Skimming

As you know, I'm back at work full-time, since December. Since about the middle of January, we're really hitting our new groove as a family comprised of one career woman, one stay at home dad, and one baby.

But I'm worried about the distribution of labour.

Parenting-wise, I have it pretty easy of late. I'm up with Miss Baby first thing in the morning (usually a very reasonable 7-7:30am), when we snuggle and breastfeed and get the house ready for the day: we open blinds and make the beds, refill the wipes or the diaper basket. She smells like a baby and I sniff her head and hold her close while she takes her time coming into her more active daytime self. We wander into the kitchen for breakfast, Miss Baby on the counter in her Bumbo chair, and me reading her the headlines from the breakfast bar while she coos at PCK and the cartoon dude on the Mini Wheats box. Recently, we've begun to have breakfast at the dining room table -- she, munching somewhat inefficiently on Cheerios in her high chair, and I, sucking milk through my Mini Wheats and reading the paper. I remove her from the high chair, and we make a game of 'find the escaped Cheerios'. More snuggling, and usually some laughing: this is the best and happiest part of her day.

By the time The Dada is done showering and shaving and dressing, I'm basically off-shift until I come home from work at about 5:20-5:30 ... or 5:40-5:50. Then I play with Miss Baby and feed her some supper and play some more, and Pynchon helps with her bath, and I breastfeed her to sleep and tiptoe out of her room by 7:45. It alternates between high-energy fun and silliness, and more sedentary activities that she enjoys. She goes to sleep readily and easily. She rarely wakes at night anymore.

In sum, my weekday shift is pretty easy: no naps, no long stretches alone in the house, no staring at all the cleaning and renos that need to be done, no major outfit changes or numerous diaper changes. I get the happy morning snuggle time, and the activity-filled and also snuggle-intensive supper-hour to bedtime shift.

I'm skimming the cream from the parenting milk bucket (urr, wait, I am the parenting milk bucket. Poorly chosen metaphor ...). It's hardly fair. Come the weekend, The Dada is, as you might well imagine, a little burned out. And yet here we are on a Friday evening after a long week of cold and shoveling and plumbers and more, and Pynchon sends me -- me! -- off with my friends for dinner tonight. So, just to be clear, he was on shift all day, and then fed her, bathed her, and put her to bed tonight. While I was out carousing.

I started here to write a sentence about how guilty I feel, but that would be about me: what I want to write instead is what a good man Pynchon is, how very very generous he has shown himself to be, as a husband and as a father. It is my goal as this marriage proceeds to model more of my behaviour on his. And to let him know just how much he means to me.