Home Alone

New nightgowns. Back to sewing. 

I know I haven't been here much lately; I'm just starting to crawl out of the shell I like to call the 'thomas street heat bubble'. Little by little, day by day, life is being restored to these here parts.

Things have been cooking in the kitchen again after a month-long hiatus. The sewing machine has been running and I've picked up knitting needles on five separate occasions in the last 7 days. yes. I think we're back.

But I don't want to share what we've been cooking up around here lately. Not yet. I want to record for posterity (and hopefully not for judicial sentencing) a momentous occasion in the lives of my young girls. I left them home alone today.

Before you get all worked up, let me tell you that they were alone in the house for approximately 10 minutes, which is nothing compared to the 1 1/2 hour long naps I take while they listen to audio books. Or the 45 minutes at a time I lock myself in my bedroom to hide from them. And I ventured only 0.9 miles away from our front door.

You see, every other Wednesday I have to pick up my box of vegetables from our CSA. The girls were not willing to come along for this 5-10 minute laboriously boring task, so I opted - as I often do when they put up a fight - to leave them alone. Until today, they have always rejected the idea as atrocious. Today, they decided it sounded pretty o.k.

I walked out the front door feeling strangely liberated, and I set the trip odometer to 0. Exactly 3.5 minutes later I arrived at the Wicker Park mansion to pick up my cucumbers, my kohlrabi, my sweet corn, and my salad greens. The only drama of the whole episode happened in my car, when I gazed down to the fuel indicator and realized my gas light had been on for an inappropriate length of time, an inappropriate number of miles (my husband's eyes are rolling out of his head right now.)

Despite my fear of running of out gas on the 1 mile journey from my home and having to walk back in the heat, in the rain, pregnant, and with too many pounds of roughage under my arms, I arrived safely home to realize that they hadn't realized I had even left.

Mae looked at me, puzzled: "When are you going to go?"