Today was my first out of five days solo parenting and here’s how it went…

Solo parenting isn’t new to me and I do it quite often considering I’m married. My husband works roughly 100 hours a week. He’s gone 12-14 hours during the weekday and if he’s not off on the weekends, he’s either at work or on call. Some days he won’t be home until after the kids are in bed. Even then, it’s not that bad because I usually know he’ll be home at some point.

Not this time. He’s gone for five days. 120 hours. 7200 minutes. 432,000 seconds… okay, you’re right. It’s not that bad at all. I guess I forgot to mention that the tail end of our Easter weekend involved gastroenteritis. Being childless and sick sucks but you get to sleep all you want. Being a parent and sick really sucks because you can’t sleep when you want because there are little people who need you to watch them every minute. You need to count down to nap time and oh wait, with two kids, one will finally be napping and the other one is still awake so you can’t take a snooze.

Let me recap what happened after my husband left this afternoon. Blake was inconsolable after her nap and nothing in the world would make it better— that is until the word “ducks” slipped out of my mouth. Have you seen Love Child love ducks? They’re like crack cocaine for toddlers. I swear every toddler loves them and if you have them at an outing, every toddler will find their way to you. Well, after some bribery, I managed to get Blake, Sloane and Loki out of the home to pick up a piece of IKEA furniture I found on craigslist while the kids were both napping. Yup, you read that right, they were both napping at the same time. Both kids were unhappy with the seven minute drive over to the pick up place and the dog was whining the entire drive because he thought we were going to the dog park.

Dinner was unsuccessful, ducks was the only thing Blake wanted to eat and Sloane wasn’t really interested in anything I offered her. One of my amazing friends, Sophie who lives a couple doors down was picking up pizza for her family and offered to grab us some cheese sticks. Of course we accepted and of course my crazy toddler took a bite and turned it down because she was full from all her ducks. Even though dinner was unsuccessful, I managed to get Blake down for bed (even if it was 20 minutes later than normal) so that’s a win for me! Both kids are sleeping now and I hope it stays that way until the morning. Even though my 8-month-old has not slept through a single night yet, I can keep dreaming about it. Well, one night down, four nights to go.

To the full-time single mom and dads, kudos to all of you because you do this every single day.