Monday Gratitude

What I’m thankful for going into this week:

1. B has started going down slides again. We don’t know what sparked his fear of slides, but it’s been at least six months since he’s wanted to try one. This past week, whenever we were at a playground, I made a point to go down the slide over and over and make a big deal about how fun it was. I think he internalized that and has been thinking it over, because yesterday at the playground he spontaneously started going down the slide, and did it again and again.

2. B tried a few other new things at the playground yesterday, too. Lately, playgrounds have basically just meant he sits in the baby swing. We’ve been trying to encourage him to at least try the regular swing, because he’s getting too big for the baby swing and some of them are really high off the ground and it’s nearly impossible to get him out once we’ve got him in. And yesterday he did try, and did really well! And he also started climbing across a rope bridge, which he had never interacted with before. But the most exciting development, to me, was that he fell on the rope bridge several times but kept trying. He’s had a tendency to get spooked by something and avoid it for months, like whatever happened with slides. I feel like we’ve unlocked much more play possibility with playgrounds heading into the summer.

3. We had a very low-key mother’s day. Bagels for breakfast, swim class and grocery shopping in the morning, and in the afternoon we rode our bikes out to get ice cream. Then we went to a playground, where B did all those exciting new things, and we had a nice, child-free dinner on the porch after putting the kid to bed. Last mother’s day, under the spell of being told “happy mother’s day” by practically every stranger I passed, we euphorically brewery-hopped our way through the neighborhood and I awoke the next day with one of the worst hangovers I can remember and a toddler to take care of. I’m grateful that’s not the case this year.

4. We had a fun, easy plan for this morning. On our way home from swim yesterday B noticed there’s a playground there, too, and he really wanted to go but we didn’t have time so I told him we could go today. I asked if he’d rather we take the car or the bus, and he said bus. The boy loves bus. And I love bus because even though it’s a short ride, it somehow turns an hour-long outing into a two, maybe three-hour-long outing. Our whole morning was taken up with absolutely zero thought required.

5. Tonight is my final meeting for the committee I was assigned to as part of my co-op parent duties. I’ve found the experience really overwhelming. The last-minute nature of the tasks I’ve been responsible for doesn’t play well with my ADHD, and now the committee is working on raising literally millions of dollars to save an education program, and a campaign of that magnitude is absolutely not something I have the bandwidth to meaningfully engage with. And it has left me feeling like I’m not doing a good enough job, because somehow these other parents from other co-ops are able and willing to do the work, but I suspect they have day jobs and spend some of their work hours doing committee work. My job is chasing around a small criminal hell-bent on killing himself using even the unlikeliest of tools, and it doesn’t allow for the spontaneous creation of Instagram reels about an auction basket.