A lot has happened since last November. The most important thing is that KosherCook started a new job last December and became full-time in April. This has been a wonderful improvement to our standard of living, but turned my life upside-down in a number of unexpected ways. Ways that should have been quite expected for someone with a decent amount of foresight and the requisite organizational skills to see beyond lunchtime. But no, not me.
At first everything was normal because KosherCook was working part-time and still picking up KosherCop after school. However, when he started full-time KosherCop began staying after school in his school's after-care program. This was all well and good, but what I didn't account for were days off.
Schools have a ridiculous number of days that they don't bother to open. Federal holidays, Jewish holidays, extra vacation days before and after Jewish holidays that other schools don't have, professional days, and the dreaded snow day (which doesn't require actual snow, just the threat of snow, to grind our lives to a halt).
We had no system in place to deal with these days off and they were a problem even when KosherCook was still part-time since he doesn't have a job that can be done from home. So all of last winter and spring was a marathon of frantic calls to grandma to see if she could babysit, days spent working from home, and in some cases unexpected days off to accommodate a school schedule that can be best described as whimsical.
Summer looked to be better as we signed KosherCop up for Camp Shoresh for both of their sessions. However, again my monumental lack of appropriate planning reared its ugly head when we realized that A) Shoresh was only 6 weeks and 2) when we scrutinized the logistics of the bus schedule we were in real trouble as to how we were going to get KosherCop to and from the bus. And again, because KosherCook's schedule was less flexible and I have a very understanding boss, I adopted a crazy schedule for the summer. While KosherCop was riding back and forth 50 minutes each way to and from camp, I was driving back and forth between Maryland and Virginia and then finishing my work day at home from 5pm to 6:30pm. Then during the other FOUR weeks of summer (did you know summer is 10 weeks long, not 8? I didn't) working from home, scrambling for playdates and again begging Grandma to babysit. The good thing was that KosherCop had a great time at camp which has not been the case for several summers.
Needless to say I couldn't wait for school to start. This year I've gone ahead and actually planned my work schedule around school (and more importantly no school) and things are somewhat more predictable.
A lot of this predictability is also due to the life-changing birthday gift I received from KosherCook last February - an iPod Touch. My years and years of obsessively searching for the perfect calendars and dayplanners came to an end when I set up my Google calendar and work Outlook calendar to both appear on my iPod. What a revelation! No more copying over my digital calendars onto paper and then ignoring them since they were rarely up-to-date anyway. Plus, we now have the added bonus of KosherCop talking about "apps" all the time.
The other sad way in which our lives have been changed is the marked decrease in gourmet dinners. KosherCook is no longer home early enough to cook a big dinner. I've had to start cooking some nights as well (gasp!). It's not so bad. I'm actually a decent cook, just not as creative as KosherCook. We still get the holiday meals and KosherCook outdid himself this year for Rosh Hashanah. He even was able to cook ahead so our guests weren't standing around for 2 hours waiting to eat.
And finally, KosherCop recently demanded to read this blog and was greatly offended by my descriptions of his antics - he thinks I am making fun of him and has told me in no uncertain terms that I am not to write about him anymore (we'll see).
So you see, everything that was at the heart of this blog has changed. We aren't an unusual family with a stay-at-home dad, just another hectic family with 2 working parents and not enough time. We don't have fabulous one-of-a-kind gourmet dinners every night and the KosherCop gravy train of hilarious material may be drying up.
So as I lay here home sick from work for the second day in a row, I'm pondering the future of this blog. What will be the point of it? Does there have to be a point? Will anyone miss the images if I just write and don't have an image to go with it? Can I stop censoring myself and tinkering with the blog design long enough to get some posts out before 2am?
Perhaps these questions will be answered. Perhaps they will remain a mystery. Either way, I miss writing and plan to be here more often.
I hope you will join me!
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