Time

There always seems to be something you can buy or sign your kids up for to make parenting easier. What first comes to mind was this ad for a "sumo suit" for a baby. Basically it was like a padded swaddling pajama thing that was supposed to help them sleep better. For like $45. Max and Laurel were both terrible sleepers as babies. Very restless, and up frequently at night for years. I was definitely very close to buying that thing for Max, out of sheer desperation, and also out of fear that I wasn't doing it right. Harming my child through my ignorant approach to sleep, or something.

Laurel sleeps like a rock now, 10-12 hours at a time, and even Max at 2.5 years old, sleeps most of the night in his own bed. Even without a sumo suit, or really any particular gadget or white noise or anything. A great deal of the troubles you experience with children simply pass after some time.

I obsessed over methods and gear during my first few years as a parent, mostly to maximize efficiency. Since Max came along I have settled in with the idea that time is the best commodity I can provide them. It's hard to talk about the sheer quantities of time I spend side by side with little kids, dropping pieces of laundry individually into the washing machine, sifting through gravel to find the perfect rock, coaching someone tying their shoes. What do you do all day, people ask. Often I feel like I'm getting nothing "done." But the days pass and the thing that is getting done is kids growing up, our family structure solidifying, and building trusting relationships with other people's children. Worth it, for sure, even if my IRA doesn't think so.

Running Club is possible because of that time. Once a week in the summer (third year now!) we blaze a trail in the park by tying ribbons to trees. We currently have 43 ribbons in 2 colors, just regular ribbons from the fabric store, cut into strips. A few steady regular families join us, plus others who show up once or twice to try it out. After they follow the ribbons, kids organize themselves into games of tag, or run the trail again or catch daddy-long-legs in the field. We end with a cheer....2-4-6-8 Running Club is really great. It's not like the organized sports teams or family 5ks or really anything else I've ever been to. There's definitely an emphasis on being active and being in nature, but I don't really feel like the point is to exercise or get fit. Some kids will run laps and get kind of competitive with themselves, pushing harder each time. But one of my favorite memories is from a particularly hot and muggy evening when the kids made up a version of freeze tag where you can't get up from being frozen until someone else sits down next to you and tells you a story. Lots of sitting in that version of tag. Running Club is a weird mash up of elementary school PE and a Hash without the alcohol. It's what happened when my kids said "what if we had a club that...." and I said ok, let's do it.