Life as it is

This is how daily life looks like for me - Saskia has her hands full as well.

I wake up early in the morning because Elmo gets out of his bed and comes to my room. Sometimes he gets up middle in the night, sometimes he lets me sleep untill the alarm goes of.

While he eats his breakfast (the same ritual as before) I make his lunch for school. I grab a bite myself somewhere in between. In the meanwhile Saskia takes care of Mone.

His school lunch looks a lot more healthier then what I eat: some fruit, his can of water (or milk), his sandwiches and a cookie for dessert.

At 8.20 he walks to school with his mom. Its a 2 minute walk, of which one minute is spent saying hi to the bunny that lives halfway the traject. I promised myself to drop him off once a week, and so far I met that promise (even if it means arriving after 9.30 A.M. at work).

No changes in the traffic jams, however. One of these days I'll dedicate a blogpost on my hours spent in traffic, since it has become an important part of my life - sadly enough.

When I get home at about 7.15 P.M., I find my wife exhausted and my kids alive and kicking. Normally Elmo has already eaten his dinner, so he is ready to go to bed. But sometimes he took a nap in the late afternoon, and then you can't get him in bed before 9 P.M.

After a short bedtime story, he lies down to sleep, while I keep him company and read a comic.

And then, finally, I get to play a little with my lovely daughter.

As you can see, there isn't much time left for anything else. Saskia & I are looking forward to the holidays 'cause we really need it.

Life as it was

Our day rithm has changed a lot over the past months. This is how it looked like until easter of this year:

Each morning I go downstairs to wake up Elmo. I make sure I'm all ready for work myself, because once he's up, there is no more time left for anything else. He is hardly awake and when he is, he is often angry because he just isn't ready for the day yet.

He eats oatmeal for breakfast - always from the same bowl, and always with the same blue spoon. Don't you dare serve him anything else !

Getting dressed is the hardest. He loves his pyjamas and you need to negotiate with him to convince him to get changed - offering chocolate in the negotiation will often do it - or else there is always the "hard way".

Then I drop him off at the "Kindervilla". He's always very kind to me when we are in the car, but when we get near the kindervilla he gets suspicious. Once inside he yells that he wants to go to Brussels (because that is the place to be in his imagination, and his Meter Jaja lives there, so it must be paradise to him). The last 4 weeks that he went to the kindervilla, he cried as he just didn't want to stay there.

The next hour and a half I spend in traffic jams.

I get home around seven after a hard days work, and we eat together and talk about the day. Elmo has the coolest way to sit in his chair - just check out how he sits back with his arm over the edge.

At ten PM Elmo is still jumping around while Saskia and I struggle to stay awake. The living room is by then transformed into a battlefield full of toys.

Then he drinks his bottle of milk ..

And after a last bedtime story (or several of them), I get into bed with him until he falls asleep. I wake up in the middle of the night and find my way to my own bed. Often he calls me in the night, so I more or less spend my sleeping time in 2 different beds.