Author: Doris

It’s been a weekend full of lab values and medication names.  I’m hunkered down in Edda’s room and I moved my sewing machine off of my craft table and replaced it with a calculator, laptop and lots of scratch paper.  Edda is here with me watching TV.  Maxi is also here on the couch.  We are a study-cram team!  I wish I had a bag of chips to eat.  It’s also almost 3pm and we are all still in our pajamas.

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Vince called this morning from Japan.  He’s with Donald in their little hotel room in Tokyo and everything is well.  He had a great time in China.  He longs for dairy.  Of the camp participants, a few people are staying in Guilin to continue the program, one person is going to Beijing, two people are headed home and Vince headed to Tokyo. He can really do it: he can go through foreign airports & customs, haggle with vendors in another language, budget some money, be friends with girls, figure out how to get cold medicine in a different country & live with another family.

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Jeremy did take me out on a date last night.  We rarely go out on Saturday nights because I’m loathe to ask Edda’s helpers to work weekend nights because they are all young and I feel like those nights belong to them.  When we do go out, we’ll usually go out on Tues, Wed or Thursday, but lately we haven’t been even going out those nights because usually something has happened during the week that makes the designated “date night” seem like too much trouble or, more likely, we’d both just rather have dinner at home with the kids.

But this weekend, Adriana volunteered (or strongly suggested she wanted to work on Sat night) and we took her up on it.  There was never a crystallized moment in the past decade or so that I suddenly realized that I would be giving up going out on Saturday nights with my husband (I do often go out on Sat nights with girlfriends) for much of my adult life, so I never had the chance to really mourn it, and also, it’s such a small thing – a little luxury even that how could one feel badly about not having when there are bigger and sadder things to fret about giving up? But yesterday’s date was so much fun.  I can’t decide if it was funner because I so rarely get to do it, so if I could do it more often, it would lose its fun-ness quickly or if it was fun because it was just so much fun and I could do it every weekend for the rest of my life.  The movie (The Big Sick) was great (highly recommended!  go see it!) , the dinner was cheap and quick at Chopt and Jeremy told me all about biking and the bag he covets from some German company that he showed me at REI.  But besides hanging out with Jeremy, I re-remembered how fun a weekend summer night outside in a bustling downtown can be, women wearing tank tops and flowing dresses, music & dining outside, a full theatre with a recently opened movie full of laughter, the sun setting after a hot day, the temperature and humidity having done their work in the early morning and mid day now easing into a comfortable chair and relaxing a bit, a bit of sangria, just enough to loosen anxieties and worries (one glass for me) and that’s it.  Fun.

And finally, of course, ice cream.

Jeremy is getting ready to go on his week-long biking trip at the end of July.  It’s a supported ride, meaning that they’ll take your stuff in a van/car/bus as you ride and bring it to where you’ll camp for the night.  This means that Jeremy is packing for comfort and not weight.  There’ll be a roomy tent and a heavy cot to lift the middle-aged back up off the ground.  They’ll provide food & entertainment too.  He was going to go with his friend Ben, but Ben got a new job that starts next week and couldn’t really ask to take his 2nd week off of work to go bike riding.  So Jeremy is going to go by himself.  He was thinking of cancelling because now he’s friendless on this bike trip, but inspired by Vince’s summer camp experience where we sent him friendless into a country halfway around the world, he decided that he loved biking enough to make some new friends.  We’ll see.  He just checked, they are suppose to ride 480 miles.  He’s trying to figure out a way to ride 20 more on his own to make it an even 500 miles.

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I’m studying this weekend for the nursing boards.  My exam is next Tues.  There is a practice app I’m using to study, but I can tell I’m not really studying.  It all feels a little pointless as I have no job, but I’m trying to be chipper about memorizing a lot of lab values and medication names and side effects.  It’s harder for me to memorize these days, both hindered by my aging brain and also my sense of un-urgency and lazy summer days.

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Jeremy is taking me out on a date on Saturday.  It has been a million years since we’ve gone out on Saturday night from the house.  We’ll do the classic dinner & movie.  The Big Sick, I think!

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We texted Vince tonight.  China was so fun, he reports, but he’s getting over a cold right now.  He’s ready to travel back with the group of girls to go to Guangzhou for one more day of sightseeing and shopping and then on to Tokyo where he’ll meet up with the coolest uncle ever who took a whole week off of work and purchased a week of unlimited wifi hotspot on his phone so they will have excellent service all over.  Watch out owl/cat cafes & capsule hotels & bullet trains – Vince & Donald are headed your way.

Edda’s spending her days with her counselor, Aurora, at Camp JCC.  Aurora is the daughter of a former coworker of Jeremy’s, so Aurora has been to our house for Edda’s birthday pancake breakfast and we’ve been to parties that her parents have thrown.  Aurora and Edda just happened to be matched up with each other this summer.  I didn’t recognize her at first!  I see her only once a year, and I usually concentrate on her parents and everyone changes so quickly when they are teenagers.  So far so good.  They both seem very happy.  Camp can be hard for both Edda and her counselor.  Edda (I think) is a reluctant summer camper.  She likes air conditioning.  She dislikes hot weather and sports with balls.

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This past week’s trip to Long Island and Maine made me realize how hard it can be to manage Edda in unfamiliar places.  I can care for Edda completely and with relative ease in our house and going to places such as Target, movies, grocery stores.  But once we start visiting other people’s houses, it gets really tricky.  When we were at Alan’s house on Long Island, we didn’t shower Edda even once because there really wasn’t a walk-in shower.  While were were at Julia’s house, I showered Edda only when Jeremy was around because I could walk into the shower with Edda and wash her and then hand her off to a dry Jeremy waiting in the bathroom.  We were fortunate that in both places, there were bedrooms on the first floor of the houses.  In Maine, Jeremy would go on a long bike ride and I’d think, oh!  I could go get some groceries or toiletries in town, but there were five steps from the elevated porch to the ground and I didn’t think I could manage to get Edda down them myself.  I couldn’t ask our host who is into her seventh decade to help.  I guess I could have gone next door to ask our host’s niece and nephew-in-law, but I had just met them and I can be shy about these things (actually I know people will jump up and help when directly asked). So we just sat on the porch until Jeremy came home.  Jeremy acts very confident when easing Edda down the stairs, singing to her, or talking to her in a happy voice while Edda awkwardly bends her knees to go down each step.  But when I told him about my fear of going down the steps towards the end of the trip, he admitted that he felt pretty precarious too.  He can’t see his feet or the steps or hold the handrails.  And his feet are always entangled in Edda’s feet as they go down the steps.  I’m not quite sure how this crept up on me, I think we haven’t traveled with Edda in this way for a while (hotels are easier and you can ask for an accessible room).  Thank goodness Edda is done growing.  With her spine fused, I think she’s at her max height and max weight.

Well this has been a week back to routine except that since Vince is still out of town, the house is much, much cleaner & quieter.  Edda has camp all week, we have childcare at the beginning and end of the day – so this marks the first week since Edda’s surgery that I’ve been back at work full time.  And not unexpectedly, I’m a little blue.  I applied for only one nursing job that I thought for sure I’d get, and I didn’t get it.  Also, a visit to the gyn early in the week confirmed my segue into perimenopause as my estrogen levels have started to dip.  Ack.  Anyways, it’s all fine, of course.  When I got my period in middle school I couldn’t believe then that I had to put up with it for decades (into the 2000s!) and now that it’s about to disappear in the next half decade or so, I’m getting all nostalgic.

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Kitachi’s birthday is on Friday, but she’s working only tonight and tomorrow night this week.  Jeremy’s out tomorrow night, so tonight was the night to celebrate!  We made her favorite dinner – tacos and had a brownie cheesecake.  Yummy.  Kitachi is moving to Texas in a few weeks, she’s been with us for over two years now.   We’ll miss her a bunch.  I’m always both happy and sad when our care providers move on…I know they gotta do other things, but they’ve become an extension of our family.   Sometimes I think they know Edda better than I know Edda.  Maybe Edda lets them in on her little secrets that she doesn’t tell me.

Jeremy wore a nice purple tie to work today!

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OK, one last bit about vacation…thank you to Julia who let us spend a week at her house!  It was wonderful to meet her sister, Liz.  We got a group photo at the end of the week, but I’m still learning to use my new camera, so I mistakenly got a fun series of photos of us trying to get the group photo.

Let’s finish off this vacation in this blog entry.  Vacation pictures are mainly fun for the people who went on vacation, I think they make for boring blogging.

Jeremy biked.  A lot.  He biked 300 miles while we were on vacation.  He’s a little obsessed (as soon as we arrived at home, he spent $30 to get access to live streaming of the Tour de France and started watching that all day on Sunday giving me the blow by blow.  Or should I say crash by crash?  It’s not really comforting to me, that TdF.).

There was ice cream almost every day.

There was a lot of napping.

And beautiful 5am sunrises.

Julia’s friend Kendall was there the first part of our vacation.

There was movie watching – Wonder Woman.  I’m very happy this movie did so well but I did have some issues with it.  Diana was a little too clueless at some points in the movie and more dewy eyed than I prefer for my female leads.  I liked Rey & Sarah Connor.  I want my female leads to have more engineering backgrounds, lol.

A game of corn hole.

Sunset.

Lobster.

We split the drive home into two days, stopping off at Bard for the night.  Neither Bob nor Katherine were at home, but Pip was.

And we took him to dinner with Emy and Seth.

Now we are home!

Can I tell you how awesome my friends are?  I wish I could show you all the things they are doing to protect Medicaid.  Soojung cleaned her whole house and then woke up at 2:30 am to do this video for WaPo:

Marta is going to rallies & speaking on the same panels as Pelosi, Booker & Hoyer, you can follow her on twitter: https://twitter.com/MartitaConner.

I was lucky to have dinner with them last night!

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After Vince had safely boarded his flight, we headed back to Alan’s where Jeremy went on a bike ride and us girls went with Alan to Home Depot to purchase an extension ladder.  I love the Home Depot.

Back at home, Hai made a delicious pho dinner.

Matt came over for dinner and sang Chinese opera (?!) for us.

The singing required a fan, which Viviane provided.

Starting at 2:30 am Sat morning, we started getting texts from Vince.  Our foray into WeChat somehow failed and we gave up on it.  Vince has been able to text us via regular texting and Facebook messenger (he’s also been calling using Facebook messenger).  His first text read “I’m in China” and his second text read “I have no service”.  Jeremy spent some time figuring out with T-mobile to remove some sort of block on the account.  Vince found his group & texted a photo and then I was relieved & tried to go back to sleep.  This is a photo from later in the week.  Yes, he’s the only boy!  A complicated double culture whammy – China & girls.

We left Port Jeff and headed to Maine first via a ferry.

And made it to Maine by dinnertime where Jeremy made this for dinner.

And we woke up to this:

And this is how we spent most of our vacation.

Poor Maxi, she couldn’t come on vacation with us.  She tried.  We really had to yank her out of the minivan.  Vince is now halfway through his summer camp in Guilin.  We had booked a flight out of JFK for him last Friday mainly because it was a way for him to get a direct flight to Guangzhou (where the camp started) instead of flying out of DC and switching planes again at JFK or Seoul or Tokyo.  Since we had to road trip to NYC, we decided to make a family vacation out of the whole thing.  We left Thursday mid-morning to go to Alan’s house in Long Island.

First stop: Burger King.  A surprising number of people had decided to wear the crowns at this rest stop.

The Long Island traffic was predictably slow so we didn’t make it to Alan’s house until 5pm.  The two Vs quickly picked up where they left off a few years ago playing this balancing game, though this time it didn’t seem to balance as well.

A quick swim at the beach after dinner.

After spending the night at Alan’s, we left Port Jeff early to get to the airport in case traffic slowed us down.

They didn’t let us go back with Vince, so he managed the all of security and check in and boarding.  For a moment he was all excited because he thought they had upgraded him to first class.  We were all excited for him!  But it turned out he was just in economy (+);  instead of 9 across, his section was 8 across.

Edda enjoyed her time at the airport.  She likes climate controlled places with lots of flat open areas.

There he goes!

The visa is secured, the money is exchanged, the Imodium is packed.  New wallet, new fanny pack, & new haircut.  He learned how to use a credit card & debit card all around town.  We watched all the orientation videos & downloaded texting apps which aren’t blocked.  All I’m hoping is that someone will pick him up at the Guangzhou airport at the appointed time/location.  Vince is like – what do I do at customs?  I’m going through that myself, right?  I have nothing to declare, right?  Yeah, sweetie, you have nothing to declare.  He seems mostly excited and not nervous. Kelly, his violin teacher, told him not to follow any strangers and I’m like, he’s gotta follow some strangers or else he’ll be stuck in the middle of a Chinese airport.  Then Vince suggested an amendment – I’ll only follow strangers if they happen to have the right T-shirt.  Go on your adventure-y adventure Vincie, but come back to me soon.

I’ve been in a funk for the past few days where everything is irritating for no reason.  I think I’ve been in the house too long, or the house is never empty with just me in it, or I’m not busy enough or just everything is actually very annoying.  Edda is doing so well (how can I really be annoyed when everything is going great!?), tolerating all the outings I can manage to take her out on including renewing my drivers license (I can still drive without my glasses even though I always wear my glasses) and my Goodwill drop off of bags and bags of decluttering.  The house is always bursting with crap.  Annoying crap.

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Thank you sherah, for your lovely gifts.

We were just thinking about the Green Mesquite where Ruby swallowed a whole rib in one big gulp back pre-Vince&Edda.

Damn, I miss that dog.  Vince will have to go to the GM someday.  <3