2010
turn it up
maura @ 6:37 pm
It’s not that time is ever NOT relative, but it sure seems more relative the older I get. And especially since becoming a parent. Whenever I see a newborn (or someone who’s pregnant) it seems like forever ago that Gus was a baby. Of course what everyone always says is totally true: reflecting now it seems to have gone by in an instant, and I occasionally experience nostalgia so intense it’s practically painful. But I also remember the sometimes excruciating dullness of babies and toddlers. Lying on the floor next to Gus playing trains I wondered whether my brain was actually dripping right out of my head into a pool of gray goo on the floor, or if I just imagined it to be true.
Last week Gus spent 3 days and 2 nights at camp with school. He had an awesome time hiking, building stuff, finding creatures in the pond, toasting marshmallows, etc. — all the standard camp goodness. He came home exhausted. We don’t tend to get a sitter that often (for a wide variety of reasons), so we were eager to take advantage of the time to cram in as much grownup stuff as possible. We saw a movie one night and went out to a medium-fancy dinner the other, and stayed up way too late. We were pretty exhausted by the time he got home, too.
Time was more fluid than usual when Gus was gone, I think because this was the first time that he’s been away while we were at home. In the past when he’s spent a few days away with his grandparents we’ve always gone away too. While we were home alone time seemed extra slow, but when we were out time sped by (also at work, but that’s often the case for me). The cats knew things were different, too, esp. the one that usually sleeps on Gus’s bed.
The movie and dinner were really nice, but I couldn’t shake the weird relative time feeling the whole time Gus was gone. So strange.
