How we sleep

Since a few weeks, life is back to normal in our bedrooms - meaning everybody sleeps where he or she belongs, except Mone. But for a while, I was having the bed all to myself - that must have been from since I was single more then 12 years ago.

Meanwhile, Saskia and Mone where camping in Mone's room. Saskia proposed this arrangement the day she came home from the hospital, and since it's not wise to argue with a woman who just gave birth, I felt I better accept it. What a man has to do to please his wife..

Holiday memories

Baptism invitation

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.

The first week of February: the "stippeltjesweek"

I'm a little bit behind with my posts (about 4 months, actually). So, I pick up where I left you: beginning of February. This post is about one of the most emotional periods in our family life - don't worry, I won't make this an emo-blog.

Our daughter Mone was born and the day she came home from the hospital, our family was finally reunited. Saskia and I were really looking forward to our first "family feeling" - we kind of felt like a couple with a kid before, instead of a real family.

But after the first night at home, Elmo got ill (varicella). He called it "de stippeltjes" (the dots)

My dad picked him up from his kindergarden and kidnapped him for a whole week. We really missed the little fellow - it was the first time he was gone for more than 2 days. And with all the emotions due to the birth of Mone, we didn't know how to feel - somewhere between guilty and pleased because of the peace and quiet at home.

We talked on the phone every day with my parents, and the stories seemed just horrible. The first days he didn't really mind being sick, but then it got worse - I've never seen the varicella so bad. By coincidence we got a publicity in the mail about a vaccination against varicella that same day. Man, did we feel bad.

So I decided to go and visit him, which turned out to be a bad idea. I saw how my parents did their very best to take care of him, but the whole ritual of cleaning his wounds, covering them with cream and powder.. it was just as if you were forced to torture the little guy. He tried to be brave but it was just too painful. When I saw it, I was totally shaken. It was the first time (and the only, so far) that I felt like I was failing him because I wasn't there when he needed me.

I put him to bed and lay next to him. Because it was getting late, I had to sneak out of the room and leave like a thief in the night. He woke up when I was leaving, and yelled out for me. I could still hear him when I was driving of. I felt like a traitor, but decided to minimize it when talking about my visit to Saskia, so she wouldn't feel as guilty as me.

It really got me thinking about how important Elmo has become to us over the past two years. The next days we heard that he was getting better, but the empty feeling inside didn't go away. We decided not to visit him, since it looked like it did more harm then good. We made the best out of it and focussed on little Mone who was only about 10 days old at the time.

When I finally got to pick him up, he was all chearful. And driving home, I think I saw my mom getting a little emotional - Elmo is truely a heartbreaker.

What a homecoming it was ! Saskia and Elmo were so glad to reunite, that we could finally start that family-life we were all so hard longing for.

It took about a day before Elmo tried poking Mones eyes out or hitting her with her new toys: The daily routine had finally started. As always when Elmo is on "holiday", he makes incredible steps forward. In this case, he stopped his diapers overnight - we had been working on that for weeks, without success before.

He even tried emptying his little toilet himself, which was fun for him but not for his mother. I think our hygiene standards have just changed.

We moved on since then and I don't think Elmo has any bad memories of his "Stippeltjesweek".