A day in the life of Auntie and Uncle Frank

@kale&cigarettes #500wordsaday

Day 5 of the 500 words a day for 30 days experiment

It’s day 5 of this experiment. Already. I didn’t get to my laptop this morning. I find that I’m more productive in the mornings. Get it done and move on with the rest of the day. Otherwise, I get busy, distracted, procrastinate and the anxiety monster rears its ugly head. We’ve been a few hours north visiting our dear friends who’ve just welcomed a new baby boy into the world a week ago. This morning, we woke up early after last night’s slumber party with a 5 year old girl and a 6 year old boy. To be honest, after the kids were going WWF on the inflatable mattress, I bailed on Frank, leaving him to manage with the two little rugrats. If you know me at all, you know not to mess with my sleep. That and you don’t want to see me when I’m hangry.

So this morning, after the kids woke up our mission was to keep them occupied and semi-quiet so they wouldn’t run upstairs and wake up the baby. My comadre had been up breastfeeding and soothing the baby throughout the night and she needed her zzzzz’s.

Frank and I, Uncle and Auntie extraordinaire, packed up the kids and headed out to meet our friends at their hotel. We dined on the free continental breakfast and took the kids swimming. We didn’t wait the requisite 30 minutes or whatever it is after we ate to get in the water. Everybody lived and we had a lot of fun. Frank was giving our goddaughter some swim lessons and flipped the other little fish around like crazy.

Once we felt we had adequately tired them out, we headed back to the house and hung out with the new parents and their little one. Today, I felt more comfortable carrying the tiny little one. I shamelessly sniffed his little head and took in that sweet, magical baby smell. That alone added on 5 years to my life. Ahh, taking in the youth.

I’m leaving out their 2-year-old cutie that’s into car keys and going to the golf range. In total, 3 youngsters and a newborn, 6 adults, countless baby and diaper bags, car seats and sippy cups.

We’re so out of it when it comes to all this. We’ve been outta the baby game for a long time. Ours are 20 and 17 already so as I joked with my friend, we have loaner kids. When we wanna kid fix we can borrow one and do all the fun stuff with them. When they start getting to be out of hand or cranky, back to the parents they go. 

So, we headed out on their first outing since coming home from the hospital. We decided to get something to eat and we took a caravan to the Farmer’s Market at Fairfax and Third in Los Angeles.

The place was packed with a bunch of families shopping and munching. We looked for a big enough table for our posse of six adults and 4 kids and all the bags and crap. We went in a few different directions to figure out what to eat and we took shifts eating and watching the kids. No major meltdowns, not too much crying, the littlest member of the gang slept in his little carrier hooked up to mama and we all survived the first trip in the real world for our new baby. I’m writing this after driving back home and a long but sweet day. I'm pooped after all the production but I'm grateful and give props to all the new parents out there. It's beautiful but a lot of work!