Full circle

A few years back, a laptop virus prompted me to dump all my photos onto Facebook for safe keeping. I've been hoping to one day get an external hard drive and pull everything offline and onto there. I finally acquired said hard drive and so I've been spending those few morning hours I have to myself cleaning off old laptops and making sure all my Facebook albums are backed up on my hard drive. This task also doubles as an excuse to revisit my early days with Emagene and compare them to now. How did we manage? What did we do to entertain ourselves? How was she such a happy infant? Is there any of then that will entertain her now as I get to know Aoife? Can I borrow some of that frame as inspiration for this autumn of transition?

I remember having a loose structure or rhythm to our days together. Pete was in school and working and we lived in an old neighborhood with a duck pond lovingly called Swan Lake. So naturally, we visited the "lake" twice a day. I greatly miss that pond right now. There is not much in the way of natural habit within walking distance of my house, except a horse pasture that only occasionally houses horses.

 In my need to find our new rhythm, I've been verbalizing - mostly to the girls- what used to work for us.

Emagene has begun a new habit of asking to watch videos of her as a baby or asking me to repeat stories of what life was like when she was little. I told her of our nightly habits once she had teeth: we would take a nap when daddy left for work, have dinner, take our walk, have a bath and then watch a video while we ate popcorn before bedtime. When I said we used to watch Thomas or Fragile Rock, she immediately asked to watch Thomas. We haven't watched Thomas in about 2 years! So after a morning walk and some lunch, we are welcoming Thomas back into our lives.