Sunday Mornings (And Friday Nights)

So this picture sums up Alisa's life, well, ever since we started sailing full-time in 2007.  She's the one who's got the kids.

That's not all she does, of course.  She stands watch and navigates and tells me when it's the right moment to drop the pick in a crowded anchorage.  She made our bimini and drilled holes in our toe rail when we needed a place to tie in the netting on the life lines.  She reefs the main and cooks both at sea and in port and she's the one who figured out how to tune our radar and she does all the provisioning for the boat.

But she does all that in breaks from childcare.

I watch the kids and brush their teeth and change their diapers/nappies, too.  Of course.  But the way that we've divided up the work of everyday life has me doing more of the non-kid things and her doing more of the kid things.  (Surprise!)

And on this last crossing of the Pacific Alisa was really watching the kids a lot.  I was doing the final re-write on the book and working on two marine biology research projects and playing engineer for Galactic.  So Alisa had the kids so much that friends even commented on the blog to ask if they could please see just one photo of Alisa without the kids.

I checked.  We didn't have any.

So when we settled into Hobart to take a break after that crazy period of simultaneously working and sailing across the Pacific, I had an idea:

I would take the kids every Sunday and give Alisa the day off.  That's me above, making pancakes for breakfast on the first of those Sundays.

But... it didn't quite take.  We were in the yard for two weeks so I didn't have the kids for those Sundays, and then even after we were back in the water other stuff kept coming up, and Alisa ended up not getting the weekly break from child-rearing that I had nobly promised her.

Luckily - there's another sort of break that's available to her: the girls' night out.

Our good friend M-A took Alisa out dancing last week.  This is a picture that surfaced from that night out on the town.

I think that the occasional Friday night out might make up for a whole bunch of Sundays spent with the kids.