We leave tomorrow for a long weekend in Paris, and when we get back, B will have less than 2 weeks left of his final year of preschool. This summer, we opted to keep him home from school for all of July & August, to give us all a break from the routine and the chance to do more things together (including a nice long vacation that will start in late July).
I’m looking forward to summer — to not having to be anywhere on time and not having to leave the house for days if we don’t want to. (I know I’m romanticizing it, and that I will also spend countless hours refereeing fights and administering countdowns to the next turn for something, but right this minute I’m still looking forward to it.)
But it hadn’t occurred to me until yesterday that the end of B’s school year marks another major milestone, not just for B as he finishes preschool, but also for Liam. The daily one-on-one time that Liam and I have shared since B started school, over a year and a half ago, will be at an end.
I’ve been so focused on Liam starting preschool in the fall (and on B starting kindergarten) that I missed the fact that these are our last few mornings to spend hours together, just the two of us, for a long time. (Most likely we’ll get a chance to do it again in September 2014, when we’ll be back in the US, B will be in “real” school and Liam will, most likely, be home with me again.)
Each dynamic of a family, each combination and permutation of the members, is a little bit different, and I experience different aspects of each person in each situation. When I just have Liam, he isn’t operating in “little brother mode”, and he gets my undivided attention (which he seems so desperate for right now). It’s going to be quite a change to be on Mommy-Liam-B time for most of our waking hours (something we haven’t done with regularity since Liam was less than 1, which feels like a lifetime ago). Parenting is like that, though — every time I get comfortable with a schedule and a routine, it’s time to change it all over again. I’m very happy to have B home for the summer, but I will miss my mornings with Liam. It’s going to be a whole new kind of adventure.
