Year: 2017

Summer is over!  The kids are in school tomorrow, Vince – 10th grade, Edda – 8th grade.

I will post my handwritten Edda-care calendar here.  We had 4.5 people in rotation (I count Nat at 0.5 because she was slated to work, but didn’t end up working – but I knew she always had my back in case I needed her help).  Because Edda’s companions don’t work full time for us, they always have a more primary gig going on at the same time (and it’s summer, so they all had vacations & holidays), so it meant that I had to keep in the back of my mind all their other schedules so I knew who to call on on what days to pick up or drop off Edda or if the camp schedule changed.  I’m lucky to have all these people who know Edda and care for her so well and it’s what I wanted when we went off the au pair childcare route, but sometimes it’s a little crazy.

Vince has jet lagged himself the past week without leaving the time zone.  He went to bed at 2 am on Friday night and 5 am on Saturday night/Sunday morning.  Whaaa?!  He was asleep at noon on Sunday morning.  He’s going to have a tough time getting up at 6:30 tomorrow morning.  The rest of us aren’t that bad, but we all have been sleeping in until 7:30 am the last week.  I know 7:30 am doesn’t sound like “sleeping in”, but Edda’s bus comes to the house at 7:10 am.

Arietni joined Edda’s team this summer after Kitachi moved away.  We are looking forward to the school year!  Edda is happy in this picture, I just caught her at an awkward moment.

******

Jeremy is not feeling well.  We had to cancel some evening dinner plans.  Eliana (who was caring for Edda this week in the mornings) hadn’t been feeling well towards the end of the week, I’m hoping we don’t all go down.

I am slowly turning into my mother.  Not a terrible thing, for sure.  My mom is pretty cool.  In my middle age, I’m picking up hobbies that I know my mother also enjoys.  The quilting, for example.  But quilting is a regular hobby, lots of people quilt.  But the other, slightly odder, hobby that I’m trying to learn now is how to juggle & my mom is a pretty good juggler.  Today Vince and I facetimed mom with our progress and, though she hadn’t practiced in a while, she schooled us.  And then tried to coach us.  I’m not sure I want my mom as my juggling coach.  Or maybe that would be OK.

******

Jeremy made a delicious dinner tonight.

He has crazy arm veins.  I’m hoping he’ll let me practice on them when I’m learning to do IVs.

The house smells bad.  I think the outside temps dipped below the setting for the AC to kick on which then means that the humidity creeps up in the house which means that all the musty smells come out. Please someone save me.  I should go buy some Febreeze.  I should just turn the AC colder.  Let’s take a tour of what the house smells like (the internet does not have scratch and sniff, lucky for you. Soon, I’m sure.) :

The sweaty gym:

Old pee-filled diapers:

A teenage boy (he’s asleep in bed there, in all his unshowered glory):

******

Edda (and Adriana) went to the dentist today.  We had been so bad at brushing her teeth that the dentist put us on a 3-month checkup schedule.  I retrained everyone to brush and floss Edda’s teeth and today she said if we kept it up, we could go back to an every six month schedule.  Hooray!  I always bring someone to help me with Edda at the dentist.  Adriana held her head steady and held the bite stick in Edda’s mouth, I had Edda’s legs and hands and, boy, can that girl wrestle and flail around. We had to give a 2000 mg dose of amoxicillin prior to the appt to prevent infective endocarditis which she is more at risk for since the spinal fusion.

Bob came to town for one night to see Gene, so on Tues, we met his train at Union Station, had lunch with him at the Shake Shack (though he went to Chopt) and then drove him to Gene’s in Silver Spring.  Edda is the slowest eater in the Lee-Martin family, it puts her French fries in peril.  As everyone else finished their fries and burger, Edda still hadn’t started in on her fries.  As we chatted with Bob, I could see the boys just taking fries from Edda’s pile.  I shooed them away from her fries and she ate every last crunchy bit.

******

The start of school, our anniversary and our birthdays mean that there are a million boxes coming to the house.  Jeremy has decided this is the birthday for the bike power meter.  There are new shoes to be fitted into new pedals and buying, trying and returning.  Vince is obsessing over some branded shirts that he bought for the new school year.   He told me that he needed shirts and I corrected him and said that he wanted these shirts and he did not need any more shirts.  I swear, I hear him open/close the front door every hour checking if they have been delivered.  This morning, I woke up to find the front door wide open.

A quick 3-month-post surgery checkup for Edda.  Two x-rays: one front & one side.  Everything looks good: the screws are tight, the incision looks good, the curvy part he left at the bottom (unfused) looks like it’s stable and not curving further. Dr is optimistic that’ll stay steady as Edda’s head seems well centered above her spine.  Her splayed feet are OK, we’ll get new supports for her as the old ones are stretched out.  He’s not worried about them.  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo, i wish they all went so smoothly.

Edda seems to be telling us that she’s getting tired of the 10 movies that she has been watching for the last decade.  For ten years, we’ve had these movies on and she has generally been happy to watch them, pacing back and forth in front of the TV, laughing, sitting on the couch and getting up from the couch and laughing some more.  Now, when we have them on, she’ll wander all over the room, swing at stuff on the island and knock plates and cups to the floor, threaten to ignite the stove, hunt you down while you are on the computer or trying to cook or read or whatever and insist on getting a taste of what you are eating or just leaning into your body and hitting you on the head.  And she’s kind of slightly moaning all the time.  I’m so bored mom, I can just see her telling me.  So we keep trying new videos.  Today I tried Secret Life of Pets.  We sat together & I kind of liked the beginning.  Edda loved the beginning!  So much laughing and smiling, but then I had to let her be and go back to work and then within 10 minutes, there was a lot of moaning again.  Mom!  I hate this movie.  So we went back to one of her old movies and it was OK for the rest of the afternoon.  I have no idea.  This child is a mystery.

******

Jeremy broke his glasses this weekend, so he spent a big part of the day getting a new prescription for lenses and trying out a bunch of glasses.  It meant I got a lot of texts with Jeremy in a variety of very similar looking glasses.  This was at Warby Parker in Bethesda.

******

Our 19th anniversary is tomorrow.  We celebrated tonight at La Limena Grill on the pike.  Delicious Peruvian dishes – some with Chinese or Italian influences.

And then a walk.

We are so old.

He’s wearing the dorky yellow strap to keep his broken glasses on his head.  He wants you to know he’s picked out his shirt to match it.

I have been having trouble focusing on my Sunday long runs recently.  What should be a straightforward long run at a pace I’ve done a million times on a million weekends (7 miles @ 9 min)  has become a – not quite a struggle – but a bickering within myself in which the side that always argues to stop because I’m hot and tired has been winning.  I’ve been stopping a lot for really no good reason (you know when you are at work and working on something and being productive, and then you find yourself searching for the latest sale at Nordstrom or go looking for youtube vidoes on corgis or Trump’s latest tweets?  Same thing.  Why, why did you stop working?  Who knows. One just wanted to stop working.) and then I get mad at myself for stopping and then it turns into a thing where I’m like – omg, I can’t even do this long run, how am I ever going to (*insert ambitious project idea here*).  Paul suggested that I go run with a group and then that’ll help with the not stopping, but honestly, I like the time I spend running alone.  It can be complicated adding another person to the mix.    I get hung up on the pacing!  What happens if they are too fast? or too slow?   With some hesitation, I showed up to a (what was advertised as) a low-key long run group this morning and asked what the general workout was as various thin, youngish, fast-looking people started to gather around me.   The workout was 12 miles starting at 8:15 working down to 7:30 pace.  Hmmmm.  I can not do that.  Even though I did, in the end, find someone to run with, I’m not sure this particular running group is the right one for me.  Maybe.  Maybe the person I found to run with will run with me on our own.  She is a faster runner than me & older than me and told me I should focus on dropping my 5 mile pace to 7:30.  I told her I thought I’d need to up my mileage to at least 35-40 miles a week for that to happen, and she was like – you can do that.  sigh.

******

Edda and I spent the mid-day together working on the next quilt.

******

Vince came into the room at about noon and we FaceTimed my parents.  We also had a long discussion about the coming school year.  Vince wants an extension on curfew.  He doesn’t really have a true curfew, he has an electronic curfew of 9:30 and he can stay up as late as he wants without his phone/computer.  I’m hesitant to extend it because if we extend it to 10, it really would be relying on him to enforce it because by 10, I want to be asleep myself.  Last year, at 9:30, we collected his electronics and brought them to charge in our room.   If we extended the time, I see a few problems: I also don’t want to encourage last minute homework efforts at 10 pm.  Also, I really enjoyed collecting his computers at 9:30 because then he’d come into our room for 10-15 min and tell us about his day, things he found funny or things he’s worried about.  This is our time for private parent/son discussion and considerations.  This is not always possible at dinner (our other discussion time) because Edda’s there and usually a caregiver is there too – there is a lot of talking at dinner, but not necessarily a place for more heartfelt discussions.  I think this would disappear with the 10 pm electronic curfew.

******

Sunday night dinner!

Hamburgers!

Donald!

******

A trip to G-street fabric today.

Dreaming of the next quilt I’m going to make.  I’m looking only for the unloved, marked down fabrics.  The ones that are a gaudy color or odd pattern and then trying to make a beautiful quilt out of the misfits.  But I still couldn’t quite manage to figure out what exactly I’d do with  this print of delivery men.

*******

Jeremy is home!  And took over control of the cooking again.  Thank goodness.

“Jeremy went whale watching on his work trip,” I told Vickey.  “They went in kayaks and the whales almost ran into them.”  “What kind of whales were they?” she asked, “Orcas? Humpbacks?” “I dunno,” I replied, “but I’ll ask Jeremy.”

“So love, what kind of whales were they?  Vickey wants to know.  Orcas? Humpbacks?”, I asked Jeremy in the 15-minute window we had to talk that day in between teleconferences, meetings, meals, etc.  “I have no idea, they were whales and they were really close to us,” he replied.  “Well, go find out what kind of whales they were because Vickey wants to know.”

Jeremy never told me what kind of whales these were, but he sent these pictures.  Vickey took one look at them and said, “Oh my God, these photos are amazing.  I want to go whale watching in a kayak.”  And she decided that they were humpbacks.

The video shows how close they really were.

******

My boys are coming back to me as we speak (type).  Vince is coming in at ten tonight.  I’m picking up Jeremy tomorrow at the airport.  This week has been quiet and peaceful.  Edda had camp in the afternoons and that ended today.  Only one more week of summer with nothing scheduled for either kid (though Vince has a stack of summer packets he hasn’t yet looked at).  I had enough Edda-care before and after camp to allow me to work a full week, get some exercise, and clean/declutter the house a bit.  I cooked a nice dinner each night, I even had some vegetables.  I spent this evening working on my next quilt.  This one I’m stalling out on because it’s going to require a lot of hand sewing, but I got it going again.