Recovering

Well, at the beginning of this week, I thought Zak had completely changed his demeanor, and that maybe I was hitting a new stage of "terrible fours." Whenever we have a couple of tough days, I start thinking, wow, maybe I've spoiled him or done something wrong. But then I remembered how busy the last week was at the tennis tournament, and that he'd not gotten enough sleep at all...and I felt a little better. By Friday we were back to normal and I had my normally awesome son back :-)

On Wednesday, he was doing strange things like...as I was unloading the car, I put our backpack down on the ground to get some other things out. I put it down apparently right where he wanted to walk. He walked right up to the backpack and started crying "Why did you put the backpack here? I need to walk here and I can't!" I told him, "Zak, go around the backpack, there is plenty of room...I'll pick it up in a minute." But he continued to cry "No, I want to go through it! Why did you block me!" And he pushed through the backpack.

He also had gotten pretty bossy. I turned right on a red light, and he shouted out "Noooo!!!! Why did you go!?!?! It was RED!!!!! STOPP!!!"

Everything was just a bit more dramatic than it needed to be. But, as I said, by Friday, he was back to his wonderful self, I think because we had gotten back into some semblance of a normal schedule. On Friday we did a 3 hour bike/playground trip with Rowan and Dana. On the way to get them, Zak and I sang songs on the bike. Zak still loves that "You are my sunshine" song, and then he tells me that he's my sunshine. Then he also tells me that I'm HIS sunshine. Which makes me feel good. Then he says "and Tato's our coconut!" :-) Makes me laugh!

His new thing is to ask me "What's the problem?" If I say, "Oh shoot" because I hit a traffic jam, or I forgot to buy milk, or something...he comes running over "What? What's the problem here?"

Friday evening I was getting ready to go out for birthday drinks with friends, and I put on an outfit...Zak told me, "Mama, I like black, but that's not a good outfit for you at all." Then he proceeded to find another, purple outfit that he liked better. Wow! I wore the one he picked out, because it was more comfortable anyway :-)

Work is becoming a bit more challenging. We have quite a bit of business travel planned, which basically makes it impossible to do 3 days. The week of the travel obviously doesn't make sense...and then there is no possibility to catch it up because you already get way too far behind when you travel anyway. My work plan continues to "creep" up...and its slowly becoming much more than I can manage in my 3 days. I'm seriously considering going up to 4 days a week. Not only because of work, because I think I could force the issue if I really wanted to...but because I think Zak would probably do better going that one extra day to pre-school, and I feel like we've got such a great base set now. I'm going to think about it through September and then decide.

By the way, last week at work was great. As always, ups and downs...but all in all, I'm still on the right track and adding value :-)