What? No New Posts Lately?

Of course not. Time, for parents, is a flexible and elusive thing. And non-parents often bask in the future glow of child rearing, thinking it will be such a sweet existence, an Elysian Fields experience, a real Disney moment, where troubles don't exist. I say, don't count on it. The same way a high school graduate looks toward the unknown of college, as a place to be experienced, where things will be better, life will be better, far from the constraints of home. Most kids find out you don't get laid every day, grades might matter, oh, and you do have to pay those loans back.

But back to time. There are times where, having forgotten a load of laundry in the washer, I find it again days later, only to have to clean it again to rid it of a nasty musk smell it acquired. And yes, having to do it again a few days later for the same reason. Foolish, you say? Of course it is, but parents don't exist on the same level plane as unmarrieds, or those without kids. The only times you are acutely aware of are those that have an immediacy attached - a doctor's appointment at 2:00, say, or a play date at 10:30. Everything else is vague, at least until the spouse gets home. Why? There is no real structure for the short attention span of kids, and get a few together, of different ages, and the clock becomes meaningless. One gets up real early, the other sleeps in. This skewers meal making, and also puts a slant on who gets to watch what ("he's been up watching cartoon network for hours, and I just got up," for example). And you can try to salvage it at lunchtime, but if one of them has an intermediate snack before lunch, again, you're kind of screwed.

Of course, given they both get up at different times, they both go to sleep at different times, and this is not unlike the several levels of Buddhist hells found in Japan. Maybe it's Shinto, I can't remember. "But I'm not tired," says one, and you can argue until you're blue in the face. But you'll be up, unable to watch anything remotely violent or sexy on television yourself, anything that might be a tad stress relieving, something to take the edge of a long, timeless day. And the last thing you think about is posting to a blog that no one reads. So that accounts for the infrequency of posts.