In Brooklyn, the routine really started to get to me. Day after day the same thing. Get up in the morning. Breakfast. Get Lila ready for school. Clean up a bit. Sit down to work. Pick Lila up for school. Afternoon activity. Dinner. Clean up from dinner, then get ready for bed. Sleep. Then start the whole thing over the next morning. It became so tedious, monotonous, boring.
This morning, Lila woke us up around 7am. I asked her what she wanted for breakfast. Pancakes. Then we played for a bit. She poked my nose with her finger and said "Bink!" I poked her nose back and said "Bonk!"
Bink. Bonk. Bink. Bonk. Bink. Bonk.
But then with her last bonk, she accidently poked me hard in the eye. "Ouch, that really hurt." That's when she got upset and had a little tantrum. Flailing around, whining, kicking a bit. Noah managed to sleep through all of this.
"All you had to do is say it was a mistake," I told her, but she kept going and going."You let me know when you're ready to get up and make pancakes nicely," I said before turning over and pulling the covers on. All of a sudden, Noah starts singing. "I'm a big, big sloth. I may be slow." Says Snook from It's a Big Big World. (That PBS Kids site, by the way, is wonderful. Lila loves it. Sometimes we play together, but sometimes she prefers to navigate it on her own.)
We all started cracking up.
Then I opened the pancake mix. Lila poured it into the bowl. She poured the milk into a cup. I cracked the eggs. She mixed the batter while I cleaned the three eggs I spilled on the floor. I cooked the cakes, while she showered (which she does all by herself now). Then she dried in the sun on our front deck while eating her breakfast.
After Noah and Lila left for school, I did some yoga. I found this wonderful website for Ashtanga yoga that includes the order of all the poses along with images of each. Then I set to work. Right now, I'm finishing two stories. One I started in Riomaggiore. The story begins on the terrace where I sat writing. "I looked up from my terrazzo and fell in love." The second, I began the last time we were in NY. This is the one based on a cab ride I took home from a Couchsurfing meeting.
When Lila gets back from school, we'll all walk down to the other side of the island to see a guy named cookie about renting a kayak. Then to the beach. It's high time Lila learned how to swim. Then we'll come home for dinner, clean up from dinner and soon after, bedtime.
After having no routine for almost nine months, I really do appreciate all the things that I stopped seeing before.
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