Survivor: The Week Without Dad - Day 8

This is part 8 of a series of posts chronicling our week while my man and my kids' dad was out of the country for a week. See Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 , Day 6 and Day 7.

Day 8 – Saturday

Today I am just exhausted. It’s been a long week of little sleep.

I stayed up really late last night. I didn’t realize the affect that having another child in the house would have on me, but I was even more reluctant to go to sleep last night. And once I did go to sleep I think I just didn’t sleep heavily at all.

I remember my phone making a noise at one point. I looked at it this morning and it was a text from Mike at about 2:45 am saying that he was on the plane and that he should be departing on time.

I woke up really early, too, but I stayed in bed trying desperately to go back to sleep. And then came the knock on my door at 7 am.

All the kids were up and already dressed.

And my first thought… “Oh it’s going to be a long day. Where’s my coffee?”

I offered to either make pancakes or go to the donut shop.

I’ll give you one guess as to what they picked.

Yeah.

So we went and had breakfast and headed on to Nathan’s first soccer game.

He played goalie for the first part of the game. When he came off the field he said, “They shot the ball to me one time, but not two times,” with a bit of a sad face. So cute.




He played on the field, mostly just as a runner, the second half. At one point he ran off the field towards me and I said, “Son, you can’t just run off the field. Get back out there.” He looked at me with those big baby blues and said, “Mom, my legs are tiiired.”

So I gave the “cut-it” motion to the coach and they put someone else in. Nathan gladly took his spot on the bench. He was gassed.

By the way, I totally have to give credit to Mike's dad, "Grumps" as the kids call him, for the pictures above. Mike had my camera with him all week, so that left me with just my phone. Which was fine, but I wanted some good pictures of Nathan's first game.

Mike's mom, "Nanny" came up for the game as well. We went to lunch with her and then headed home for some much needed rest.

The three of us were excited to go to some friends’ house for a barbeque in the evening, but I still needed to make a dessert. I finally just asked the kids what they wanted and they requested brownies.

Great. I can make brownies in my sleep. Which is exactly what I wanted to do.

And I did.

I finally woke up at 5 pm and Nathan woke up shortly thereafter and we were able to get out of the house pretty quickly after that.

I heard from Mike that he was in Chicago while we were trying to get out of the house, so I called him back once we were in the car and on our way. I can't tell to the relief I had to have him back on the same continent as us. Something about those overseas flights just makes me nervous. Not when I do it, but when the one I love is out there in a little tube flying over the Arctic circle... it makes me nervous. But he was within a couple of hours of being home.

We had a wonderful time at our friends’ house. It was the perfect distraction that I needed to keep my mind preoccupied and not dwell on Mike's continued travel. We just hung out with them until about 9 pm when we started making our way back over to our neck of the woods to be ready to pick Mike up at 10:30 (our friends live about an hour away).

As it turns out, there was a hot air balloon festival today and they do fireworks at the end of it. So we stopped at the side of the road and enjoyed the fireworks from the car for several minutes and then continued on our way.

We went straight to the airport and found a parking space and went into the baggage claim area. Within a few minutes we saw a plan pull up at the gate right across the way and at the same time I got a text from Mike, “Just pulled up to gate B29.” I texted back, “Yeah, we see you.”

And within minutes, we actually did.

We did it. We survived.

And I didn’t even get voted off the island.