Author: Doris

Happy birthday Jeremy!  It was a beautiful day today here in the DMV.  Jeremy’s ginger cake didn’t look perfect when I unsprung it from the springform pan, but it’s nothing a little sugar and sprinkles won’t fix.

A dinner of enchiladas, mexican rice & beans.   (Edda did not eat any of the dinner, rather, she had two helpings of the cake & ice cream.)

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Vince’s long awaited package of shirts from this particular brand – Supreme – came today.  He tells me that all the celebrities wear this brand of clothing and that it is super popular.

These are literally Hanes (you see the package says Hanes on it?) undershirts with a tiny, tiny, tiny Supreme logo printed on the front.  If you go to the Supreme web site, everything is sold out except for these undershirts.  Maybe they sell only undershirts and the rest of the web site is a sham.  Anyways, he loves them.  I know it’s ridiculous because it’s a stupid shirt, but there is a deep pleasure in giving my children exactly what they want.  To say yes when so often I say no.

Every year, there is something about school starting, our anniversary & our birthdays that brings about random arguments and serious discussions between me and Jeremy.  We are doing pretty well this year, I almost thought we would sail through the season, but alas, it was not to be.  I don’t want to make a big deal about it, because if it was a big deal, trust me, I would not be writing about it on the blog, but it is always interesting to me how our way of arguing and what we argue about changes over time and also remains so much the same.  This year, we argued about a certain approach to parenting which will require steady focus and attention and effort and Jeremy wants to take the lead because he thinks it would be a bad idea if I took the lead.  I generally agree with that assessment, but I’m skeptical of Jeremy’s follow-through ability.  Jeremy said it was unfair for me to already count his attempt as failing before he’s even started and that I needed to not wait on the sidelines until he failed (or had success, because he’s had many successes that I conveniently forget about) on the follow through, rather, I should support him in his attempt.  I did come around to this argument, I will support him in his position as the lead in this particular parenting endeavor.  This will not be easy for me as I have my own ideas about this, but I know that Jeremy disagrees with each one of my ideas and has a completely different approach.  I can see how his approach would work, it’s just not how I would do it.  We can’t spend the time arguing about the approach, we just need to do one and we’ll do Jeremy’s and I will support him 100%.

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One of our weird dynamics that brings encourages discontent is our feelings about birthdays and the timing of our birthdays.  (Do I write this blog post every year?, I think maybe I do.) Tomorrow is Jeremy’s birthday.  I’m not really a birthday person, I don’t think of my birthday as a particularly special day and I don’t really ask (or even really want) other people need to do anything for me on my birthday.  Jeremy likes celebrating on his birthday, but his birthday is a week ahead of mine.  So what happens is I forget to celebrate or downplay his birthday or just go out and buy him cookie and then a week later, my birthday comes around and I’m OK not celebrating because I didn’t celebrate Jeremy’s last week and I don’t care much, but he wants to celebrate mine because he likes birthdays but is resentful because the recent non-celebration of his birthday the week before is fresh in his mind.  So this year, I’m trying trying to make an extra effort to celebrate.  I’m making a ginger cake from scratch (even though Vickey, slightly doubtful of my baking skillz ever since the date cake fiasco, told me go to to Trader Joe’s to buy one – it’s really good!), I have gifts, I have a dinner idea.  It’ll be good.  He’ll be 49.

Vince got up at 6:30 am and got himself to school.  Excited about: a math teacher that juggles, a history teacher who has fluid seating, an English teacher who make everyone put their phone on a shelf, an organized Chinese teacher.  With him out of the house, I had a chance to speed clean his bedroom.  Disgusting.

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Maxi fell right back into the school year routine.  Looking out for Edda’s bus.

Same bus driver & aide, but brand new bus!  Edda’s the first kid to go up/down on the lift.  It has AC and everything.  Very nice.  The bus driver was super pleased since the last bus was a little flaky.  These buses all have cameras so you’ll get sent a ticket if you run the red flashing stop sign.

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.

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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.

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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):

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.