Saturday, March 18, 2006

What to do when Papa is away ...

It is Saturday afternoon, the sun is blazing through the living room window and the sky is clear and cool. His Holiness is sleeping in my bed and the apartment is as quiet as I have ever known it. In one week I’ll be on a plane back across the Atlantic and recent days have been filled with preparations. HH is now aware of my impending departure but I am certain he has no sense of the duration. I had planned to make a short film of myself reading “Big Red Barn” by Margaret Wise Brown but I haven’t done it and I don’t know if I’ll get to it next week. I don’t have any real plan for staying connected with him besides calling and hoping he won’t just switch off the phone immediately after saying hello, which he does with unfortunate callers now and then.

Those of you who visit these pages have often been the source of some great advice and I would appreciate some of that wisdom here … your strategies for dealing with a long, long trip away from a 2.6 year old.