Perfect day with Natali

The good thing about working as many nights as I do, is that I get a lot of weekdays off. I love those days.

On said days, I get up before anyone else to prepare breakfast; my monster commute has taught my body to be up at 6am, so sleeping till 7 is a luxury for me. On good days, I make pancakes and eggs; yesterday was a good day. We sit as a family and eat until Natali has to go to school.

On days when I'm at work, she bikes to school on her own. I have never been entirely comfortable with this; she goes through the hospital, where the rules of driving and yielding aren't exactly set in stone. So when I'm home, I bike with her to school before biking the Lorax over to his daycare.

I love riding through town in the morning, especially on a fall day like yesterday. I go through the old town, where cars are either discouraged or entirely banned. A few shopkeepers are setting up their wares and delivery trucks are idling on some of the main thoroughfares, but mostly the Lorax and I have city our humming selves. He points at sizeable cars and goes through a mini-seizure of excitement if he spots a semi truck or a bus.

Yesterday, the weather was perfectly crisp and clear. After dropping off the kids, I enjoyed my second breakfast (leftovers from the morning's feast) and took off on a two-hour run in the woods. Got back, looked at some work briefly and took a long nap.

The above describes many of my days off. I generally think of this time in our lives as a "rough patch", every day yearning for a better time. Surely, I will move on to different jobs at different hospitals and will one day wear a sports coat with gold buttons. But I may never have days off like these; crisp, cool fall days with the Girl and the kids in little Næstved.

And yesterday was even better than the average day off. The Girl was headed to Copenhagen for a 5K relay. The Lorax loves trains and came along for the trip, leaving Natti and me to enjoy a father-daughter afternoon evening. A perfect father-daughter evening consists of this:

- Getting her ears pierced. She has been begging to have this done for years, and this was the night. Boy, was she nervous beforehand and, boy, was she glowing and self-important when it was over. All night, I watched her smugly feel her earlobes, just to make sure the little diamond studs were still there.

- Renting Sunny With a Chance of Meatballs. It was ok.

- Eating huge greasy burgers from a little place we haven't gone to before. Eating them in front of the TV. Having so many fries that we didn't even fight over them.

- Presenting her with her new phone. The Girl destroys her phone every so often, so she will inherit Natali's old phone, while Natali gets this new one. This new phone is a smart phone-ish thing that didn't cost very much.

- After an evening like this, she will be eating out of my hand for days.