Winding Down To Christmas

We head into Thursday before Christmas weekend and needless to say I'm already 50% checked out of work mentally. Sometimes I would have to snap myself back into work mode when I see a chat from Eloisa or any of the other Directors, otherwise I was happy to simply cruise through the day. And I even started today with breakfast at iHOP. I figured I didn't know what would be happening Christmas weekend and so I might as well enjoy the moment with Johnnie with whatever we ended up doing today. And this morning that was him enjoying pancakes and bacon and sausage and me enjoying a nice spinach mushroom omelette. That's him in the pic drawing on the kid's menu BTW. And when we got home, I did my team meeting with the EHR Group and then no meeting with Dennis because I already emailed him the status report he needed from me and I was good to go for the rest of the day. I did crick my eye on emails and invites coming to my Inbox and I did have to answer a couple of quick questions from Eloisa but otherwise i spent the rest of the afternoon pretty much just doing WFH chill. And that also meant watching the latest episode of Willow on Disney+. In the meantime there were also arrangements I was trying to do for next week being that Johnnie and Lisa BOTH are not working the entire week. I pretty much got Johnnie into a routine of doing Prodigy English and Math, and then a video here and some exercise there. I note that I am still pretty much keeping up with my steps routine and then before I knew it, it was already 4 PM and it was time for Johnnie's Spanish class. It seemed like I had other stuff work-related to do too but I am not feeling overwhelmed at all. More like that tennis player who knows he's getting shots fired at him from different directions and he is still returning every single ball accurately and with relative ease. After the Spanish class, Johnnie requested that we get udon and rice+beef at Mitsuwa. We hadn't done that in a while too so I was happy to oblige. Besides, I was really getting tired of cooking and washing dishes every time we eat. Isn't that why you get to a certain level of living standard so you don't have to do that, at least not for every single meal? I was HAPPY to go out and get dinner. Johnnie did his udon and I did chicken katsu with rice and cabbage salad. Pretty good too and I shrugged off any annoyance that bubbled up when I found out not one restaurant would give you a cup of water. You had to buy a bottled water. How goofy is that?! Still a product of the pandemic? I suppose I'm just happy we get to go out and eat here almost like it was back to normal, noting that a year ago we had to have tags on our wrists so people would know we were vaccinated. I also note that we were talking about going back to the office then and then another variant hit and those talks died a very quick death. And here we are still working remotely a year later.  Anyway we went home and waited for Lisa to pick up Johnnie and Claire. I always get antsy when I'm in that zone of waiting for her to pick them up as opposed to knowing that they're staying the night or being alone after the hand-off. Uncertainty is what bothers me I suppose. And tonight Lisa waited until almost 8:30 and then told me she was feeling tired and feeling like she was getting sick again. Johnnie said we shouldn't bug her. It was decided that Johnnie and Claire would stay the night then. And I am 100% fine with that. I'm pretty sure johnnie didn't mind either. "I love you dad" I heard him say as I put him to bed. "I love you too Little Bug". A million times more.