Good morning!

Hope everyone had a nice 4th of July week/weekend.

This will be a quick post because the Monday morning tornado show is about to get started.

So let’s mostly do a photo dump, yeah?

We spent a lot of our week with Christina and Milton and sweet baby Nora who were visiting from California. On Thursday, we walked over to Maggie Daley and Crown Fountain and splashed around for a bit.

They came over for dinner and we had Lou Malnati’s.

No fireworks were observed.

Because small children and bedtime, y’know?

Friday was the 13th anniversary of our Nanu passing. And, on the exact moment of his passing, our family logged in to a group WhatsApp call (as we do) to be together.

And, as weird and unnecessary as it may seem to the outer world (I was sitting in the nail salon listening to Nani singing while awkwardly smiling for screenshots of us in our individual boxes), I love that our family does shit like this.

We’re spread all over the place. And we’ve all got stuff going on. But for this one brief moment in the day, we log in and remember our sweet Nanu and sign off with the promise to buy a lotto ticket.

I love it so much.

Moving right along to Saturday.

We went and watched Corduroy at the Shakespeare Theater. It was 60 minutes long and we were right up at the side of the stage. The baby joined us too and I wasn’t anticipating it would go well. But it really really did. He was engaged for the full hour and especially loved the part where beach balls went flying into the audience. He kept shouting, “BAW, BAW, BAW, BAW BAW!” We didn’t have to use our bribery (teething crackers) ’til the very end. Hurrah.

After, the four of us went to lunch at Harry Carray’s. Which was a real nice reminder why the four of us don’t go out to eat all that often. Puffs and french fries on the floor, a baby that wants OUT of the high chair, a 4-year old that is hangry and then needs to poop. So many needs, not enough hands. Anyway, we ate our food. I don’t remember what it tasted like. But we ate.

And THEN.

Ankur took the baby back home to nap. Ishu and I went to the museum.

I love the 1:1 time I get with Ishu. It’s so much easier to do 1:1 versus 2:2. Which, if you think about it from a math perspective, is the same exact thing. But, from a parent perspective, it is TOTALLY NOT.

Okay.

And then Sunday, I did a Costco trip with the kids by myself. Ankur volunteered to come with us, but he also needs to be studying for his board exam and gets ZERO chance to do that when he gets home from work. So, any free moment we can carve out for him to study, we gotta start doing that.

So, Costco trip with Mama.

I wish there was a camera on us so you could see what I looked like trying to push the cart through all the people, hold one sample for Ishu between some fingers, feed the baby some samples when I could (and when I couldn’t, he was certainly grunting loudly asking for MO, MO, MO).

And then the drive home with the NASCAR traffic.

No thank you.

Anyway, that was our big Sunday outing because mama was done done done.

How do people do this?

I don’t get it.

I mean, I guess I did it. But some people make it look real easy to get both kids in the car, easy peasy. Meanwhile, I’m sweating trying to pull a walking stick outta Ishu’s hands, try to convince Ishu that NO HE DOES NOT NEED TO BE CRYING BECAUSE HE DOESN’T GET TO PLAY WITH THE BABY’S TEETHING TOY, reaching behind my car seat to get teething crackers into the baby’s hand, putting all the groceries in the trunk and buckling the baby in the car seat only to have Ishu say, “Mama, I gotta poop.” COOL, COOL, COOL.

Also, the baby hates the car. And so when he screams, that flusters ME. But also Ishu gets all sorts of dysregulated by the screaming and then he is screaming OVER the baby’s screams.

And, yes, well, we won’t be doing that again any time soon.

Phew.

But we survived. We had a beautiful weekend with some challenging moments sprinkled in. But isn’t that just life?

Okay. HAVE A GREAT ONE!