Full Life Circle

Emily’s POV.

We left a week later for our summer in Winnipeg. We drove, which, according to Abby, isn’t unusual for the guys and their families. It makes life easier when it comes to packing. You can bring a lot more things in a SUV than you can in three suitcases. However, it is a 13 hour drive without any stops. With a five and a half month old baby, it was not a simple ride. To top it off, Jon refused to let me help drive. So we had to stop every couple of hours to take care of Brooklyn and use the bathroom for both of us adults. Then we stopped about halfway to Winnipeg so that we could spend the night in a hotel.

Adjusting to life in Winnipeg wasn’t too difficult after I got the lay of the house. It was a grand house, right on a lake just outside of Winnipeg city limits. Five bedrooms, five baths, with a dining room, living room, family room, den, and four seasons room. The yard had plenty of room for a family to play and grow in.

Jon and I ended up spending most of the summer skirting around one another. He really seemed to take to heart that we weren’t going to try and act on our attraction towards one another until the end of summer. He went out on a date or two as a favor to his mom while we were in Winnipeg, but they were only two dates max. We never really talked about his dates, but I could read his face, it was too soon for one and for two, they weren’t people that he could see a future with. As a single dad, that was what he really needs to focus on.

Mrs. Toews, or as she insists I call her, Andre, has been a godsend while we have been up here too. Because she wasn’t around the first few months of Brooklyn’s life, she wanted to be around a lot once we got into Winnipeg. She insisted on taking Brooklyn off my hands almost every other day so that I could see the city and Canada.

So on days when the Toews grandparent duo had Brooklyn, Jon would work out early in the morning and then we would go out and see different parts of the city. Once or twice, I would go out on my own, but Jon almost always went with. One of my favorite spots in the city was the Art Gallery. It can’t rival the Chicago Art Institute, but it has some pretty impressive works of art. I even managed to drag Jon to the Canada’s Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Jon’s favorite was the Canadian Royal Mint tour that we went on mid-July. I thought it was great too, I had seen the US Mint when I was a little girl on a trip to Pennsylvania, but seeing foreign money being made was more interesting than I could have imagined.

These trips were interesting. We would almost always casually flirt, but it never went further than that. It became frustrating on the days when we took long trips, or tours where we had to be right on top of one another to see whatever it was for the day. I am so sexually wound-up, I’m positive that I would explode the second I started to make out with a man, let alone was seduced. And Jon is so good looking, he is hard to ignore.

When we were at the house, it was a little easier. For one, the house was big enough that I didn’t have to be around Jon if I chose not to. He was doing a lot of the parenting now that it was summer, so I let him do his thing. Second, for most nights, I would cook us dinner with fresh food from the farmer’s markets downtown. But there were some nights that Jon would grill food and we would invite his parents or his hometown friends over. Abby and Patrick would travel across the city once a week for dinner with us and we would do it the following night at their house. It was an easy routine.

I made friends with Jon’s hometown friends’ wives. They were so nice and didn’t act differently towards me as the nanny. It was easy to get along with them. When Jon and I weren’t out seeing the city or other parts of Canada when his parents took Brooklyn, I would meet up with either Caroline or Delaney. They were so nice, both newlyweds within the last year, and neither of them had children yet. They both adored Brooklyn and it made them want to have one of their own. But when we went out without the little girl, we didn’t talk about kids. We acted like the young, 23 to 26 year old women we were. Ones who didn’t know a professional hockey player or his cute little girl.

We would shop, get manicures and pedicures from the spa, see movies. We would talk about their husbands and of course, about Jon. But it was about Jon the man I was attracted to, not the training hockey Captain. But I always attempted to redirect the talk of men back to one of theirs. Caroline was married to Jon’s best man in his wedding to Ande, Jeff. While Delaney was married to Trent, who met Jon and Jeff when he was 12. The other two boys had known each other practically since diapers. But now the three are as thick as thieves, and they rival the bromance that Jon has with Kaner.

Abby was a little jealous that I was making friends with new people though. While we were in Chicago, I didn’t know anyone and the WAGs weren’t the easiest to get in with as a nanny. So Abby and I were always together. It was nice, reconnecting with my sister and nieces. But once I made friends with Caroline and Delaney, Abby felt personally stunned. I didn’t mean to ‘dump’ her, her words, but it kind of happened by accident. It’s just that the other women were more similar to me and the person I wanted to be for just a little while. At 23, I am raising another woman’s baby. Most 23 year olds are worried about finding a job out of college or finding a man to spend the rest of her life with. But me, I’ve skipped all of those so that I can raise Jon’s little girl. Abby and I are more similar when I want to be the ‘mother’ figure.