stamp that birthday as successful

So boyfriend's birthday was a success.  :-)  I met him for dinner on Friday along with his daughter, J.  The company was good and he seemed happy to have us both there, as we are most weekends! I let the restaurant know it was his birthday, so he got a birthday brownie sundae, but sadly they don't sing to birthday patrons there.  Too bad.  He did get to blow out a  candle, though!

Back at his house he opened up his gifts, which he really seemed to enjoy.  He's super excited to use the wok and is already perusing recipes and reading about how to season it properly.  Add it to our future kitchen adventures.  He also liked the T-shirt, the kitchen gadgets and had a childlike moment of joy upon receiving the Mario Kart happy meal toys LOL.

Earlier in the week on Wednesday night we very impulsively decided to take a tiny trip to Ocean City, MD to celebrate his b-day weekend.  We booked the hotel room and let J know of our plans.  We headed out Saturday morning for the drive and went straight to the beach.  We spent our afternoon lounging in the sand, enjoying the gorgeous weather and playing in the ocean.  We lucked out and got a really fantastic parking spot right by the beach, too.

After beach time we checked into our hotel and everyone got cleaned up and showered.  We then headed back to the beach, this time to the Boardwalk area.  We walked the full length of the Boardwalk, people watching, going into some shops, buying fudge (me!).  We had dinner at a restaurant along the Boardwalk where we got to sit outside and watch a supremely gorgeous sunset as we ate.  The weather was superb and it was really just a lovely evening.

We headed back to the DC area Sunday morning and enjoyed the rest of the day at BF's house.  We grilled burgers and all just hung out until J got picked up by her mom.  We got a couple of hours of solo time to spend together before I made the trek back to my house that evening.  Overall it was a great weekend and BF thanked me for making it so, and for including J in our celebratory plans.

It's interesting because so often, it's surprising to me how easily I've acclimated to dating someone with a kid. I love J-she's bright, well-spoken and has a great sense of humor.  I actually feel like she reminds me a lot of myself at that age in some ways----she's so precocious and funny.  In other ways she's an entirely different person than me in that she's self-possessed, confident and decidedly not shy.  I was very quiet at that age except with my very close friends, and you couldn't have paid me to get on stage in front of any size of group.  Bottom line is that I really enjoy her and I think having me around on her weekends with her dad is actually something she enjoys.  He bothers her a little less when I'm there (though not a ton less!) and I think activities and even cooking adventures are more fun with the three of us.  I'm not there all the time when she is, but quite often, and she seems to really enjoy chatting with me at times.

However, there are other times when I realize what a foreign thing this really is to me.  For many months, as a result of her play and then just various other social calendar items, he would have periodic weekends where he didn't have her at all.  They were flukes, but they happened rather frequently for awhile.  Now she's off school for the summer and her schedule is a lot easier, and as a result, there haven't been any weekends off in awhile.  Technically his schedule with her is supposed to be alternating full weekends and half weekends.  At this moment, we just had a full weekend and I think we're on the verge of a second full weekend.

It's hard.  I love having her around, and I know he loves it.  But our weekends are definitely very different when she's not there.  We do what we want instead of 98% of the time struggling to figure out what she wants to do and doing that.  She's a teenager so she's got her moments of being difficult, in that she will gladly groan about certain activities, but has no better ideas of what to do.  She'd be happy just staying at home and playing on her various devices or watching a movie or playing some Mario game and never leaving the house, ha!

Besides that, there's another aspect to this whole dynamic, and I have no idea if this is normal or not, as I've never dealt with it.  The thing is that thus far, after 6+ months and me being around too many weekends to count off the top of my head while J is there, BF and I do not get to do much more than kiss or make out for a few minutes in the morning.  I don't know if it's a conscious decision on his part, but it's the reality of things so far.

I've not said anything until this point because I thought maybe he just needed to get used to all three of us being there together a lot, and getting her used to me being around and being okay with me.  But she's used to me, she likes me, I like her, we're good.  And most often when we go to bed she's two floors down watching Netflix/on the computer/playing video games/chatting with her friends.  She tends to go to bed at least two hours after we retire upstairs.

The thing is, though....I only see him once during the week, and it's a weeknight, and i don't get home until nearly 6:30, and we go to bed around 11.  And lately she's there every weekend, the full weekend.  If he's uncomfortable being physically intimate with me in any way while she's in the house even after six months, and if that's some stance that he has taken for some reason, that's going to be a real challenge for me.  It bums me out to not have the option to be close to my boyfriend when he's RIGHT THERE.

I'm not asking him to lock himself in the bedroom with me for two hours while she's awake.  I'm not asking for wild escapades, walls shaking, loud, obnoxious displays of affection.  I just don't think it's hugely unreasonable to think that once we've gone to bed, and if we're cognizant of the fact that we're not alone, that we should be able to take advantage of that particular alone time.  Between our differing bed times and our hugely differing waking times (she sleeps until AT LEAST 10:30 every morning, usually later), there's plenty of time for BF and I to spend together without anyone being the wiser.

I mean, come on, she's almost 14.  She's not stupid, she knows what's happening as a general rule.  She surely has no desire to have it confirmed, but there's no need for it to go that far.  I just don't want to have to stick around until 5 pm every Sunday to have any solo time with my BF when I only see him once during the week otherwise.

It's a weird situation, and it's totally new to me.  I don't know if this is even a specific choice he's made, or if it's just something he hasn't dealt with since she has been older and more aware.  That's wholly possible, and I get it, I do.  But at a certain point I guess I just thought he would relax about it.  Couples with kids do this in their daily lives, and no one is emotionally scarred.  Honestly, J seeing her dad in a happy, affectionate (to a reasonable degree) relationship is probably a good thing for her.  Her parents have never been together, and her mom's bf sounds like he is an on/off situation.

Again, I'm not in any way saying that J should be privy at all to what we do behind closed doors.  I'm just saying that I don't think that the fact that she's in the house should mean that we are banned from anything more than innocuous kissing.  Am I way off base her?

I HAVE NO IDEA.  :-p

All I know is that I love him, I'm very attracted to him, I like feeling close to him.  Right now I feel like I'm grabbing the time when I can find it, and there aren't a ton of choices.  I find myself checking the calendar and wondering how many days it is until our Outer Banks vacation when it will just be the two of us for seven days, LOL.  Worst of all, I find myself wishing that just occasionally, J would have more plans that precluded her from spending a full weekend at BF's house, and I feel super guilty about that!  Even if we could just manage to get back to the supposed real schedule, wherein every other weekend she leaves Saturday at 5pm, I could work with that if he still hasn't loosened up about things.

In the end, I guess I'm just hoping that eventually BF will relax, and that he'll realize that we can sneak those moments when she is around, and the world won't grind to a halt as a result.  :-)  I feel like that HAS to happen eventually, right???  FINGERS CROSSED.

Patience is a virtue, blah blah blah.  :-)