As a parent, I find that I'm rarely afraid of being alone. With my extraverted nature, it used to feel like pure torture. After being a stay-at-home dad and having tiny humans begging for my time around the clock, I now take great solace in my alone time. It really doesn't matter if I'm reading a book, playing a video game, or watching TV. Those rare moments alone are pretty stellar as far as I'm concerned. For Ethan though, being unexpectedly alone is one of the scariest things in the world.
For the record, Ethan actually doesn't mind being alone under normal circumstances. At least once a day, he will disappear to his room to read books or solve puzzles on his own before reappearing up to 30 minutes later. He's also really good about entertaining himself while I'm making dinner most nights. This stands out because for all her good qualities, Ellie never excelled at entertaining herself. In fact, outside of her quiet times, that's still a relatively difficult task for her. The moral of the story here is that while Ethan doesn't mind being by himself, he doesn't enjoy it when it's completely unexpected.
It's important for me to mention that I would never intentionally leave Ethan at home alone. Most days I don't even go outside while Ethan is napping. This week is kind of an exception though because we have lots and lots of leaves. I mean LOTS OF LEAVES. Taking that into account, I felt like mulching leaves in the backyard was a pretty good use of Ethan's naptime and headed outside to do just that.
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| Just keep mulching, just keep mulching... |
During my mulching escapades, I made sure to take a quick break every time I filled my mulching bag to poke my head inside and listen for Ethan. Four mulching bags in and Ethan was still asleep. However, at some point between four and five, that would change. After five, I poked my head inside and heard the sounds of intense crying. I quickly ran inside and opened the subbasement door only to find Ethan sitting at the top of our kitchen stairs crying. It took a few minutes to calm him down but I finally convinced him to come join me outside as I finished mulching a few more leaves.
As soon as I finished my final batch of leaves for the day,
Ethan immediately came and asked if I would push him on the nest swing in the
backyard. Of course, I'm never going to complain about getting to push either
of my kids on the swing so we did just that. After a while, Ethan had his fill
of the nest swing and wanted to move to the traditional bench swing hanging
from our deck. The great thing about pushing him on that swing is that he faced
me the entire time meaning I could see the big smile on his face as I pushed
him over and over.
Looking back at the day, I realize that it was probably my fault Ethan reacted the way he did to being "alone". I didn't actually tell him where I would be when he woke up. Therefore, he probably did panic when he couldn't find me. However, we did get to have a good talk about how he should never panic in those situations because I'll never be too far away. The challenge is to see if either of us learned anything from this experience or if we'll be doomed to repeat in the future. Time will ultimately answer that question for us. #DaddyWrite
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| He clearly wasn't too upset with me because I did receive an affectionate head pat. |
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