So Far Away From Me

Paul has been gone to NM for over a week now. From very first day he was gone Isaac kept asking when he'll be home. Although he knows exactly when his dad is coming home, it's his way of saying that he misses him. He's the one who waits up for his calls at night and answers the phone on the first ring. The first night Paul was gone he slept with the phone next to his ear and when I woke him up for school the next morning the first thing he said is, "Dad didn't call!" Leah misses him, too. For about five days she has somehow kept her tooth from falling out of her face so Paul can pull it out on his return. Too late, though, it finally lost its grip and fell out today. (Leah made note there was no blood...I wonder why!) Benjamin has stepped up to the task of killing cockroaches (or at least removel). One night we had one on the wall and it took me three times to successfully target it with Paul's heavy-soled shoe. After knocking it on its back Benjamin took hold of the shop-vac before it had a chance to regain its bearings and... vromp... it travelled through the long hose (I'm guessing it's still alive because the following day we fed it Cherrios, crusty bread and Smarties, the usual reinforcement from Richard, the speech therapist, as we vacuumed out the van.)
I've always felt there are so many invisible jobs that I do as a mother. Now I've realized that there are just as many (well, some, anyways) that Paul does: pest control (see above), plunging the toilet, watering the garden, dumping the enlarged dog food that Elizabeth plops in thTutti Frutti's water to name a few. The garden is the one that's so hard for me. I've never been good at gardening; our children are the only things I've kept alive. So four days into his trip when he asked me how the garden was doing I panicked. It hadn't even crossed my mind. Luckily I could say that it had rained some and then I promptly checked outside for signs of life. Three nights later I did the exact opposite and flooded the thing. Aaarrgg.