Saturday Stay at Home Dad

Kari has been working all kinds of different part time jobs lately. She finished teaching at the Logan School just as the seasonal work with The New Teacher Project started again for the year. This year she is doing screening of applications nationally as well as doing the in person interviews for Denver like she did last year. Her first full day of interviews was today which leaves me as the stay at home parent for the day. That leaves LT at the mercy of my parenting stills that are rarely tested beyond a couple of hours at a time.

We all drove to Tenn Street Coffee together to get the day started right. LT read some books with mom before she had to go off to work for the day.

Mom took the car to work so, after a little quality time at Tenn St., LT and I were on our own to walk home. He seems pretty comfortable strutting his stuff walking along Tennyson.

The weather forecast for today was predicting highs in the 50's but it was cold in the morning so LT was bundled up for the walk. I think he looks a little like an astronaut in this outfit so I've taken to calling him the orangesturnaut. The orangesturnaut was pleased to discover a stick in the out reaches of our block.

Don't tell mom but dad let the little guy watch some Sesame Street on the "de-te".

As it turned out, a friend of Papa's was going to be playing music at Tenn St. a little later in the morning so we decided to head back out and meet him. My plan was to spend an hour or so there and then head to the playground for a bit to tire LT out. Then a quick lunch for the little man and it would be nearly nap time. The only real chance I had of getting him to sleep (so I thought) was walking him in the stroller so we took it with us to Tenn St. so we'd have it later. However, as you can see in this picture, on the way there LT decided it was better to push the stroller than to ride in it.

LT loves music lately and he was entranced by the guitar playing.

It wasn't long before his eyes started getting heavy...

... and then he was out.

He slept for about 45 minutes in Papa's arms (one recently broken).

So much for my nap plan - he fell asleep about 2 hours earlier and slept for about half of what my original plan had called for. I suppose now would be a good time to fess up that I may have called my wife the "Nap Nazi" a few times for her concern over trying to keep a semi-consistent nap schedule. In her defense, however, things do usually go much more smoothly with LT if he's gotten the requisite sleep. It was starting to look like that wasn't going to be the case today. At least he was having fun reading with Papa after the short nap.


After Papa went home, LT and I headed over to the playground for bit.

Baba was in town today and I had originally told her that LT would be sleeping during the time she was free. But we now suddenly found ourselves with a different schedule so we invited her over to play. LT was very excited about pushing his stroller home from the park to meet Baba.

But not so excited that we couldn't take a detour on the way home to stop and crunch some leaves.

LT happily sent me on my way to do some chores while he and Baba played in the front yard.

I wasn't totally successful with the naps but, on top of keeping the kid alive and happy, I did manage to do some laundry, clean up after and walk the dogs, and even made a pizza dinner for the three of us (from 'scratch' with our new bread maker). Not too bad for a part-time stay at home dad.

I think both Kari and I enjoyed our day of 'trading places' but I don't know if either of us would jump to make the trade a permanent one. I will say that having some help from the grandparents is pretty nice and we are really lucky to have them all reasonably nearby.