So, as I mentioned in the last post, my kids and I moved out to a new apartment. We’ve been living here now for about a month and a half and it’s actually pretty great so far.
We’ve established a couple of good routines, their mom comes visiting for a few hours a day and sleep, while almost rare and broken up for me, seems to have found its way to the kids routines as well.
For now, the boys have been home from kindergarten or over a month now, in the middle of December and a couple of weeks, they were sick. They probably had a regular cold – we didnt get tested since they weren’t all that sick, and tests aren’t administered here that much – and then Christmas hit and the municipality shut down all 15h/week-kids for kindergarten to limit the spread of the disease. They’re allowed back after the 22nd, which effectively means the 25th. And OH BOY will they be happy to get back to play with their friends!
Meanwhile, the oldest started school again last week. She’s been having a blast from what I can tell, but she keeps avoiding to give me a copy of her schedule. First she tried to push an old schedule of hers and pretend it’s the current one, and since she’s been trying to get a schedule from the teachers to give me, but so far it hasn’t gone too well. I pretend I’m more annoyed by this than I am, mostly for fun, but also to show her that, while it’s not the end of the world, she shouldn’t just brush this aside. I mean, it’s mostly so that I can keep track of her starting time and end time and the days she has P.E., and just having a regular routine where she goes to school the same time every day and I trust she comes home directly after school and be honest about which days are P.E.-days..it’s not exactly reliable, to be frank. Not that it’s super important, she goes to a school that is merely 10 minute walk from home, so if anything is up, I can easily just go there to clear it up – or she can be sent home to fetch her gymclothes by the P.E. teacher.
I’ve been looking into the whole economic situation of mine and there’s just a bunch of papers I need to fill in every month for the government to get my money. There’s all these laws to look up, forms to fill, certificates to get a copy of and send, copies of rent bill to send, etc. For some reason I also have to send proof that my kids actually lives with me, which were a main reason some of my money were late with 4 weeks at one time. It’s a mess, but a mess I hope will clear up in time. Hopefully this will get pretty much automated soon. It just steals way too much energy to deal with every month, for something I shouldn’t even have to deal with since it should be automated. It’s money I’m guaranteed as long as I fullfill the requirements, which I do, so… But, it’s covering all the bills I have – rent, electrical, insurance, internet, the luxuries such as my cellphone plan, netflix, Disney+, etc – as well as food and my monthly payments for debts, even upgrading stuff at home, such as buying more clothes to the kids, toys, etc. I hope that in the end I’ll be able to put aside some for savings as well.
Enough of that, though. Meanwhile I want to tell you guys of the apartment itself! It’s a bit on the smaller side, for what I – we – need as a family of four. There’s two bedrooms, one larger and one smaller, that probably were supposed to be a sort of guestroom. My young boys share the large bedroom between them, and it’s actually pretty decently sized for two boys that age. They have a chest of drawers, a book case and boxes and drawers for their toys, as well as a small table to play on and their two, identical beds. They really dont seem to mind sharing a room, not for sleeping nor for playing. They’re almost inseparable. As for the older kid, she got to chose her room herself. I told her two possible layouts of how we could arrange the rooms and one being she got the large bedroom and we remade the livingroom into a bedroom for the boys, and as for a livingroom/where I sleep, we used the little guestroom or we let her have the small bedroom and the boys the large bedroom. She chose the small bedroom for herself, because that room had the balcony. Yep, she sacrificed room area in favour for a balcony. She has room enough for a bed, a chest of drawers, a bookcase and her desk, with still enough floorspace to clutter with clothes, but not much else. However, when spring and summer comes along, I bet that balcony is going to get so much use it more than enough compensates for the smaller room.
As for me, I’m yet again stuck at sleeping on the livingroom. Not that I mind, the size of my sleeping area isn’t that important to me, I could just as well sleep in a cupboard as well as in a gym-hall for all I care. But as it stands now, my bed is basically being used as a couch during daytime, which isn’t exactly my favourite thing though. But I manage.
At the moment, I’m in rehab – I guess you could call it a medical rehab, not an addiction problem rehab – and I hope this disease thing get over soon. Every step of this rehab is closed though, so for now I have to keep waiting something out. It’s basically the story of my life. Hopefully this thing gets over with and I can go to something similar to work training, and it’s supposed to be something easy to do for 8h each day. I’ve been a stay-at-home dad for way too long to get thrown into a fullblown work schedule for 8-9h every day, so we’re going to ease it in a bit. At first, I might just go for ~3h, one day a week, but I hope that it’ll increase to something easier for a full workday every day of the week. Partially because that will prove that I’m capable of keeping up a full work week, but also because if I’m occupied with work training for a full work week, my boys kindergarten times will go up from 3h a day, 15h a week, to full days at kindergarten, including the actual time I spend at work, but also the time I have to spend on travel between my work training and kindergarten to drop them off/pick them up.
They really need the time spent with other kids.
So, all in all, things really are looking up from here. I actually feel great.