers or bottles to clean, I felt again how fortunate I am to live a truly unencumbered life (even on the bad days).

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For those who don’t know, tubing is when you pay a guy on the side of the river to borrow a large inflatable inner tube then ride it for a couple of hours until his equally shady cohort picks you up on a decommissioned school bus and drives you back to the start.

River tubing is basically summer camp for kids whose families don’t believe in things like counselors and safety.

The area we tubed was called Satan’s Kingdom for it’s three small sets of rapids that were fast enough to get your heart racing but short enough to justify the total absence of lifeguards or emergency call boxes.

Tubing through Satan’s Kingdowm was THE thing to do during my early teens when I was old enough to go unchaperoned with friends but still too young to properly enjoy my newfound freedom.

The unpredictability was the best part.

Even though we always got in and out of the river at the same spots, environmental variables created vastly different experiences every time. 

Go tubing after a few days of consistent rainfall and you’d zip through the course. On these days we’d paddle to the side after passing through a section of the rapids then walk back upstream along the riverbank to keep pressing our luck and make the journey last a little longer.

Invariably, we’d stop after one of us came within inches of smacking our melon-soft heads against one of the rapid’s jagged rocks.

On the other extreme were dry days when we’d float excruciatingly slow and rub the sides of our arms raw paddling our inner tubes to get enough speed to make the trip worthwhile.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was right (circa 500 B.C.) when he wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” 

Though I doubt Heraclitus was referring to the pain of scraping your butt on exposed rock beds when it hasn’t rained for a while.

Tubing is exhilarating when the rapids temporarily seize control and spin you out of your comfort zone. But tubing is also monotonous sometimes causing you to rub your arms raw just to finally keep things moving.

It’s actually a lot like putting my kids to bed. 

I know the path well, along with exactly where the pitfalls lie, but I never know how it’ll turn out until I get in there.

These days I’m far more likely to spend an afternoon helping my two-year-old daughter toss sticks into a babbling brook than I am to spin head-first into a river’s rapids with a bunch of knuckleheaded friends.

But the rhythm’s the same: tranquil moments punctuated by rapid escalations that are over relatively quickly and rarely cause lasting harm.

I’m talking, of course, about the emotional flare ups that precede most of our naps. The baby who goes from happily rolling over to inconsolably needing sleep; the toddler who’s suddenly overwhelmed by emotion when she’s told it’s time for her nap.

And then, other times, she’ll just happily ask for her crib or he’ll softly close his eyes, smile, and drift off to sleep.

It’s fair to say that several times a day I’m metaphorically transported back to Satan’s Kingdom with no idea how the ride will go.

I thought about this at length Friday when faced with the nearly impossible dilemma of whether to wake my four-month-old son who decided to take his afternoon nap strapped into his float in our pool.

I didn’t intend to stay in the pool for very long when we got in, but once he nodded off, I also didn’t want to disturb the peace. 
So I waited. 

And silently skimmed the shallow end over, and over again until my arms were numb.

At the risk of seeming presumptuous, I suggest a second verse to Heraclitus’ saying from a mere 2,500 years ago.

Just as, “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” so too does no baby ever slip into the same nap twice. They change so fast that, “it’s not the same nap and he’s not the same baby.” 

The unpredictability is the best part.

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As a stay-at-home dad, very few moments of my life involve an absence of direct responsibility for a child’s well-being.

I’m so deep into the fatherhood lifestyle that it runs the risk of becoming the entirety of my personality.

I can’t even have a conversation with my barber without making it all about my kids.

I knew that being a dad would change my life but I didn’t quite appreciate how quickly and how completely it would wrap itself into absolutely everything I do.

It happened so fast.

Yesterday was just the third anniversary of the day Jenny first tested pregnant, which seems like an impossibly short time to have fit both a toddler and newborn into my life.

It’s been an incredible journey so far.

With Father’s Day approaching next week, I’ve been reflecting on the many ways becoming a parent has changed my life.

Today’s column focuses on the first moment I learned that I would be a father.

Following is the story of that moment as recorded into a journal written for our child during my wife’s pregnancy:

—————-

…But the biggest and greatest surprise of my life was when I found out about you.

It was the morning of Tuesday, June 12, 2018. I was hurrying out the door to work for an early meeting when I heard your Mom make a weird little noise from the bathroom followed by a faint call of, “Mr.!”

The sound reminded me of one time when I stepped on a piece of glass and realized I might need help, so my first thought was that she was hurt.

“If you’re bleeding, I’m not coming in there,” I said, because I don’t like to be around blood.

“No,” she replied, “Just look!”

So I rounded the corner and saw her shocked, pointing at a stick on the counter. All I heard was the sound of the empty shower running its warming water.

I looked down at the stick and saw the word, “PREGNANT.”

My body took a minute to process the information.

I wasn’t even breathing, like my body needed to prepare itself because any breath I took from that moment on would be different – as it dawned on me that I was a father.

I looked up at your mother’s eyes, which were full of tears yet had never looked more beautiful.

Happiness flooded forth with those tears as we tried to process the news.

There had been so many tests in previous months and years that said, “NOT PREGNANT,” so neither of us knew what to do.

“Take another test!” I told her, wanting to make double sure.

“Is it real?” she asked.

“Yes!”

I wanted to stay and talk with her about how happy we were and share all of our hopes and dreams, but now I was running late, so I kissed Mom goodbye and left to go to work on my first day as a father – with eyes full of years, a heart full of joy, and a head full of hope for your future.

——–

That moment was like firing the starting pistol of a mad sprint that led me here to a life I hardly recognize yet that feels remarkably familiar and like exactly where I’m meant to be.

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We missed the drive-by Santa and, while our snowman was delightful, he didn’t make for very good company.

If her little brother hadn’t been born in January, it’s likely my daughter Senita wouldn’t have spent time with any other kids at all.

Spring started rough too.

As soon as the first warm day hit, I was a wee bit too excited to find my daughter friends in a brand new town and threw an unsanctioned St. Patrick’s Day party on the public library’s grounds.

It ended up being a freezing cold day that only brought a couple other kids out and didn’t find its friendship gold at the end of the rainbow.

And, in hindsight, visiting the Easter Bunny who hops out of the woods straight at your daughter’s car window was a terrifying mistake.

But the last two months have been good.

Though we started venturing back out into the world with literal baby steps, we seem to be hitting our stride.

New England is leading the way in beating the Covid-19 pandemic but challenges still remain for kids under the 12-year-old vaccine threshold.

As a stay-at-home dad to a two year old and a four-month-old, I’m acutely aware that a family’s immune system is only as healthy as it’s least-vaccinated child.

With viral transmission rates under 1% in our community, our daily lives aren’t all that different anymore except that I don’t take the kids into the grocery store, we avoid in-door dining, and our library story times are now held outdoors and are weather-dependent.

Instead of letting Senita play with as many toys as she wants in the children museum’s common room, I now let her smell as many flowers as she wants on a stroll around the reservoir in town.

The place we visit most frequently is our local playground.

Playgrounds are the perfect spot for a pandemic-era toddler: outdoors, well-ventilated, and social but with incidental contact at best.

The playground is an outdoor space where she can safely be around others and test both her physical and social skills.

I’m as excited about Senita being brave enough to go down the big slide all by herself as I am about her acknowledging and taking joy in another kid’s presence.

A few weeks ago we made friends picking dandelions with a girl named Ariana and invited her to throw sticks with us into the creek.

Her dad said it was the closest thing she’d ever had to a play date. I gave him my number to arrange another but, well, you know how men are.

Still, it was a great lesson in sharing and Senita’s first one-on-one interaction with a girl her age in a long time.

We’ve since started a small playgroup at the park from a local parenting group and are benefiting in lots of ways.

Senita’s favorite part of this week’s visit was just quietly swinging next to a girl named Bella and got really excited that she was carrying a Minnie Mouse doll.

They didn’t really talk but they were happy to be near each other and Senita has asked about Bella (and her Minnie doll) several times since.

I love that there’s a place she’s excited to go again and people we can reasonably expect to see.

Of course, like anything in public, the playground is hit or miss. Senita was pretty sketched out on a recent visit by a weird gypsy girl who kept following us around.

I don’t know for sure that she was a gypsy girl, I just know that she was of school age, but not in school, and wearing multi-colored harem pants.

It’s possible her family was just really passionate about making their own clothes, but I silently admired my daughter’s friend-making discretion.

I suspect there will be more unsettling big-kid encounters like this one as schools start closing for summer and a whole new cast of kids and caregivers enter her world.

In an era when even library story times have gone virtual, the playground offers a real sense of community and life beyond the screen. In the good ways, the bad ways, and every way in between.

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It doesn’t matter what day you’re reading this, the sentence holds true.

For her, tomorrow is a magical day where everything has been promised and anything is possible.

We’re going to the library AND the park. She can eat unlimited amounts of cookies.

The favorite shirt she wanted to wear that was dirty today will be clean tomorrow. Episodes of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse will play on our TV one after another and they’ll do the final hot dog dance twice per episode.

We’ll ceaselessly read books without regard to bedtime. The number of monkeys jumping on the bed will never skip from five to two to save a little time.

The only problem, you may have guessed, is that tomorrow’s never coming – at least not the one she’s been promised.

“Tomorrow” is just something we talk about that has been completely made up like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, cryptocurrency, or politicians’ values.

By some unfortunate linguistic trick, we’re always living in “today.” Tomorrow forever hangs on the periphery of her consciousness; something she can see but never have.

This is perfect for toddlers’ parents. “Tomorrow” is soon enough to seem like a reasonable amount of time to wait for a toddler but far enough away to divert their attention without causing a temper tantrum.

Every day I fill my daughter Senita with hope for a tomorrow that will never come and then let that hope sizzle out while she sleeps so we can start the next day with a clean slate. It’s like a pressure relief valve on her need for instant gratification.

I never intended to habitually lie straight into my two-year-old daughter’s face but that’s the situation I’m in and I’ve made peace with it.

It all started very innocently with a genuine desire to teach Senita about time, giving her some sense of ownership over the future instead of blindly moving her from moment to moment.

A simple example is telling her while she’s in the bath that she’ll next be drying off with a towel, brushing her teeth, putting on lotion, and getting clean pajamas. It’s very helpful and she loves knowing the routine before it happens.

This naturally introduced the concept of “tomorrow,” which she immediately grasped.

When we lay out an outfit for her to wear the next day, she now expects it to still be there the next morning.

If we tell her Grandma and Papa are coming over tomorrow, she’s less shy when they visit, and more likely to ask about them before they even show up.

But the “tomorrow” concept also unlocked a loophole in Senita’s cognitive processes where something she desperately wants in the moment (like one more cookie) can be calmly and joyfully deflated. I’m entirely incapable of exploiting this loophole.

My wife Jenny and I used this tactic on Senita so many times with Girls Scout Thin Mint Cookies that Senita now asks for them as, “Cookie Tomorrow.”

She’s very smart so this tactic won’t work forever but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

I do wonder sometimes if we’re setting her up to be a serial procrastinator, but I never worry about it for long because if we are, we won’t know about it until the last minute anyways.

There’s also the possibility that her visions of “tomorrow” are helping her set goals. In just the past week or so she’s started aspirationally raising the “tomorrow” concept.

Several times when putting a bedtime story book away she’s vowed to “read SO MANY books tomorrow.”

Similarly, she’s started testing our limits by running away any time she needs to be picked up to go in her crib or sit on the changing table and when I finally catch her she sighs dramatically and resignedly promises to, “run faster tomorrow.”

Since she has to believe in something, let her believe in the future. It may disappoint her one day, but that day will quickly pass and another tomorrow will be waiting.

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My three-month-old son raises his arm wearing Buzz Lightyear pajamas as if he’s ready to blast off.

The two of them sit together mesmerized by a book on her lap even though neither can read.

My days as a stay-at-home dad are full of picture-worthy moments and I can’t stop reaching for my camera.

I don’t want to miss a single precious moment, which is hard because everything feels precious.

I’ll leave the camera at home during a trip to the playground telling myself to just enjoy the moment when suddenly my toddler wants to zip down the slide that previously terrified her.

So, I pack the camera. Just in case.

More pictures probably existed of my first-born child before she turned six months old than have ever existed of me, a forty-year-old man.

I thought my picture-snapping enthusiasm would slow down when my second child arrived because everyone takes less pictures of a second-born but it’s actually tripled.

In addition to the individual pictures of each kid, I also want ones of the relationship developing between them.

Son and daughter holding hands? I take a picture because I might never see it again once sibling rivalry kicks in.

Or, maybe they’ll be lifelong best friends and this picture will be a reminder of how far back their special bond goes.

Whether they’re smiling at each other or glaring at each other, I want proof.

I don’t know if I’m striving for immortality or so smitten with my kids that I believe the world needs sixty-three pictures of my daughter trying to hold a frog-shaped umbrella over her head but it’s nearly impossible for me to resist capturing something every day.

One of the beauties of photography is that while you can fully control the camera, you can never fully control the scene both in the moment the picture’s being taken and way down the line when the picture’s seen again.

It’s impossible to know how a photograph will age. If my daughter becomes a meteorologist, those frog umbrella pictures might be one of her most cherished possessions decades from now.

There are so many developing aspects to my kids’ personalities that I want to catch them all.

How amazing would the picture of my daughter in Groucho Marx glasses be if she ends up becoming a comedian, or how perfect would the pictures of her swinging a bat for the first time be if she ends up as softball MVP of the Women’s College World Series?

I’m as guilty as anyone of posing my baby in ridiculous outfits while my wife shakes a rattle over my head but the candid shots are my favorites.

I want to record my kids as they are now so in the future I can see the origins of the people they eventually become.

I haven’t deluded myself into thinking every picture I take is precious or that generations of Gaffneys will look back at how we celebrated Easter in 2019.

But I know someday, I will.

And it will bring me immeasurable happiness remembering how uncomfortable the Easter Bunny made my newborn daughter and how excited my wife and I were to put out a third basket for the first time.

Everyone I know with grown up kids tells me to cherish every moment while they’re young. Though it’s oftentimes obtrusive and exhaustingly annoying, my incessant picture-taking is my best attempt to do just that.

So forgive me if you see my laying in the wood chips at the playground shouting for my daughter to “look over here, MICKEY MOUSE!” or sneaking to the back of storytime to catch her making the wipers on the bus go “swish, swish, swish.”

It may seem like just a normal everyday moment, but it’s picture perfect to me.

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It’s an unfamiliar feeling.

The beautiful weather and loosening covid restrictions play into this somewhat but the driving factor is the approaching end of my wife Jenny’s maternity leave.

We’re trying to get all of our routine appointments scheduled now while we have the benefit of two full-time caregivers.

Things like fixing my car’s broken turn signal and tuning up my home’s central air conditioning system take on a whole new level of significance when failing to deal with them now means dealing with them while accompanied by my two diaper-clad “helpers.”

I didn’t even mind seeing my dental hygienist last week since I was able to drop by in the afternoon instead of the ungodly-early appointments I usually schedule to avoid my wife taking PTO to care for the kids in my absence.

The looming deadline is instilling a false sense of urgency to nearly everything we do.

May isn’t even here yet but it already feels like it’s over. It will either be the longest or the fastest month I’ve ever known.

Last May I was so bored I prepared homemade tortillas for Cinco De Mayo and made a baby.

Now, that baby’s three months old and sleep isn’t really “his thing,” so time is just a vortex spinning wildly around my groggy brain.

In addition to my wife’s return to work, May is also bringing Mother’s Day, our sixth wedding anniversary, and two separate two-week visits from in-laws.

Houseguests! Remember those? Company that are constantly around!

If this keeps up I’m gonna need to buy a second pair of pants.

It’s taking some work but I’m getting used to having to look at the calendar again. Jenny told me she wanted to put a date on the calendar and I said “each day is a date. That’s what the calendar records.”

She meant a “date” as in going out together for the express purpose of enjoying each other’s company.

Seems pretty far-fetched to me but I agreed to give it a shot.

Jenny put it on our calendar as “Hot date without kids” even though we’re just going shopping for a canoe, which is the traditional way of celebrating a sixth wedding anniversary.

Watercraft shopping plans aside – I resent my calendar for filling up; I thought we put a stop to all of that.

It’s not the best time for me to suddenly have social responsibilities again.

I’m just starting to get a handle on the whole two-kids thing and I’m about to transition back into being the sole stay-at-home caregiver so I’ve already got a lot on my plate.

It’s been a long time since I had to have a kid somewhere at a specific time that didn’t first require a co-pay. Even Easter services were outdoors so you just rolled up whenever you felt like it as if you were a squirrel.

At least my daughter’s Turtle Dance Class (to bring kids out of their shells – get it?) is on Zoom so I can just point the camera towards a blank wall background and log in at a moment’s notice. Nobody even cares if she’s still in pajamas or is eating her breakfast.

But now the library has invaded my calendar with a three-week series of in-person, outdoor, socially distanced family storytimes starting almost immediately after Jenny goes back to work.

As if I wouldn’t struggle enough to get myself, a toddler, and a newborn out the door for anything happening at a time that ends with A.M., I also get to handle my own weather-dependent logistics.

It’s a delicate balance between being frustrated that covid shutdowns (and winter) kept me from doing something and being frustrated that I suddenly have something to do.

Of course, it could always rain and we’d get all the joy of having plans without the hassle of actually having to do them. There’s not much we can do about that!

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