For the third or fourth morning in a row, I’m the only one awake at the crack of dawn. I’m exhausted and wish I could sleep, but I do love that moment of peace and solitude – even knowing an afternoon crash is imminent.

Estelle the au pair joined our family on Wednesday. I was a nervous wreck over bringing a stranger to live with us, but even in this short time frame I feel reassured. She’s fun, great with kids (ours and everybody else’s!), can hang with us or on her own, is flexible – I’ve been shocked at how helpful that third set of hands can be when wrangling kids, gear and dinner.

As always, our good intentions went wildly awry. We went to meet her at the airport, but didn’t recognize her in glasses. We planned a nice welcome dinner, but instead watched our steaming food cool as we were accosted by a nice but overly chatty AT&T worker selling us a service plan – while Estelle played with the kids for an hour and a half! We ran out to do a few quick errands and it turned into an all-day grocery/bike stores (she got my old bike and I upgraded early)/dry cleaning/ etc extravaganza! By the time we got to our zoo trip Friday, I think everyone was frazzled.

Still, the whole experience made us laugh. It seems we have the best luck in the world the second time around! Dave and I met twice, but only worked as a couple the second round. This fairy tale is my second marriage, and it’s a delight. We tried to have a family through in vitro, but adoption was clearly a better option! And our family is
Estelle’s second placement in a month; her first family wasn’t a good fit.

Having so many wonderful second round successes has been a great lesson to my impatient self. It’s so easy to be frustrated when you carefully plan out what your perfect answer should be only to inexorably turn a different direction. Still, when it’s this great, how upset can ya be?

So we’re settling in even more quickly than we realized we could. Estelle is fantastic and our little leap of faith is paying off in spades. It’s going to be a great year, and my stress level has already abated dramatically. 🙂