I haven’t spent much time alone watching the kids. Or really any time whatsoever. So as last Friday approached, I began to get a little nervous.

I wasn’t completely nervous. I remember being a lot more nervous about the first day I spent alone with Evie, back when she was a baby. I was so afraid I would forget to feed her or change her diaper that I kept meticulous notes, with times down to the minute, that I could refer to. But that ultimately worked out okay, and became second nature before too long, so I was a little more confident with that experience under my belt. I should also mention that Sara manages the two of them all the time, every day, so obviously I knew it was theoretically possible to deal with the two of them with only one parent.

So this time around I wasn’t worried about that sort of thing, but I was still worried about being able to take care of Ollie with the distraction of Evie. The main thing I was worried about though was not being able to calm Ollie down if he got upset.

With Evie I was pretty good at soothing her. I had all the skills down, and I knew what to do in certain circumstances. I knew what she would respond to. I realized that I didn’t have the same set of skills with Oliver. The things that worked for Evie don’t necessarily work for him.

The problem is that we tend to pair off; it is usually easier for Sara to take Oliver and for me to take Evie. As we started to do this more and more it sort of reinforced itself, because all the extra practice meant that Sara got better at dealing with Oliver, and I got better at dealing with Evie. Which meant that it became even more obvious for Sara to take Oliver and me to take Evie, etc.

Sometimes in the evening I would take care of Oliver while Sara made supper, and those times often did NOT go well. Sometimes he would sob the entire time until she was ready to take him back.

So basically, I was a little nervous about not having good Oliver-skillz, but I was also confident that I would develop them in time. It’s just that the first few weeks could be sort of disastrous until this happened.

So Thursday morning Sara was out for about 2 hours, so I had a bit of a trial run. It went more or less okay, but there was a little bit of a rough patch for about 1/2 an hour. Oliver was laying in the gym and smiling. Whenever he would turn his head and look at me, he would get this terrible, sad, pouty look on his face and start quietly sobbing to himself. Then he would turn his head away and look at something else and be all smiles again for a while. This wasn’t sobbing cries, he just looked very, very sad. It was like looking at me reminded him that his momma wasn’t home, and he missed her. This did eventually devolve into sobs that I had a lot of trouble getting rid of, which was more or less what I had experienced in the evenings.

So this trial run didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence going into the first full day. However, I am happy to report, the day actually went great!

We had a play date in the morning (with someone I had never met no less!) but that went really good and helped break up the day some. Sara is of the opinion that the kids are easier to manage out of the house than in, and I am inclined to agree. Oliver was all smiles all day. He didn’t really sleep hardly at all, but despite that, he was still in a good mood when Sara got home.

So all of my worries were for nothing! I’m sure we will still have some bad days, but the more good days we have, the easier it will be to get through the bad days.