“We survived another day.”
Those are the words my husband and I sometimes exchange at the end of a long weekend with our child—especially when neither of us is feeling 100%. We take turns. We recover. We’re always in some stage of recovery. Right now, I still can’t hear out of my right ear. I’ve finished my round of antibiotics and steroid ear drops, but the discomfort lingers (as I mentioned in my last post).
Keeping our home afloat—meals, laundry, unexpected messes, and the juggling of plans—takes effort. Our son is vibrant, curious, and endlessly entertaining. He’s the kind of child you can’t take your eyes off for too long—either he’s climbing something or figuring out how to dismantle it. We love him fiercely, but by bedtime, we are completely spent. The energy it takes to keep up with him is real.
Sometimes I wonder: Is it like this in other families? Are other parents constantly “on” like we are? Constantly entertaining, engaging, redirecting, explaining?
One thing we’ve chosen to be intentional about is screen time. We limit it to an hour of TV a day, though many days we skip it altogether. Both my husband and I grew up watching a lot of television, and looking back, I’m not sure it served us well. We’re trying to do things differently. We’re investing in presence—in play, in exploration, in creativity. We want our son to be curious about the world around him—not just the world inside a screen.
Finding Meaning in the Exhaustion
Some days are a blur. Some days we count down the minutes until bedtime. But woven through the fatigue and chaos is something beautiful: we’re shaping a life. We’re raising a human who laughs with his whole body, who notices the smallest bugs, who asks the biggest questions.
And at the end of the day, even when it feels like we barely made it, we hold onto each other and say, “We survived another day.” Not out of our defeat (and sometimes out of defeat)—but out of love. Out of awe. Out of a quiet knowing that these exhausting, imperfect, screen-light days are building something sacred.
