Be-Ing Roostery : Absence Makes the Heart Grow

Almost never is it just the Rooster and me, home alone.
In fact, I have been struggling to remember when we ever had a night like this, and it's possible we never did. 

Peaches had the rare weekday play date though, far on the other side of town, and when Rooster and I settled in together, we took out his homework to discover another extremely rare occurrence: Because he had to take a big, long test today, his teachers gave only one assignment: Read for twenty minutes. I didn't even tell him that his homework was reading, because to him "homework" is automatically a negative association, and I want him to continue to revel in the joy of his reading. Honestly, to my boy, reading for only twenty minutes would be a punishment.

So we have been hanging out, eating dinner, resting, and reading, for about three hours now.

We didn't do anything fancy. That is just what made it ideal -- the things we didn't do. We didn't yell or get wild, we didn't have time outs, we didn't struggle through pages of math, we didn't have any standoffs about mistakes on assignments, we didn't rush, we didn't have to do deep breathing exercises to keep our sanity.

I liked how we read. I liked how we sat on the sofa. I liked how we ate. It sounds ridiculous, but it was a wonderful evening. I liked all the things that lacked drama. I liked the calm.

The absence of homework from school, and the absence of working at home to manage two kids who can sometimes bring out the wild in each other, made for a night of restorative be-ing.

I highly recommend you take some things off your plate as soon as possible and have a night like ours. It does a soul good.