You want to know how strange weekends are at our house? Usually, we all pile into the car and head to whatever event is planned for those days. If things go as planned, Friday night is a chance for the parents to try to reconnect with the teens, preferably without any electronic interference unless it involves a movie theater. Saturdays are for the family to be together somewhere, even if it is all of us at home, headed to a volleyball tournament, or gosh anything. When it’s Volleyball season, we run pretty hard. It becomes imperative that we try to keep connected to the kids in our house, and you would think that traveling for hours in the same car would open the door to dialogue for us....yeah, no. Eric and I talk a lot. We can talk about Christmas presents or Birthday presents and the girls don’t know because they are either asleep or have ear buds in listening to music or whatever they choose to listen too. Lately, that’s anime for Sydney and “Friends” for Madison. Bradley watches the flavor of the day, which is a variety of ten to twenty million different things and sometimes he starts dropping words to make us smile.
But lately, our weekends have been so different from our norm. We have teen agers now, and that means school dances and with a gentle push football games which they weren’t sure they’d enjoy, but they do. So a little less teen connection happening right now. And then there’s Bradley. He sometimes enjoy going to dinner, and sometimes he hates it. We really have to choose carefully for the places with the food he loves the most so that he is happy enough to be with us for it. He’s only just starting to be interested in sports around him. Last season he only watched one volleyball game from Dad’s lap. So he really isn’t all that into the football games and such. Most of that is just too far away from him for him to really have his attention be captured. When we have the chance we let him have his Friday night dates with our awesome Respite care provider.
Bu as life does, things always keep changing. Dad is back to his schooling so we have to adjust things to make sure that he has the time he needs to get his work done. The amount of homework for the girls is picking up and their activities too. Last Friday, Madison went on a date with a boy that she thought she really liked, but his silence over the weekend cooled that and she broke it off with him on Monday. See, things just change really fast around here. Haha
But I digress. This week Bradley has been sick, so that changed our scheduling and planning for this weekend. It was back to divide and conquer as Eric and I split the duties to keep him safe and calm to try to get better, and still get the girls - mostly Sydney, all over this county. Friday night I took the girls to see Cal State University Northridge host Cal Poly for women’s volleyball. Then today, Eric took Sydney to a team bonding bbq while Madison took herself to her school for a practice ACT. Meanwhile, Bradley is having a rough few days as he keeps fighting a fever and it would seem he’s having increased seizure activity when he’s trying to sleep at night. So he requires close monitoring.
After barely sleeping last night, he fell asleep pretty early while we sat around watching the baseball game. Eric and I have no dog in this fight, but our oldest is a Dodger fan, so that’s what we did together tonight. By the time it ended, we had everyone but Bradley in here watching the game. Our connecting is coming in bits and pieces. This weend has been about chatting in the car on the way, and Sydney and I making the desserts for the bbq, catching up with Madison when she came home from her test... little bits and pieces filling in the gaps, trying to connect the dots of a busy week, an exhausting week.
Hopefully, Bradley starts to feel better and sleeps tonight, so the parents can sleep tonight and feel better, and maybe tomorrow we all pile in the car and go do something together. Play at a park, walk around the mall...anything that suggests that our little guy is returning to something more healthy and lets our girls blow off some steam. In the middle, maybe we can just enjoy the squabbling girls and the laughter and the being that happens when we get to be together. Maybe.
But first, we really need for Bradley to get feeling better. Then we have to try to gather the dots. One step at a time.
Happy Saturday Y’all.
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