I’m sorry I pretty much left everyone hanging for quite a while there. After Peter hit his head, it felt like things sort of went into suspended animation for a while. He improved, but progress was slow and really only visible when we compared week to week, or even looked two weeks in the past. We had amazing help from my parents, but especially from Peter’s mom, who lived with us for essentially a month and a half. We absolutely needed that kind of support because Peter couldn’t drive, watch Emmie for more than 10 minutes at a time, or do much more than make himself a sandwich at times (not to mention the bajillion doctor’s appointments he had to get to!).

Thankfully, time is working its healing powers (along with a LOT of rest), and we’ve also been figuring out different things that make him “better.” If people are interested in what has helped him, I can do a separate post of the things we have learned and figured out the hard way. He can now function relatively normally at home (for certain tasks), and has been able to go back to work a few hours a week. We have every hope that he should be able to go back to work normally in the fall.

So! Now we are picking up with this “new normal,” where Daddy wears funny glasses all the time, we rejoice on cloudy days, and Mommy does all the driving. We’ve been on our own for a little more than a week now, and it’s going pretty well so far.

***

Little Miss Emmie has been evolving too. At this rate, three is going to be so, so rough. I hope I can make it.

She spent the majority of Mother’s Day threatening to hit me, kick me, spit on me, and any other kind of rude behavior she could think of. I know she was *completely* just trying to test her limits, trying to see what kind of reaction she would get if she said “I’m gonna kick you, Mama,” but it didn’t make it any easier. I didn’t make it any better because I was very emotional all day, so I couldn’t deal with it in the calm way I normally would have. “Why you have a tear on your face, Mama?” Sigh. I am really dreading the teenage years.

Thankfully, she still has moments of sweetness (not that she showed many of them yesterday), and these glimpses of the behavior to come make me really cherish those moments of pure love that I still can squeeze out of her.

Here’s a picture of Emmie and Oma that shows she can still be at least a little sweet: