Year: 2013

Jeremy shaved his goatee today. I don’t recognize him. If he passed me at the mall or at the airport, I would not give him a 2nd look.  I can’t stop staring at his face!  The general consensus is that he looks younger without the facial hair.

Vince made his own biscuits today.  He has some leftover chicken pot pie from my mom’s birthday party – he had eaten all the biscuits that were on top when the dish came to the table, but there was a good deal of the pot pie innards left and he wanted to have biscuits with them.  So a little measuring, a little kneading and voila! yummy biscuits.  The following photo may or may not have been a reenactment.  I try to discourage reenactments in my photos, but sometimes my preferences are not adhered to.

The final product:

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I’m excited about Thanksgiving – we  are hosting this year – so far the count is 35 people.  We’ve rented extra tables, chairs and plates.  Two turkeys are going to be delivered by our milkman on Tuesday.  We will even have an extra visiting dog (we thought we’d have 2 extra dogs, but alas, one of the dogs is not allowed on Amtrak). And I get to hang out with my little brother for a few days!  So excited to talk to him about his latest dating adventures.  I’m so happy that I got married before the internet was invented (not exactly true, but almost true) – it all seems so much more complicated now; he tells me about all the latest dating apps where you can trade and rate prospective dates among your Facebook pals and you have 24 hours to decide whether or not you want to go out on a date.

In our last conversation, we discussed how young of a woman he could date without being it being totally gross.  Of course, there is the standard equation – “half your age + 7” – which would be 25.5 for Donald.  I guess lately he’s been set up with 23 year-olds which Donald reports is really, really weird (I think for both parties).

He’s also suppose to install this new-fangled thermostat in the house which you can control via the web and will learn over time your heating/cooling preferences – it’s suppose to save us $.  I’m not sure I believe it, but it looks really slick.  He gave it to me for my birthday – so that was months ago – it’s still sitting shrink-wrapped on my desk awaiting deployment.

Celebrated my mom’s 72nd birthday at our go-to celebration place, Founding Farmers.  I’m so please that, for at least 6 months out of the year, I live so close to my parents that we can celebrate together like this. 

We ordered way too much food and drink.  Lots of it is now sitting in the fridge waiting to become my lunch – I love leftovers.

Vince is reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle for English class (his edition has a picture of a wind-swept girl looking wistfully off into the distance on the front cover which I don’t think makes it very inspiring for middle-school-aged boys to read the book). We’ve taken to reading the books he’s been assigned with him to help out with the tricky words and to work through some sentences he may not understand, he’s not the quickest reader and he has a touch of dyslexia – same as Jeremy.   I did this for him for his previous book – Tuck Everlasting.  Jeremy’s taken over for this book.  He’s a little behind on the reading (isn’t everyone always behind on the reading?) so this photo was taken at 9:45 pm, far past his regular bedtime.

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Girls make the best engineers.  After a lifetime of being in male-dominated classrooms, it’s quite an experience to be in nursing school. 

Someday I will tire of using these photo filters on flickr, but right now they amuse me.  It’s been beautiful these past few days – especially Monday when the temps flirted with the 70s.  Ruby certainly enjoyed her mid-day walk.

I went to a few study sessions at school today – normally I skip these in favor of doing my regular job which – you know – pays my mortgage, but there is an exam tomorrow which I needed some insight on, so I went to the study sessions and now I’m skipping class to get back to work in a few minutes. 

I am trying to juggle a lot of things and when I actually say them all aloud to interested parties, it seems really crazy – but I’ll let you in on my secret – I’ve really lowered my standards.  So I’m not doing as well as I’d like in school, nor am I meeting my usual production levels at work, nor am I micromanaging my children’s social and academic life and the laundry is never folded (although it might never have been folded promptly even when I was doing much less) and so everything is a little at loose ends. 

I’m really looking forward to Dec 15 when the semester is over and I’ll get 3-4 weeks of downtime. 

Look at this handwriting!  So beautiful.  I’m a little jealous.

We’ve been meaning to take the kids to Penang in Bethesda because it has all the dishes we loved to eat when we were living in Singapore.  When I ask Vince about his memories of Singapore, it’s clear he still has a bunch, but many things he can’t remember anymore.  It’s hard to remember things that happened to you when you were 3 or 4 years old. 

We went to Penang to celebrate Vince being on the honor roll this past quarter.  It’s been a hard first quarter of middle school for him – the amount of schoolwork that he needs to do has really been overwhelming and it takes up a lot of his time.  There have been tears and less time with his pals just goofing around.