Daddy time!

Last night Allison had the opportunity to go with her mom to a performance of "Wicked" downtown. This meant an opportunity for me to go solo taking care of Caleb for the evening. Since evenings are not his favorite time of day, I was very nervous about the task ahead of me.

Leaving all of our "reserve" milk at Mimi's house on Saturday night; the first task was taking a trip in the car to pick up his dinner. This is always a good time since Caleb loves riding in the car. The down side is that everytime you stop the car the crying starts...I hit every single light. I'm used to scaling the three flights of stairs to Mimi's house with pretty great ease. The problem was I now had a sleeping baby in the car. I was faced with the decision of quickly running up them and recovering the food while letting Caleb sleep in the car or taking him with me and surely waking him. Of course I didn't leave him in the car and of course he awoke crying.

We made it home. He was awake and he was hungry...more crying. I was pretty hungry by this time too though nothing seems more important than keeping Caleb from crying. While feeding him I thought about what I could quickly prepare for myself. I decided upon reheating some leftover pizza and attempted it with one arm while trying to keep Caleb happy with the other...not easy but successful. I moved with grace through the kitchen and even stopped to fill Georgia's food dish. I was proud.

The next task would be taking Georgia out for her walk. Being the able dad that I was becoming, this meant carrying Caleb with one arm and holding the leash with the other. Since my recent success with dinner, I had a confidence that this would be easy. It actually wasn't too bad. Caleb enjoyed the fresh air and Georgia was quick about her business.

We returned and my confidence continued to grow. It was getting close to bedtime and I knew that at any minute Caleb would start his evening ritual of fighting his sleep. This comes accompanied with fussiness and, of course, more crying. He took pitty on me. With only a half an hour of serious crying, he was finally asleep.

I relaxed in my success and watched tv until Allison got home. I thought about how the simplist task has now become so much more difficult. While I had a lot of fun with Caleb, it was certainly a challenge. Not having someone there to switch off with was much more difficult than imagined. Every little task took so much planning and a large amount of patience and time. Allison returned home to a proud father. Caleb was sound asleep, Georgia had been walked and I even had time for my dinner. When telling her about the evening I let my confidence overtake my evening's insecurity. We made it through the evening and I fell asleep with a new found pride.