Independence

Kirk is starting to make his own plans. It’s different from making his own decisions and certainly different from making his own choices when presented with The Thing We Want Him To Do and Something Else That Clearly Sucks to choose between. I had told him about Sunday dinner at Nana and Papa’s house back on Friday night or so. He knew it was coming up and was looking forward to it. When he woke up from his Quiet Time on Saturday afternoon, he was ready to go. NOW. Waiting for Sunday morning was not an option. Knowing that my sister was going to head up at some point that night with her girls, I asked him if he wanted me to call Auntie and see if he could go with her. It was all his own idea from there. He spoke to Auntie on the phone and I helped him pack his backpack and pull out his sleeping bag and his daddy helped him pick out toys and then he was chompin’ at the bit. Every five minutes he wanted to know where Auntie was. “When you finish your breakfast [supper] then Auntie will be here?” He was completely unfazed by leaving us for the night.

And of course since we suddenly had a childfree night we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. It’s not like it was planned out and we were heading to a gig or a movie or hell even dinner.

The strangest part of Kirk’s event planning is how quickly he makes up his mind, especially when he changes it. Sunday dinner was delicious, Kirk spent huge amounts of time out playing in the snow with his cousins, everybody got plenty of time to visit. My sister assumed that Kirk would end up spending last night up there, too, since his cousins were going to spend another night there. We arranged everything so that she would drop him off at daycare today and thought that settled it. Mr. b and I hung out later than we normally would, figuring that we’d go home when the kids went to bed. And that’s when it all changed. Kirk announced that he wanted to sleep at home, in his own bed, and started packing up his stuff. We had to go into overdrive – it was already past bedtime at that point! But it was all worth the rush because when Mr. b put a sleeping Kirkie into his bed, Kirk snuggled into his pillow as we tucked his blankets around him and got the happiest little smile on his face. Ah, that’s the stuff.