The shades we put in the kids' room are no longer dark enough. They're just white plastic shades behind dark blue curtains. But the kids are getting up, on average, at 5 am.
Now, mind you, waking up and rolling over to see your almost-two-year-old son looking beseechingly at you while he clutches the teddy bear his great-Nana made him to his chest is probably an 8.5 on the Cuteness Richter scale, BUT at 5 am, when you know that if he'd stayed in bed you could get up at 7 am like a normal person, well, the cute gets a little less cute.
Add in his wandering sister, who's probably wormed her way into your bed already anyway, and it's no wonder Josh and I have been reduced to incoherent grunts most mornings -- and that's at work.
Sometimes at 5:30 or 6 they go play together relatively quietly in the living room, and those are the moments when I am most happy to have two kids -- because otherwise we'd be pestered to come play too.
So I think we are going to get some real blackout shades for their room. As soon as possible.
Because the cutest damn alarm clocks in the world are still going off WAY too early.
So, the new job. It's pretty good, though it means learning an entirely new way of working -- the Way of the Meeting. I've never had so many meetings in my life. But the people are great, the work is a challenge, and an interesting one, and I am enjoying learning all this new stuff.
The hardest part, however, has not been the job but the commute.
Every day I walk right past, and look down into, what used to be a giant smoking hole in my city. I've started having flashbacks again, which sucks so hard I can't tell you. The ghoulish tourists and the makeshift souvenir carts that cater to them incite a terrible fury in me and I try not to glare as I walk past.
I spent six years avoiding the place, so I get lost down here doing errands because the last time I was looking for the bank, or shopping at Century 21, there were a couple of very large buildings there affecting the route I walked.
I am also working on the 35th floor. The view is magnificent, except that I hate seeing airplanes. The week before I started they had their yearly full evacuation drill, which involves walking all the way down to the ground floor. I'm already planning to call in sick nxt year.
I am lucky that my boss is a good friend of mine and when I expressed some of this to her she admitted that she has a hard time with it sometimes too. Somehow that makes it a little better.
So I am gritting my teeth and trying to remind myself that the flashbacks will go away eventually, from daily to weekly to monthly or less. Soon it will just be my commute, and I will be thinking about the magazine I read on the subway or the work I have ahead of me, but I'm just not there yet.