As far as that transition goes though, we're all rolling along doing okay. The first week we were superstars, our mornings planned and packed the night before, meal planning all in place. Troy was my hero, rising early, feeding the kids breakfast, getting us out the door before he left for work, taking the helm when I came home and crashed in the evening, exhausted with a brain that hurt from more use than it had seen a while. The second week was a bit of a disorganized trainwreck, thank heavens for mother-in-laws who come to visit and feed my family. Week three saw us even out though, back to something that slightly resembles organized and scheduled.
Max has made out pretty well. He's pretty sooky and missing Mommy by Thursday evening (my longest day that throws him for a loop), but the long weekend with my Monday's off seems to be enough snuggle time to replenish him to happily begin again the next week. I thought that perhaps our time apart would naturally curb the amount of nursing he would be doing, maybe heading towards the morning and bedtime only nursing twice a day point I had envisioned we would be at by now, but returning to work has pretty much done the exact opposite. Maxwell actually seems to compensate for the seperation by compacting the same amount of nursing, maybe more, into the shorter periods we have together. He will stop at no cost for his committment to breastfeeding, even giving up his quality full nights sleep to hang out with Mommy at 3 am. Yep.
At least this time around I had no illusions that there would be no stress in the transition. Before I was always stressed and puzzled by my kids seemingly random 'symptoms', behaviour changes that I would only later realize were connected to a major change. Like I said, things are quickly settling into a new comfortable normal, but the first few weeks held things like more defiance from my biggest boy, more 'baby voice' from the second, and Claire took to tackling my thighs and crying, "Howd me Mommy!", usually while Max had me in his "You will not put me down and disappear again!" deathgrip. Breaks my heart!
Plus we've still been on the go, as you do when there is so much summer to fit into so little time.
So this weekend, we skipped a handful of events that we wanted to attend, we should have attended, would have been good to attend, and just stayed home.
We slowed down, hung out, and puttered away.
We decided to finally go get the apple tree we had been discussing. We had envisioned having a bit of an apple orchard eventually. Our hopes are that by the time we have teenagers we'll be growing enough of our own food to offset the cost.
Well.
We bought a few more than one. Seven actually. The late-summer price was right, we got a little distracted by pear trees, and it just kinda grew from there.
We're pretty good at go big or go home.
We're now the proud owners of two pear trees (a Bartlett and a Flemish), two Honey Crisp apples trees (yum!), a Cortland (usually a favorite from the grocery store), an Empire apple tree (a heartier descendant of the McIntosh, but better for our harsher zone 3), and a Paulared (a NB heritage breed, which I thought sounded excellent). So yeah, seven. We haven't yet managed to plant the flower or veggie gardens we've been dreaming up, so apparently we decided to make up for it with trees.
Troy just realized today how long it is going to take to dig seven tree size holes.
