Peace and Quiet is Suspicious

Sometimes I forget that parenting Noah is basically an Olympic sport that no one trained me for. Then a weekend like this shows up to remind me.

My husband’s grandmother was not doing well, so we packed up for a ten hour road trip to Kentucky. Last minute chaos, of course. Noah’s older sister could not go, so I made the executive decision to split the team and have Noah and Ilyia stay with their dad.

The car ride down? Suspiciously peaceful. No soundtrack of random noises. No sibling aggravation. No Noah staring out the window like a tiny philosopher who refuses to nap. Just…quiet. It felt illegal.

We stayed with family, who graciously opened their home to us. And for the first time in a long time, I slept in. Actually slept. No early morning patrol to see what Noah was into, where he was wandering, or what he had quietly decided to dismantle before breakfast.

I visited with family without scanning the room every thirty seconds. No mental checklist of: Is he naked? Is he outside? Is he bothering the neighbor’s animals? Is he gently or not so gently tormenting someone?

It was peaceful. Suspiciously, wonderfully peaceful.

Because traveling with Noah is not just packing a bag. It is packing awareness, strategy, and a constant low level sense of “what could go wrong next.”

On our last few trips, Noah has also decided to become a souvenir collector. Not the kind you pay for.

At Thanksgiving, he brought home my sister’s Patagonia sweatshirt. We did not realize until weeks later when he casually wore it like he had purchased it himself. Company logo and all.

Then in January, we visited friends in North Carolina. Their son had a model double decker bus from London. Not a toy. We said it many times. We hid it. We believed we had won.

We did not win.

I recently found that bus living its best life in Noah’s toy collection.

Do these things harm anyone? No. Do family and friends understand? Absolutely. Do I still worry? Also absolutely.

Because it is always a gamble. Will something go missing? Will something get broken? Will Noah decide today is the day he redecorates someone else’s house with chaos?

I love giving Noah new experiences. I want him to see the world, to travel, to be part of everything.

But weekends like this remind me just how much extra comes with that. The extra awareness. The extra planning. The extra mental load.

Around Noah, I am always on. Hyper aware of him and everything around him. Home and church feel easier because they are familiar. Everywhere else is a wild card.

And yet somehow, he still makes it memorable. Even if the memories occasionally involve stolen sweatshirts and international buses.

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