Month: August 2012

Jeremy is making his mark all over the place. Here he is quoted in our local paper: Here! And here he his quoted in Swedish: Here!

Our house is so quiet tonight. SeHyun, our sitter, is on vacation until tomorrow. We had been hosting an Israeli counselor for Edda and Vince’s camp for the past month, which was really nice, and she left for home today. And Vince left to visit Jeremy’s parents today – so it is just the three of us tonight (Jeremy, me and Edda) and, of course, the two dogs. Even though the house is relatively unoccupied, we are still busy today.

After dropping Vince off at BWI airport, we went to a party in Baltimore. It’s not always easy bringing Edda to a party – I really only tangentially know the host (he’s Jeremy’s former co-worker) so I didn’t know anyone there and no one knew us – but we settled Edda in the middle of the backyard with her little TV and a plate of chicken and we had a grand time – met lots of people, including many people who were astronomers – which was interesting to me.  We were the first to leave when Edda decided that she had had enough.  I have come to adjust my expectations when going to these social events with Edda, I thought we’d be lucky to last an hour or two, but we made it from about 3:30 to 7 pm, which is not bad.

It was the lawn Olympics – we (grown ups) had a balloon toss, an egg run, bocce ball. Mini-golf. All good fun.

We are saying goodbye to Shamrock (I always think that Edda rides Shamrock, although I think this photo is not actually Shamrock) – at least for now. We’ve been doing hippo therapy for at least 3 years now – but I’m hoping to switch over to other activities, adaptive soccer in the fall and maybe swimming (or maybe not). We’ll see, we’ll see.

Our annual block party this evening.

My statistics class is almost over. I can’t wait until it is over, as it is a summer course it meets every day for a couple of hours and although I liked it in the beginning, I’m now a little bit lost (OK, really a lot lost) and it is frustrating. I have some work to do to before the final next week. It may be because my philosophy is to only spend the time that I’m in class working on statistics which isn’t really working out that well because I’m not really understanding it the first go-round, maybe because I’m distracted (see grocery list on notes page).

So I’m playing around with Instagram which I really don’t like, but I’m trying it now (to keep me occupied during class).

So our IT infrastructure in the house is falling apart. All the computers are dying a slow death – viruses invade, children and guests download odd apps onto hard drives – someone drops a gob of jelly onto the keyboard rendering the “K” key permanently stuck. So I haven’t been able to download my regular camera photos. So iPhone photos will have to do. (I know, tragic).

Jeremy has been reading “Little Women” to Vince. Vince does not really like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson stories. He and Jeremy both enjoy kind-of old fashioned stories that don’t have much to do with magic or demons. They both loved The Penderwicks, Swiss Family Robinson and The Wind in the Willows. I was the one who suggested “Little Women” – Jeremy hadn’t read it either. I couldn’t believe it, Jo, Beth, Meg and Amy, where have you been all of Jeremy’s life!

I did have a hard copy, buy Jeremy found it free for the iPad, so he downloaded it and is reading it nightly (except for this week, the Olympics are on, so reading time is short). I was a little worried they wouldn’t finish it as the 2nd chapter in – Vince asked, “So when does something happen?”, but I think something did happen and they are enjoying the book together.

We are enjoying watching the Olympic Games – I had briefly thought that we should get cable for the month to get the live streaming, but in the end, broadcast NBC is good enough (both lazy and cheap) – all the Olympics that I can use. Jeremy and I were amusing ourselves in coming up with new Olympic sports that we could actually compete in, like “Middle-aged married bickering” or “Cutest muffin-top” or “Leaving cabinet doors open / leaving lights on / scattering wet towels all over the floor triathlon” – all good events that I think we’d do well in.

It has been a stressful summer, Edda has had many, many evenings spent like:

Crying, crying, crying, big unhappy tears. We’ve gone to many doctors and no firm conclusion about her unhappiness. Aside from Edda’s unhappiness herself, there is only so much unexplained crying that a person can take without losing her mind, so I’ve spent the summer slightly bonkers – but I think (knock on wood, keep fingers crossed) that we may be coming out of this summer funk. It’s been great just hearing her laugh again at her silly Dora videos that she’s seen ten million times.