Month: May 2018

Thursday night we headed into Bethesda to do a larger family celebration of Bette’s 80th birthday.  This was held at Mon Ami Gabi.  Vince was very excited because they serve steak and we very rarely have beef in the house.  We are a chicken, pork, fish house. 

The famous profiteroles. 

Edda loved her shrimp and polenta.  Recently some nights, she’s been a picky eater and not eating much of her dinner which is very unusual for her.

Jeremy and Christine (talking about Vince).

Friday morning started off very early with kittens.

I headed to Baltimore with Adriana’s family (Adriana is one of Edda’s weekday evening caregivers) to see her graduate summa cum laude from nursing school.  The ceremony was long.

We had lunch near the water where in an unusual move, I ordered at drink at 11 am.  Note: I had no alcohol at 7:30 pm the night before with the steak dinner, but happily ordered a mojito at 11 am with chips and guac.  Must be something about the guac.  Adriana’s family is lovely.  They like to rock climb and were giving me some tips.

Then I headed back home and took a quick nap and then packed up Edda and some stuff and headed to Virginia to meet Vickey’s new guinea hen.

Edda and I are sleeping over to wake up bright and early to celebrate the royal wedding.  We started celebrating by eating pie.

Edda’s first sleepover!  Kind of.  It feels that way.

Karuna came over for dinner, but we couldn’t convince her to join us for the sleepover or the wedding.  Boooo.

An actual Corner Market opened at the little strip mall 0.25 miles from the house!  We are very excited.  I went in there today and bought some fuzzy water.  Jeremy wanted to go after dinner and he bought some salad dressing.  They will also have a pharmacy there.  That’s exciting too!  These are the businesses I patronize at the little strip mall down the street: the vet, the Chinese food place, the Corner Market, the burger place, the ice cream place, the pizza place, the nail place and my dentist.  I think the only places left are the bank and the therapist.  Oh, and maybe the massage place.  I could add those places and then I’d be at 100%.  I love the little strip mall.  I’ve been going since I was a little kid!  There used to be a Safeway there and I remember shopping there as a kid.  My parents used the bank there.

Edda is graduating from middle school this year and transitioning to high school.  They must have taken the big, wide class photo a few weeks ago. I hadn’t heard about it because Edda tells me nothing, but it was just last week when I was rummaging through her backpack that I found the order form for the photo.   I ordered the photo because I like to suffer for no good reason. Now these photos always kind of kill me, a slash across my already broken heart, because no matter how well meaning everyone is, they are always a little off.  A reminder how it wasn’t suppose to be this way.  I’m generally OK with Edda being Edda, but there are moments when I’m taken aback and the breath kind of knocked out of me how much we’ve gone through.  I remember when Edda was first diagnosed and I was wild with grief and fear and anger that I told myself that I would give it five years and reassess the family.  If it was still terrible then, then I would put into action some drastic, irrational, emotional plan.  But we made it past those first five years and then the next five years.  I know that Rett girls know more than they let on, but I actually find much comfort in thinking that Edda doesn’t quite fully know (or at all) what she is missing.  I’m comforted that she is not in pain, she is generally insanely happy and knows that she is loved and loves the things that she gets to do and that (I think) does not constantly yearn for what she does not have.  I constantly yearn for what I do not have.  Somedays I can tamp it down a little and what I do not have is a chocolate chip cookie and other days (though much fewer now more than a decade removed from her diagnosis), especially when it comes to thinking about Edda, I think I’ve lost everything and yearn for all the things that Edda (and I) will never have. So above is her class photo, the only kiddo in a wheelchair, pretty much left center front in the photo.  It would have been nice to find a willing kid to stand next to her and have him or her stand up and help hold her up, but that’s hard to do in middle school.  Below is her elementary school photo which is better because she’s not in her wheelchair and they got her in a regular row of kids, but the two kids sitting next to her are leaning ever so slightly away from her.  I get it, I probably would have done the same thing.  Parents, if you ever want to make another parent’s heart sing, just ask your kid to fling their arm over the special needs kid in a casual, friendly side hug in the class photo and smile wide.  Such a small thing!  But really, really hard to do.

Tonight we had our first family meal on our newly refinished table.  Jeremy has some quibbles about it, some cross-grain sanding marks, some drip marks on the side, some tiny bubbles on the finish.  But I’m like – it’s fantastic!  I love it! Let’s eat!

Vince continues on his unending shoe collection.  One night of babysitting = a new pair of kicks.

My peonies are about to bloom.  But it’s suppose to rain this whole week, so they will bloom and then be pelted down by rain and then they will be gone.

Storms were forecasted to blow into DC between 6-8 pm.  Tornado warnings & derechos were expected.  I freaked out about the trees around the house.  We gathered everyone at home and when it seemed like the worst was coming, we sat down to dinner.

In the middle of the first floor away from all the windows.  Even though our beautiful table was completely done and ready to eat at.  Even though the storm was essentially a no-show.

I think my bad mood is weirdly linked to Mother’s Day.  Mother’s Day = complicated feelings.  I’m working through all that.  I’m not a super motherly mother, I did not grow up dreaming to be a mother above all else, but I’m very happy that I am a mother even though this whole mothering thing is way super complicated.  Isn’t it always?  Jeremy made me a bagel one-eyed-giant.  I had two of them.

I also got the dining room table refinished and back into the dining room today.

And I facetimed my own mother!

This is Vince driving his friend Sam to a party on Friday night.  We weren’t quite sure if on his learner’s permit he was allowed to drive non-family members.  Vince declared Sam his brother and off we went.

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Jeremy’s obsession with bike riding continues, to his chagrin, to escalate.  This month is bike-to-work month and he wants to win.  There is a guy at the Cambridge office who, for years, has biked to work – a total of 30 miles a day.  Jeremy can’t bike to work everyday, so to make the most of when he can bike to work, he does a round-about extend-o route.  Friday am, he left the house at 5:30 to ride 75 miles to work, did he include Virginia in this commute to work?  Maybe.  Is this kosher?  We spend a lot of time wondering if it’s in the spirit of the competition.  Meanwhile, he’s outgrown his weekend club rides now (they stop a lot and chat and get coffee at rest stops) and I told him to go join the racing team in the area.  Though, honestly, racing terrifies me.  There is a lot of crashing, I think. They meet on weeknight evenings at 5:30 way outside the Beltway.  I’m like – don’t these guys/gals/they have jobs?  They’d have to leave work at 4pm to get way out there.  And the descriptions are lovely – this is a drop ride, we go hard and fast, know your way around because if you get dropped, you’ll have to find your own way home.  Look, it’s so crazy now that his socks match his jersey.

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I’m still in a pissy mood.  I want to spend all day in bed watching Netflix.  I try to resist, but it’s hard.  Jeremy is trying to cheer me up, we went out to lunch.

Found a new bike shop in town where we looked at electric bikes and $6800 bikes.  OK, maybe he looked at the bikes while played Words with Friends on my phone.

at REI looking at biking accessories.

Then we went for ice cream.  Big storms are predicted for tonight.  Hopefully no trees fall on us.

This has been a terrible book year for me so far.  I don’t know why it is so hard for me to finish a book.  I have the library app on my phone, I’m constantly checking out books and then starting them and giving up on them 10 pages in.  I don’t think that it is the fault of the books.  Rather, I think it is the fault of my brain.  It’s flighty and perches on a branch for only a few minutes when what really needs to happen is for it to hunker down and roost for a couple of hours. 

When I was in Ann Arbor and Vickey was in Chicago in the final week of March, we both independently purchased this edition of Middlemarch.  I remember there were about 4 different versions of MM at the bookstore that I was at and I did spend a few minutes deciding which edition was going to allow me to finally reach the end of the story.  I was buying Middlemarch because I had recommended Silas Marner to Vickey a few weeks prior and she loved it and retold me the plot because even though I vividly recalled loving it, I had forgotten the whole plot of the book except for the part about gold at the bottom of a well. 

Vickey recently decided to give up on her neighborhood book club even though she loved cooking for it because they were constantly reading terrible books (well maybe not terrible books, just books that didn’t need to be book clubbed) all those books about orphans, or books about WWII or books about orphans & WWII or Wonder/A Wrinkle in Time or some random self help book. And I’ve been in a book slump, so we decided to start our own book club of two.  I immediately suggested Middlemarch.  She said – did you read the forward?  Let’s not read Middlemarch.  I think she’s right, we have to start the first month with some possibility of success.  We are reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.  We’ll see how it goes.

Adriana needed Tuesday night off, so Kitachi pinch hit for the night. Edda really loves all her caregivers and it’s always a treat when someone who isn’t a regular anymore comes by for an occasional night.  We all get to catch up.

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Today, I interviewed for a nursing job at H*ly Cr*ss.  It was a surprise interview because I stopped applying for jobs in January, but somehow my resume got forwarded to a hiring manager.  I went thinking I wouldn’t take it because I thought I was done with the idea of working in a hospital (working nights and weekends & Christmas or Thanksgiving), but this job is compelling in certain ways.  My nursing interviews are always so long because it always involves shadowing a nurse for about three hours and then another hour for the actual interview with the hiring manager.

After the interview, I headed downtown to celebrate Bette’s 80th birthday.  We had an all female party (both her daughter-in-laws and me, a niece-in-law).  When I told Jeremy we were going to Blue Duck Tavern, Jeremy said – it’s right by me! and I said – it’s all girls, you aren’t invited. 

A lovely lunch!  I think Bette was pleased.  I ordered my very own dessert which I never get to do!  Coconut tapioca, carrot cake, pineapple allspice sorbet, curried cashews and saffron.

I’m still slogging through my bad mood.  I did have a chance to vent to Vickey today who listened patiently to all my irrational thinking for 15 minutes long minutes without a single patronizing word at all and reassuringly told me that no, I was not a selfish unreasonable jerk (which is where this whole mood has taken me) and then gently redirected the conversation to her trip to the ER this weekend.  I was like – you let me yammer on for 15 minutes about my totally made up first world problems when you had a story about the ER?  She said – don’t worry!  Everyone is OK.  And yes, everyone is OK.  Well, except for kind of Jeremy and Vince who have seen my irrational & wild thinking up close.  I hope they are OK.  I’ve apologized a lot.  You know behavior patterns you have that you know are annoying or just poor choices and you know that you shouldn’t be doing it even as you are doing it and you can almost see yourself from above like on a home surveillance camera system and cringing at the sight of it and even though you promised yourself you wouldn’t do it again and yet, there you are, still doing it because you can’t possibly help yourself?  It’s been that kind of week.  And it’s only Monday.

Progress on the dining room table.  Now with the stain and one polyacrylic coat.  I totally said polyurethane before, but we are doing all water-based coatings so we don’t have to use all those solvents to clean up.  Two more PA coats and we are good to go for brunch.  It looks good.  I’m surprised.

Hmmm, what happened this weekend?  It’s hard to remember.  Jeremy got home on Friday afternoon and we both picked up Edda from her aftercare.  Sam, Vince’s friend, was over for dinner (pizza from Slice) and then we had a quiet evening.  I’ve been in a bad mood the past few days I’ve been trying to shake it.  I used to think that my bad moods were based on circumstances and the seventeen bad things happening around me, but I don’t believe that anymore.  Now I think of a bad mood as a cloudy day – something that blows in and out in no real predictable pattern.  Sometimes the cloudy day just stays for a day or two and other times it just stretches on for a long time.  When I’m in a bad mood, everything seems terrible and these terrible things still exist when I’m in a good mood but I don’t care so much about them them. 

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On Sat, Vince went to a girl’s birthday party.  The first one since he was about 5!  Interesting & exciting and no, they are just friends.

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This weekend we are taking care of finishing our dining room table.  We sanded it down three weeks before Thanksgiving hoping to serve turkey on it, but we missed that deadline and now are hoping to serve Mother’s Day brunch on it.  We were swamped before Thanksgiving (I think I fixed a toilet instead) and then the temperatures dipped and the stains/polyurethanes said not to apply it below 55 F.  Which meant that we were stuck with it in the garage all winter.

I think we (as a couple) can be paralyzed by overthinking tasks.  We needed to put a base coat on, a stain on and then the layers of polyurethane.  We kept looking at youtube channels and the instructions and then debating how long to wait between coats and whether we’d have time to do it between outings and Sunday night dinner and then I said – hey, I think we just have to do this because if we don’t do it now, then this will be stuck in the garage another six months and I need the garage back because we’ve been parking on the street since November which is a pain for all the caregivers and Edda who needed the garage to get out from the rain and snow under a protected roof and blah, blah, blah…  Anyways, we started to paint.  Hopefully ready in a few days.  I need to go to Home Depot tomorrow to buy a synthetic brush.

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Sunday night dinner!