Is She Back Yet?

Every year my wife and her group of friends from high school go away for an extended weekend somewhere with lots of sun, and no husbands and/or kids. This weekend is this year’s trip, so I dropped my wife off at the airport at crazy-early AM Thursday morning, and braced myself for handling my kids on my own for 4 days. This annual trip is always a good way for my wife to unwind and recharge, and for me to truly understand how colossally screwed I would be if she weren’t around to keep our house from devolving into something from Lord of the Flies.

I’ve gotten fairly adept at handling the kids over the last few years, mostly thanks to the multi-page detailed instructions my wife leaves me, but this year has proven to be exceptionally challenging. Something is different. Some new variable has been introduced into the equation. I keep waiting for Jeff Goldblum to walk through the door, put a drop of water on the back of my hand, and tell me about chaos theory and how ‘Nature finds a way’. Trying to solve the riddle of what has changed is worthy of the great detectives throughout the ages ….. or maybe not:

Meet Zoey.

12 lbs. of pure, unbridled energy. Zoey joined our family Christmas morning, and it took about 30 seconds for her to win us all over. It’s a good thing she’s cute, because she is a crapload of work to keep up with. Any semblance of routine I had worked out with the kids is effectively crushed by little miss Zoey. I tried working from home the last 2 days, and every time I got on a conference call the dog needed to go out, or needed to come in, or needed to eat, or invented something to bark at, or decided to eat her dog bed, or grabbed the cord from my headset mid-call and ran across the floor trailing the headset and the phone. It was all pretty funny, but definitely made for some long days. She’s actually a pretty well-behaved dog, her timing was just brutal.

Today went pretty well, although if I could type that statement in a whisper I would since we’re not quite done yet. The house is a complete mess, but the kids are fed and in one piece (again, looking for the ‘whisper’ font), and we’re all starting the countdown to Mom’s return.

On the running front, things have been fairly uneventful, which is just how I like it. The knee recovery continues to go pretty well, and this week I upped the runs to 4-5 miles each, with no new pains or increased soreness to report. Tomorrow I’ll be stepping up to 5-6 miles as the upper-bound, and see how my body responds.

The kids have been watching Zoey in the 30 minutes it took me to put this post together. Time to assess the damage. Pray for us.