T minus one day. Just one day till Dan comes home. With him gone for the past week, I have been reminded of what it felt like to be single.  Eating cereal for dinner, staying up way too late, sleeping diagonal in the bed, and leaving dishes in the sink, just because I can. Coming home to no one in particular. I say coming home metaphorically however, because I don’t go out much these days, considering Sweet Pea’s beauty rest requires three naps per day, leaving me with very short windows of time in which I can duck out before the next nap begins.

Without the opportunities her naps afford for me to run on the treadmill, I am pretty sure I would go insane.  Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to do when she goes down for a nap. The promise of a solid 60-90 minutes of free time can be so intoxicating it nearly paralyzes me. Like, if you were to consider what it would feel like to have all the money in the world, and you start to think what you would do… Would you start a philanthropy? Give to a charity that already exists? Travel the world? Start a school or medical clinic in an under-served area? Fund every non-profit that you believe in? Buy all your clothes at Chelsea and eat all your meals at The Kitchen? Buy a new carbon fiber road bike and ride it for miles and miles every single day? Hire a butler? Buy land? Visit Mars? Shop only at Whole Foods? Go back to school? It’s dizzying.

The best thing to do when naptime begins is to work out in the basement. The laundry, the dishes, the vacuuming, the mail… they will still be there later. The chance to feel like yourself, to remember  what it feels like to be fully alive, to experience the sting of sweat dripping into your eyeballs and the aching fatigue of hill repeats in your quads-  if you get too busy completing items on your to-do list, you might forget how good it feels to hurt.

I anticipated it would be hard to be down a man, as far as daily tasks like unloading the dishwasher (Dan can do it in less than three and a half minutes, I know because he times himself, yes I married a complete dork and I wouldn’t have it any other way), taking the laundry off the line, feeding the chickens, taking out the garbage, and changing diapers. I didn’t anticipate how off balance I would feel living alone with a baby. Is this what it feels like to be a single parent, times a million?

I’ve got everything I want and I’m grateful for it. I don’t mean to whine. I just miss having the other half of my team here in the house with me.