The Grind

For the first time ever we have stumbled into a routine. When Aaron was at the bakery his hours were crazy and erratic, and before that there were jobs searches and working at camp and moving. Then a new puppy and a master's and planning a wedding and a stint in South Africa and then some kind of child showed up in our house. Med school and grad school change all the time with different courses and projects and exams. Before Dylan I always liked to have a lot of sports and things going on, and we would travel on weekends a couple times a month.

When Dylan was born my activities and any semblance of knowing what was going to happen on a given day went out the window. For a year. Then she started sleeping on occasion and became very dependent on going to sleep at certain times. Eventually that segued into staying asleep for a certain amount of time and that led to me not being such a grump all the time. But that's another post.

To summarize, as of about six months ago we ended up with: no planned activities, little travel, a child on a rigid schedule resolutely opposed to sleeping outside the home, a high maintenance dog (Snuffy, I'm looking at you), Aaron a few months into a new job (Aaron, I'm looking at you), and me in the middle of my dissertation (Kate, I'm looking at me). And suddenly everything was a lot less chaotic than in the previous five years.

We get up and Aaron walks Snuffy while Dylan and I eat breakfast (Aaron is some kind of weird monster that doesn't wake up needing refueling). Then we all walk to work/school/daycare/upupinaplaneinthesky and stay there the appropriate amount of time. Sometimes I wander around town trolling for little refugee children to enroll in my study and sometimes Aaron and I eat lunch at home and sometimes I take Snuffy running at noon. Then we come home and Dylan and I eat our afternoon meal and we all go for a WALK or maybe to the park or market. Then dinner and bed for the wee one and one of us non-wee ones takes Snuffy out running. In the evening I might go back to do a little more work or I might grocery shop or clean the house and Aaron reads rumors about Apple products or whatever it is he does behind all that hair and maybe we'll hang out and I'll make him watch Top Chef or Top Model.

On weekends we do house stuff and make big yummy meals and go biking and let Dylan be OUTSIDE as much as she wants. Snuffy gets to play with the other big dog-uhs and sometimes people come visit us since it takes a pretty big set of pliers to pry us out of here these days (Dylan, I'm looking at you). My mom mentioned not too long ago that when I was ten she asked if I would like to quit one of: skating or swimming or soccer so things would be calmer and I said no because I liked all of them. And I think ever since then when faced with such a choice I have made a similar decision.

To summarize, recent posts about a smattering of crazy summer travel plans aside, we are now boring and predictable, and this is new for me and was not something I would have planned out myself. But here we are and I am ten times less anxious than usual and we're having a lot of fun with our creatures and we're outside all the time and all my posts have been pictures lately because I can't think of anything to write because it's like: Today we were out in the yard. Then we had a snack. Then Dylan was cute and so was Snuffy. The End.

So speaking of The End, if all goes as planned I have about eight weeks until I go back to med school. And apparently that's hard and unpredictable and takes a lot of hours. More importantly, it's going to mess with our Schedule. So I'm not sure where I'm going with this except to suggest that you stay tuned for the Summer 2008 Bleisenbergs Return To Chaos Countdown.