In Brief(ish)

So...Someone is moving out in the next week or two.

We're still together, still love each other, still want a life together.  His moving out won't change how we feel.  What it will do is give him some space of his own, space not full of noise, toys, cats, and mess.  Space where he can have silence, where things will be cleaned and arranged according to his whims, time, and efforts.  Space where things will stay precisely where he left them, not moved by toddler curiosity and hands, or cats, or my sporadic cleaning efforts.

That said, the move isn't by choice.  He would rather not have to pay rent and utilities and miss out on the day to day minutiae of our daughter's life.  He would rather not sleep alone at night.  It will be an odd sort of life we live, a stretched out family.  Luckily, he found a place withing easy walking or bicycling distance.  He'll take meals here and do his laundry, do yard work, tend the gardens.  His life is still here.  His address is all that will change...his address and maybe the things that have driven him to need his own place, things which I will maybe write about one day but not now, not when there's dinner to cook, children to bathe and settle in to beds, laundry to do, ants to vanquish from the kitchen, and a world of things to get ready.

I haven't mentioned it before now because it didn't seem entirely possible...but today he signed a lease, paid a deposit, found out about power and water.  Today it is real.