A Month's Respite

Ever since Kelly started in school, with its year round schedule that gave us all of April for vacation, our Aprils have typically involved some amount of travel and a break with the usual routine. This year was no exception, and the break in routine was as out of the ordinary as our "routine" has been atypical.

For two of the four weeks of the month, Cheryl and the kids lived with me in our new little house in Moraga. For a few of those nights, we had something resembling a normal evening -- I had the pleasure of coming home from work to the embrace of my family and a freshly-cooked meal. Several other evenings were spent shopping or visiting with Cheryl's sister's family, and their days were spent visiting parks, shopping, exploring the neighborhood and playing videogames. It was not an ideal vacation for the kids, as they did not have their books and toys, but they survived the time well, with few lasting scars inflicted upon each other.

To make all of the travel arrangements work, I did a lot of driving. At the beginning of the month, I flew down to watch the kids over the weekend while Cheryl was at a retreat in Oxnard, then picked her up on the way to San Francisco in an absolutely stuffed station wagon.


The next Monday morning, we drove out to the house, where I dropped them for the day while I went to work. At the end of the week, we drove back to Glendale to pick up one of Kelly's best friends, who came with us to our timeshare outside San Diego for a weekend getaway to celebrate Kelly's birthday.




After dropping all of them in Glendale, I drove back up to the Bay Area, all on a Sunday afternoon (500 miles in all). The following weekend, we all met in Chicago to drive to Green Bay for a family wedding, where Kelly and her cousins helped pass out programs for Cheryl's cousin who had been the flower girl at our wedding when she was ten years old. How the years go by.


Cheryl and the kids flew back to the Bay Area with me to spend the week in Moraga again. At the end of the week, we drove back to Glendale, where they will now stay until school is over at the end of June. I will also turn in the station wagon to the home base, so what little furniture I have now is what I will have until July.

We return now to the Friday-Monday flight routine, although the end is now clearly, tantalizingly, frustratingly in sight.