Me and my girl

It's quite amazing: when you have three kids, hours can go by without seeing them (umm, maybe I meant minutes?  Perhaps my short term memory isn't so good these days!).  With the one child, though, I'm never alone!   It's always me and my girl, and often me and my girl on my lap.

And after spending a few days together in our recently-shrunken family of two, I realized that since Rebecca has always been caught up in her two older brothers' activities, I haven't ever created little daily rituals for her as I did with the boys.  Not only does she not have any bedtime story or regular meal schedule, as the boys always did, she doesn't even have a proper bath time: most times I just hose her down at the beach before we come home!  The only rituals she's ever known have been her medications (which she's been off for three whole months now, by the way, and doing well).

So I've finally started introducing some of these daily rituals.  We pick flowers (together), we pick fruit and vegetables (together), we prepare our food (together), she'll offer me some of her food ...

... and we sit down for dinner, the two of us together right on time!

And so, Rebecca is finally enjoying the comforting and simple rituals of a toddler's daily life.  And after dinner, it's bath time, bedtime story, sleepy-pie time, and then I'm alone.

I sit on the terrace, and quietly enjoy the moon and the breeze on the hot summer night, and I think of the rest of our family, where the sun is still shining.