Fifteen days left, and I can already feel what we're about to leave behind.

Since I last wrote, part of why we're in #Nicaragua came more into focus, we're here in part for his abuela, who's sick, and this visit was always meant to include real time with her. But what I keep coming back to is him, and what this is teaching both of us.

He's sharing me differently than he's used to. Some hours I'm fully his, some hours I'm with her, some others I need to work, and he's had to learn to hold that gap without it breaking him. I see it in the small things, a longer hug when I come back, a "just five more minutes, papá," the quiet way he waits instead of demanding. He doesn't have words for "your time is divided now," but he's finding his own language for it anyway.

What strikes me is that he's not just enduring the wait, he's learning to wait. Waiting well is its own skill, one I don't think I taught him on purpose, but he's building it in real time, watching me split myself between him and her. I want to notice that out loud, because it's easy for that patience to get absorbed quietly into the noise of a busy trip instead of being named as the real thing it is.

There's plenty softening the edges of it too, the heavy rain, new bugs to chase, a dog that'll run with him for hours, fruit he's never tasted, being in his abuela's house instead of a hotel. The weight is there, but it's not sitting on him alone.

There's another layer I keep turning over. Life in a Nicaraguan toy runs on a different kind of time than #Dublin. Here, there's warmth, family folding you in, neighbors who show up without being asked. What there isn't, always, is infrastructure, the systems and predictability that let you actually use your time instead of improvising it. I miss that organization the way you miss a tool you didn't know you leaned on until it's gone.

It's an odd thing, wanting the closeness of one place and the structure of the other, knowing they rarely come packaged together. I don't think the answer is choosing one forever. I think it's noticing clearly what each gives, and what it costs to be far from either.

Fifteen days out, I'm not the same version of #parenting I was when this trip started. Watching him navigate this, and watching myself navigate more than I planned to, has rewritten a few things I thought I already understood.