While We Wait: Our Week Apart

I mentioned in this post that I’d also be featuring some regular posts about what keeps us busy besides waiting and praying for an adoption match.  As I was thinking about our week last week, I realized something.  With both Doug and me working in schools, we pretty much spend most of our ENTIRE summers together, but last week was the first time that the 3 of us weren’t all together in the summer since we became a family of three.

Doug was off last week in Detroit, helping to chaperone a youth trip through our church to the ELCA national youth gathering.  Which left me on my own with J for the entire week.  Now, I know that plenty of couples do this all the time, where one spouse leaves on business or something like that, while the other is home with the kid or kids.  I’ve never been on my own.  I was a little nervous.  So…let’s do the math here…Doug was gone for 6 nights, helping to supervise 17 high school youth with 2 other adults.  I was home alone for 6 nights with 1 four-year-old.  We are not sure who was more tired at the end of the 7 days, but we both survived.

Here are our weeks, summarized in photos and a few words of our own:

Lisa’s Week:

My plan was to keep busy the entire week.  Perhaps I overplanned a bit too many things, but I’d rather have it that way.  I find with J that we end up with behavior snafu’s when we are bored at home.  So here was our week, along with photos from some of the things we did:

Special breakfast out with Mommy…Crayola Experience in Easton, PA, with friends…Trip to the library to pick out books and make a special craft…Time to play in the mud…Tub time with colored water to wash off mud…Special hike and picnic along Susquehanna River with grandparents…Visit to the park…Sleepover with Aunt K…Quick exit in morning when sleepover did not go as well as planned…Made volcano in sandbox with vinegar and baking soda over and over and over and over…Using Mommy’s old Fisher-Price record player to listen to stories…Out for ice cream twice…

Doug’s Week:

My week started with an early morning meeting of all the kids at a nearby church (there were two groups of us that split a bus), followed by a long, but actually very calm bus ride. When we arrived at our hotel, which also happened to be the tallest building in Detroit, and got settled in, it was time to go for a walk around the city and get some dinner. We settled on American Coney Dog, which happens to be one of the best hot dogs in America. Not a bad start to the trip.

Our next day and a half consisted of touring various sites around Detroit, spending some time on Belle Isle swimming (at least for the kids, because it was cold out!), and celebrating a birthday at the Hard Rock Cafe. Now it was time for us to begin the ELCA youth gathering.

The theme for the event this year was “Rise Up,” and we certainly did through various activities and gatherings the next couple of days. Each morning started with a 6AM wakeup for me, and then I proceeded to visit the Cobo Center to give blood and participate in a number of religious activities, spent time clearing an entire area of trees and debris for a park, and visited with our bishop. Every evening was finished with a gathering of all 30,000 people at Ford Field to hear speakers and some great music performances. The nights always ended late, of course.

All I can say is that it was totally worth it, and created some great memories. I was excited, though, to get back to Lisa and J on Sunday night, even though I had to wait until Monday morning to see J again.

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