Just the Two of Us

Some intrinsic difficulties spring up when you take a single dad with a little girl and a single mom with a slightly less little girl, and you squeeze them all into one family.  What your rules are, what my rules are, how your kid works, how mine does, how I work with yours, how you work with mine, how we work together with them, etc., etc., etc.  Our family has had those struggles, and we continue to tweak our parenting techniques to be both fair and equal to both of our girls, knowing that they are both very different little people.  What works great for Kirsten doesn't always work great for Chloe and vice versa.  But we continue to be vigilant and involved, and hopefully we're not messing them up too much.  :)  It seems to be working, and they're both growing up to be such awesome people.

Anyway, one of the super cool totally awesome things that comes with the blended family smoothie we've got is that we have custody schedules that allow for plenty of time with all of us together, and some time with each person individually.  Sometimes it's Mikey, Shell, Kirsten, and Chloe.  Sometimes it's Mikey, Kirsten, and Chloe.  Sometimes it's Shell, Kirsten, and Chloe.  Sometimes it's Mikey and Chloe.  Sometimes it's Mikey and Kirsten.  Sometimes it's Shell and Chloe.  And sometimes it's Shell and Kirsten.  All of that built right in.  So cool.  Occasionally, we even get a Mikey and Shell day in there.  Sweet!

So today, we had a bit of all of those.  The day started out with all of us, then Mikey went to work, then Kirsten went to her dad's for the weekend, and that left Chloe and me with an evening for just the two of us.

We decided to take a stroll through the neighborhood to see all the flowers in bloom.  Springtime in the Pacific Northwest never ceases to amaze me.  It's so colorful!  We even saw a few bees on the way, and Chloe commented that they were being nice bees and just flying near us.  She's come a long way from where she was regarding bees, so it's really rewarding to hear her say that.

After our walk, it was time to get settled down for bed.  We read a book about baby animals, one of Chloe's current "things".

Chloe decided that my legs were perfect lumpy pillows while I read to her.

We took some pictures to send to Mikey while he was at work, too.

We had a great day together!  It's fun to get to spend some special time with each of our girls.  They're so different (and so much alike in a lot of ways, too), it's nice that we get to do things special with each of them.  Kirsten and Mikey even have a beginner's survival camping trip they're planning together this summer.  We'll let you know how that goes.