Kadiera's Playground Cute but Evil - it averages out

I've been rather thinky again here of late. I've got most of a post written on the nature of gift giving, and the interesting things I noticed about the gifts we got for Alexander.

But tonight I'm being selfish. This post is mostly about me.

The question I get asked most often these days is, "how's the baby?" which is followed in frequency by "is the baby home yet?" And the reactions I get to my answers frequently suggest that the person asking didn't actually want to know the answer, they were just asking to be polite.

A few people have said, "if you need anything, let me know." But the truth, as I explained to one friend, is that I often don't know what we need - that's too complex a question.

The whole situation is overwhelming, and obviously we are making it work somehow, so it's not like there's some big thing that would make life functional here. What I need is for Alex to be ok, and to come home, and this is not something anyone can fix.

Furthermore, the offer is too vague. The saying is that friends help you move and good friends help you move bodies, but I've learned that some friends tell you they'll help you move, show up to carry one light box to the truck, and then sit around drinking the beer you offered them for their help while you carry out the furniture. And it's nearly impossible for me to judge under these circumstances what sort of friend you're offering to be. If I called and said, hey, can you bring us dinner some night this week, is that something that you'd do? What if I call at three in the morning because I need someone to talk to? What if I want someone to keep me company at the hospital, or to convince me to go out and do something completely non-baby related?

It's hard to know what things would make this *easier* for us. The biggest thing is time - between work and sleep and a couple hours at the hospital, there just isn't time for anything else most days.

The things we struggle with as a family are things like managing to make dinner instead of just grabbing a bite on the way to the hospital and making sure groceries get bought and the laundry gets done (and that's not counting all of Alexander's clothes and sheets and diapers that need to be washed before he gets home), and the litter boxes get cleaned.

Besides laundry, there's a whole list of Alex-related stuff to be done that we haven't found time for yet, like cleaning the carpet in our room where the crib will go, and putting that together, attempting to install the carseat in the car so we know whether or not it works, and building the computer for the baby monitor and getting that all working.

Things that *I* struggle with specifically are a little harder to define. But I need to have a bit more of a social life, and the only people who've tried to help on that front want to just call and have me drop everything to hang out *right now* - and that generally doesn't work, particularly on weeknights.

Anyways. Seriously, if you want to help, make suggestions, or ask questions, or whatever. Because I'm really not up to sorting through the things that ought to be done, then sorting through the people who've said they want to help, and trying to make matches.