Thursday's Child

Thursday is the day that I'm alone with Jack. Being totally truthful here, this has its ups and downs.

It was tougher when he was younger, in many ways, because I had to put him down for naps without him being able to nurse (obviously), and I had to soothe his frequent cranky moods without the protuberances that were most soothing to him. Now weaned, these are not major concerns anymore.

Now the major challenge is that he's only slightly interested in his toys and books, and extremely interested in going up and down the back stairs, climbing all over our dog, scaling various pieces of furniture, and playing with the phone, computer mouse, and house keys. And none of these are activities which can be unsupervised -- on the contrary, left to his own devices there's a pretty good chance all of them would end with him hurting himself, or the dog, or the computer, or placing international phone calls. The furniture at least would survive, such as it is.

Consequently, a decent part of my Thursdays are spent as a traffic cop, running around scooping him up off the dog, or helping him down from a chair he's climbed onto but can't get down from, or acting as spotter as he descends the stairs and eyes the doggie door as though he's considering going through it. Another part is spent as sideshow barker, trying to interest him in toys he sometimes enjoys: "Feast your eyes on Old MacDonald's tractor - it rolls, it honks, it plays songs, AND it makes animal noises!"

And even as I write this I feel guilty, because the bad doesn't come close to the good. The laughs I get when I toss him up in the air. (Um, I'm very careful about it.) The smiles when we're reading one of his favorite books for the 37th time this week, something like "But Not the Hippopotamus" or "Ten Little Ladybugs." The interest he takes in the world around him when I'm pushing the stroller to the park for a ride on the swings. The exuberance with which he shoves fistfuls of macaroni and cheese into his maw. The way he cracks up over silly little things like my placing a couple of his plastic toys over his ears, so he can hear the ocean roar.

Lately I've been temping a bit for my old company, which has me going into an office for the first time since Jack was about four months old. I did that yesterday, which meant I barely saw him - Emily was putting him to bed when I got home. And since Emily still has an office job, working from home only on Tuesdays, this is HER life the other four days of the week. Not seeing him all day, and getting home only to see him for dinner, bath, and bed. And I know that she'd deal with the challenges of traffic cop/sideshow barker, if it meant seeing him more.

So yeah, Thursdays can be rough. By the end of the day, when Emily gets home, I'm exhausted, frazzled, drained.

And lucky.