Different surnames

My wife and I have different last names. I discovered a new interesting side-effect of that. I volunteered to help out at our daughter's school fair. Today, the person coordinating it introduced me to my wife as someone who could help out at her stall, saying that we should get in touch to work out the details.

Fair enough. The coordinator didn't know us, so it shouldn't be shocking. On the other hand, it amuses me that they thought I would work well with L – which I appreciate.

This reminds me of a story from the another point of view. A couple of years ago I was visiting my cousin. At one point, her 15 year old son, asked how his grandmother and his great aunt (her sister) could have had different surnames. His mother had to explain how they were married and took their husbands’ names. Oh yeah, he said I forgot people did that.

Now to sleep

Just to keep track of this milestone... for the first time ever, R completely put herself to bed with no help at all from either parent. While bedtime has been getting easier and easier over the past few months, this is the first time we had no involvement. Well, none beyond We are sooooooo tired. We're just going to go to sleep now. Please don't stay up too late. You have school tomorrow. Zzzzzzz Or something to that effect.

It was a long day. We had out annual street party. I was up early cooking a nice chilli for the lunch (the longer you spend cooking, the better it tastes). The party iself involved loads of food, to the point that once it was over, despite it being dinner time, we had no room left. Except R, who has been too busy playing to notice there was lunch. So after putting together a quick sandwich for her dinner, I went to bed. The above conversation was done with me under the covers and my eyes closed. I'm pretty sure I was asleep before she was in pyjamas.

She clearly went to bed at some point, as we had to wake her in the morning. But she did the job of getting to sleep, and, more importantly, showed no signs of resentment toward us for having to do it. Nice way to turn a parenting fail into a parenting win.

Heart

One day last week I was having increasing chest pain after work. It was making me both more and more worried and more and more irritable as the evening progressed. R was a bundle of energy, bounding around and jumping on the sofa. I kept asking her to be quiet and not stress me out, all the while I was searching online for evidence it could somehow be gastric (despite being on antacids). It culminated with me going to hospital in the middle of the night.

This is a conversation the daughter and I had after picking her up from school the next day.

Just so you know, I went to hospital last night.

I didn’t realise you were gone.

Yeah. I left at 5am and got back by 6:30 before you were up. It was pretty empty in A&E. So it all went pretty quick.
When I got home I just went straight to back to bed. I was so tired and you were both asleep.
Did your mum tell you what happened?

She said you were feeling bad and to let you sleep
…
I thought you had a heart attack.

So did I. It felt like how they describe it. But I wasn't a heart attack. They did tests and were pretty sure of it. I'm sorry we didn't tell you sooner. Were you worried?

…

At this point she dropped the subject. I didn't want to pry any further as I didn't want to upset her. When she feels things she doesn't understand she gets upset if you pry, and I didn't want to ruin the nice moment between us. We spent the rest of the walk home just walking together and occasionally talking of innocuous things.

It's clear she knew exactly what I feared was going on. I felt awful for putting her through this. I also felt grateful that she was so concerned and understood what it all meant without me having to explain. I appreciate her loving heart. It's a kind of curse of being a parent. Reveling in the love they give you at the same time feeling sorry for your child for the pain they'll feel on your own mortality.

After the A&E visit and a follow up with my GP, it turns out the chest pains were probably the only thing it could have been that wouldn't call for a major lifestyle change. A swelling the in cartilage on the side of my sternum. Most likely due to my heavy laptop bag constantly banging against my chest during my daily commute. Exacerbated by stress or anything else which makes one hold their shoulders or posture in a funny way.