Missing Daddy

I have been holding this in for over a week and I guess it’s time to finally make the “announcement” … Barry is gone. Okay, so maybe that’s a bit melodramatic. :) He’s working out of state and will be home for about a week out of each month. Today is the 12th day I haven’t been able to wake up next to him and it’s been pretty difficult to adjust.

Barry had only been gone for two days and it was already seeming like two months. Surprisingly enough, Ava and Talia have both been totally cool with it. Briyana, Tre, and Zoe: not so much. Briyana cried for the first few days. Tre started mentioning him as soon as we left Hattiesburg (his Pappaw Chris had his attention in the Playstation while we were there). Zoe walked around for almost a week with this confused look saying, “My daddy?” I guess it kinda helped me not cry because I was concentrating so much on comforting them. The 11th of this month was Avalyn’s 5th birthday — and the first day in a very long time that I haven’t spent with my husband. When they started school that Monday after I took him to the port, it was rough since he WAS working nights before so he was home with me all day. It was just me and Zoe, and you all know how serious she is about sleep… so for most of the day I was all alone! 

I think the thing that sucks the most about this little “transition” is that during the last school year, we started doing “Date Day” when he was off work so every Thursday, we’d go out to eat and go see a movie at the theater. When school started back, we planned on starting that again this year since we put it on hold all summer because our finances would seriously have hated us if we tried to take all the kids every week LOL Add to that all the tears that are certainly coming when the kids realize Daddy is going to miss all of their track meets and football games and Wednesday lunches at school … and everything. I’m hoping I don’t absolutely lose my mind running around back and forth between practices and competitions… He’s been gone for long stretches before, of course. I mean, football kept him traveling in college and kept him completely away when he played professionally, but we were used to it then. It was always that way… and the kids were younger so they weren’t involved in anything that required scheduling and time commitment on my part. But now he’s been home for three years (except for the couple of months he was in Canada in 2008 when Avalyn cried herself to sleep every night for over a week after he left) and it’s not easy for any of us.

If you’ve noticed I haven’t been around much it’s because until the past couple of days, he had asked me not to mention him being gone or working a new job and since that was the only thing on my mind, I haven’t had much of a motivation to blog. I’ve written a few articles on my design blog, but personal posts… I just wasn’t feeling it. Between Briyana and Talia’s cross country practices on Wednesdays and races on Saturdays, Tre’s football practices on Tuesdays and Thursdays and games on Saturdays, our dryer being broken which results in quite frequent trips to the Washeteria, my web design business, school, and all the random duties that come with the motherhood territory, I’m at a loss for time when it comes to my blog. I’m going to get back into the swing of things within the next week because once I wrap up my current design projects, I won’t be accepting more than one per week from now on. For now, though… this is the extent of my update, but I’ll be back to my old bloggy self in no time :)