Quality Time

A funny thing happened this past Friday evening…

I had ridden my bike to work because it’s the right time of year for this type of activity. About a quarter mile from the office, I notice the rear tire had become a bit soft. Just my luck, I had a flat. I usually have a spare, but this time I was out of supplies. This meant I had to arrange for a ride home. So it was that my wife picked me up at work, after she had dropped Eliana off for her Friday evening Korean class.

The local Korean church has it’s Korean school on Friday evenings. A tough time for sure, but well worth the time for Eliana to learn a part of her culture that I can never teach her myself. (She’ll be plenty of coding tips, and math lessons.)   But, the resulting group was one that doesn’t occur too often: Myself, My Wife, and Annabelle. It was somewhat like a flashback to two years prior. With only one child to watch after, we decided it would be OK to go out for some sushi.

While we were on the way, Annabelle was very quiet. She was just enjoying the scenery, listening to her music on the car stereo, and listening to  us blab on about parent stuff. When we got to the restaurant, she was very excited. By now, she is usually running around causing some sort of mischief with a fork. Annabelle has definitely entered her terrible-two stage. However, she was being very polite, gentle and of course, cute. She was simling. We had no arguments with her. There was no screaming for a fork or chopstick. The staff sent some extra tempura because she was cute.

In all, it was a very interesting time to spend with Annabelle. This was one of the only times I can remember being with Annabelle and her older sister not being present. I’m pretty sure this lead directly to her sudden lack of screaming and tantrums. While they usually get along, it seems that the mere fact that they both want our undivided attention whenever they feel like it seems to cause both of them to get a little crazy from time to time. But with the competition out of the picture for the time being, it was smooth sailing for a few hours, anyway.

This has me wondering if we should try this more often. Eliana did have a whole two years with us as our primary focus. It seems only fair to give Annabelle that chance, even if only for a few hours a week. On the same token, Eliana still deserves some undivided quality time from both of us, without the burden of competing for her sister.  I think it would do everyone some good if we could have some kind of way to pull this off from time to time. No one likes it when we all start arguing. And just the suddenly different feeling of having one less person around to have to compete with for attention should make for more level heads when spending time together.