Leah, off to school
I was walking out of the library the other day after picking up a couple of books I’d had on hold. One of the books was my favorite book of children’s knitting patterns. It was then that I realized that now that we’ve settled into life aboard it’s pretty much back to the same old for the time being: Michael walks to work in the early morning light as I wake up with a hot cup of coffee. The girls soon wake also and I fix them breakfast; then we dress, brush teeth and are off to do errands or drive Leah to preschool or go to library storytime or to the park if the rain has taken a break.
And yet. I realized walking out of the library that life is still a little bit different than our life on land had been.
For starters, I have been itching to knit the girls some mittens now that the weather has gotten noticeably chillier. It will be my last chance for a couple of years after all. In our storage unit, tucked away underneath stacks of crates is my box stuffed full with my favorite books and in them this book that contains the perfect knitting pattern for children’s mittens. I knew it would be far too much work to dig out just this one book so I checked the library and lo and behold! It was on the shelf waiting for me to reserve. Easy peasy. And now I had the library’s copy tucked under my arm because actually finding my own was not worth an afternoon.
A few days ago Leah got out her markers to do a little doodling when I noticed that she was having trouble keeping them next to her. It wasn’t that she was dropping them on the floor (well, she was but that always happens), it was that the markers kept rolling across the table to the other side. The downward side. Wondertime has two 100-gallon water tanks; ideally these heavy tanks would be deep in the keel but in order to accommodate such roomy tanks on our small boat the two tanks lie outboard, a port and a starboard tank. What happens is that when one tank is full and we’re draining the other tank, the boat heels over quite noticeably to the side with the fuller tank. When we catch ourselves gripping on when walking down the hallway or markers rolling across the table it’s time to switch to the other tank for a day or two. Which is what I did.
And then just this morning I stuck my head into our refrigerated box to grab a carton of soy milk out for Holly to drink with breakfast when I saw that there wasn’t any in there. So I walked up forward into the head and reached into the shower where we store our Costco carton of soy milk boxes and grabbed a fresh one. It was just because I’d been thinking about ways that our life was a little different that I realized that we didn’t used to store soy milk in our shower.
We’ve truly enjoyed adapting to our new (again) way of life. While much of what is different is not so great (hauling laundry up the dock in the rain to the laundry room, hauling ourselves up the dock in the rain to the showers, hauling two cranky girls in the rain up the dock to the car….you get the idea) much of what is different truly just makes life interesting right now.
