Author: Doris

For almost 15 years, I’ve kept this blog.  In the beginning, there were slews of other blogs to follow, many which revealed more than I reveal on this blog (though this blog does reveal a lot of stuff) and I loved, loved, loved them all.  I’m a sucker for personal, memoir, emotional stories.  Most of them were about motherhood, which was fine because I was learning to be a mother, it’s what I was interested was.  Then Facebook became a thing and then the blogs slowly died off, one by one and I was/am a lonely blogger.  All the blogs turned into “Five tips for a fabulous birthday” or “How to potty train your kid in 3 days”.  I felt like I was the last person holding a personal blog for the past 8 years.  But this week, I found them!  I FOUND THEM.  Tiny, intimate, long form blogs written by smart women – scientists, doctors, professors, mothers, wives where they comment on each other blogs in thoughtful and serious ways.  Talking about work struggles, marriage struggles, financial struggles, parenting struggles.  I’m no longer alone.  I’m not yet sure I get to reveal myself to them, I’m much less anonymous then they are, but I’ll lurk for a while and then decide.

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I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things which means figuring out how to repair Edda’s old wheelchair so we’ll have a back up wheelchair.

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Vince is still confusing me.  Does he know the math?  Yes.  Is he acing all his exams?  No.  It is a sign that I will never fully understand even the things I think I understand.  If you asked me, waaaaay back in 1998, when I agreed to forever link my life to my husband’s at the Caltech campus where we had met in a graduate level fluid dynamics class that neither of my future children would be able to slam dunk an algebra test in their sleep, I would have said that you were crazy.  Crazy.  It’s just how the universe fucks with you, no?  Anyways, after 8 or 12 weeks of painstakingly going over his homework nightly, I’ll just tell you that Vince is a writer.  He’s a creative writer.  Once you get past the spelling/capitalization mistakes, his stories are good.  You can tell that he’s thinking about character development, word choice, imagery, a cohesive theme.  He’s making interesting sentences, he’s thinking of plot.  He doesn’t like it though, he’s firmly in the math/science camp which I’m OK with because, you know, I’m practical.  Can you really make a living being a creative writer?  Much harder than being an engineer.  I’m gently asking him to read more fiction, but he resists.  I tell him his talent is as a writer, he’s like – I’m not going to be an author or anything – why bother?

Back to the grind, it was pouring rain here most of the day, so it wasn’t the best day ever weather-wise to haul ourselves out of bed earlier than usual.  During break, Edda was up every day (her usual) at 5, 5:30 am.  The grown-ups took turns getting up at 5, 5:30 am or luxuriously sleeping in until 7:30 (one day I slept in until 8 am (glorious!), but that turned around and bit me in the ass when I couldn’t fall asleep the next night).  Vince often didn’t come out of his room until noon.

Here’s Vince 5 minutes after he woke up and 5 minutes before getting into a car.  He came looking for me to sew a small hole in his sweatshirt.  I’m like, huh?  You gotta leave in 5 minutes and I’m in the middle of my most productive time at work (6:30 am – 8:30 am), you just gotta leave me alone.  And you’ve had that sweatshirt hole for at least a month.

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Jeremy sent Edda off to school in the new orange wheelchair and then did a bike workout in which he watched a video of some other person riding a bike (I found this odd).

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Gong-gong came by in the afternoon for Chinese lessons and he ate some of my pepper-jack cheese and didn’t ask me at all to buy outdated electronic equipment from Amazon.  (True story:  In the past week, I’ve ordered Dad a corded phone & a 1.44 MB floppy disk reader).

Gong gong also ordered Max around and gave her some treats.

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Edda had a nice day today, all smiles and laughs when she came home.  Jeremy made all grilled cheese sandwiches for us for dinner tonight.

Jeremy took some photos of me and a pug (Margaret) at last night’s family dinner.  I want nothing more in life (uh, I guess in death rather) to be reincarnated as a suburban dog.  I’d get to nap a lot, I’d get to eat a lot and people will love me for ME.  Even if I become deaf, hairless, bark at unseeable things incessantly and fart a lot.

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I’m slowly coming to the realization that I think I’m going to miss the Women’s March on the 21st.  I think it might be a big deal but we are suppose to be away on a big weekend get-away, just us grown-ups.  These weekend get-aways are not easily planned, I made child care arrangements way before the election completely forgetting about inauguration weekend, probably thinking then that it would be a NBD weekend, though if the whole thing had gone the other way, it totally would have been a Women’s March with a different tone.   As the Women’s March edges closer in the calendar, I’m hearing more & more chatter about marching in it from my various liberal media sources and then I think I should go, that I shouldn’t miss it.  Blah.

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Edda’s feet make me sad everyday.  I think this one, the right one, is deformed past pretending it’s not deformed or that it’ll get better or that it won’t get worse.  Flared out like a comma from the ankle. Poor thing.  Sometimes I’m overcome by panic that the foot will become deformed so much that she won’t be able to walk anymore.  Then I have to consciously release that panic before it possesses me with an unrelenting grip.  I made these beautiful feet (and spine) in my belly and now I’m powerless to watch it all fall apart in front of me.  Ah, Edda!  I’m trying.  I’m trying.

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My mom gave me this sweater for Christmas and I tried it on today.  I think I need to find an ice rink and learn to do a triple Salchow.

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Megan came by to visit in the afternoon.  She’s home for a bit from travels abroad.  She used to work closely with Jeremy, but now she does other things.

Evidence of last night’s party.  I didn’t hear a peep from the boys until their mothers came to pick them up at 11 this morning.

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Met the sunrise on my run this morning.

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Spent the day cleaning up, the tree came down, boxes got recycled.  I ate a lot of Christmas chocolate.

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On our way to Eric’s for Sunday night dinner.  Vince doesn’t often come to Sunday night dinner these days, though Edda is always up for it.

It was a low turnout tonight.  Just us 5.  We talked a lot about headphones and dogs farting.

I said in my last blog post that I want nothing more than what I have.  That is true.  But I also want to have all the things I don’t have – more time, more ambition, more experiences, more friends, more family, more travel, more creating, more learning, more strength, more patience, more money, more drive, more influence, more love & more work.  Hahahaha.  It’s a little terrible.  Oh well.  Hopefully I’ll get all of next year to work on that.  Someday I’ll open that multi-million dollar medical device company (something with adhesives, they are cool) and then I’ll have to shut down this blog.  Or I probably won’t and this blog will continue.
  
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Vince is hosting our NYE party.  We plan on being asleep at midnight.

Starting the party right with hot dogs and popcorn and holiday crackers.  xoxo, see you all on the other side.

I’m content as the year draws to a close.  I’m well fed, I’m warm, I have my family around me.  I need nothing more.  Vince had Bryson over for a sleepover last night.  Each night this week, I ask him to not go to bed too late and each night he says, yes mom! and each night I wonder exactly how late is not too late.

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I got Edda this rotating laser light show for Christmas and set it up last night.  I also fixed the master bath toilet last night (it hadn’t been flushing well for years) – this was a Christmas gift to myself, a toilet that works well.

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This morning, we saw a few moments of furious snow flurry-ing.

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We dropped Edda off at daycare (am I suppose to still call it that?  I think I should call it camp.) and took the boys out to lunch in Bethesda and saw the documentary “The Eagle Huntress”.

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Then, finally, Friday night dinner at my parents’ house where Edda had a fantastic time.

This apple peeler was the big hit of the Christmas haul.  Jeremy’s even using it even though when he first saw it, he said – you guys can use that crazy contraption, I still have my knife.

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Edda’s “free” wheelchair came today.  Every year, we enter a lottery for $2000 of funding from the state of MD.  It used to be that you’d have to stand in a certain line at 6 am on a particular summer Wed. so you’d be one of the first couple hundred people to get the $, but they changed it to a mail in lottery.  We get the money about 2/3 of the time?  It’s not such bad odds, but every year we win it, the paperwork gets harder and harder to fill out.  It used to be just submitting receipts, but this year, they wanted tax forms from the companies that we’d order from, or if it was summer camp, it had to be a certain time not overlapping the school provided summer camp.  If you wanted to use it for therapy, you had to get letters from doctors and therapists and the American Medical Association that it wasn’t some whack therapy.  If you wanted to use it for childcare, your childcare provider had to be some sort of approved person.  It’s a mess.

Honestly, the easiest thing to get was a back up wheelchair because the brakes of the old one breaks all the time, but I had to jump through some hoops that showed that our insurance wouldn’t cover it.  Our insurance does cover wheelchairs, but only once every 5 years and I think we are somehow in the middle of the cycle.  Blah.  So boring.  It was $2200, so we had to pay $200 for our free wheelchair.  We got orange!  No one else is going to have an orange wheelchair.

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Edda is clearly thrilled.

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Vince made spaghetti and meatballs tonight for dinner.  He’s having fun this week.  Lots friends, hosting lots of sleepovers.

I went to Virginia today to celebrate Vickey and Karuna’s birthdays which are tomorrow and yesterday respectively.  We went to the Famous Toastery which did have very nice toast.  I had a tuna melt.

Bert had gotten a “melting” elf for Christmas which we set up on the table and watched as he turned into a little blob.

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Then we went to an odd Asian-inspired ice cream shaved ice place called Sul Bing.

And we ordered these desserts which are made from shaved frozen milk as a base and one had mango and strawberry and the other had roasted soybean powder and baked beans.  We did eat most of it, but it was odd.  We said it was good, but maybe not good enough to go again…  It’s also expensive.  It was almost $20 for these two desserts.

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This evening, Jeremy made his famous Peruvian chicken for Rachael, who came all the way to Rockville from DC.

Maxi loves some loving.  Rachael borrowed our rowing machine and three champagne glasses.  She was a rower in college and wanted to see if the erg fits in her living room and hear how much noise it made and to see if she can get back into it.

Even though Jeremy is off of work this week and I’m working half days and Edda has half time camp in the afternoon and we are being (generally) lazy, scheduling remains a complex puzzle each day.

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I bought a pair of work coveralls for my dad for Christmas, but when he tried it on, it was too small.  Then my mom tried it on and declared that she wanted it.  So I regifted it to her.  Then yesterday, she decided that she didn’t need/want it anymore and gave it to Jeremy.  He put them on today to move tires around the garage.  It must be some kind of record – regifted twice and it was only one day after Xmas.

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We went to see La La Land this afternoon.  It opens with a scene where people are singing and dancing in a traffic jam in LA.

Nat and her family performed a Christmas concert this afternoon at the house.  A musical family, it was really sweet to hear them all perform together.  There was voice, piano, guitar and Dara even did some DJ mixing.

After the concert, everyone was curious to see how the mixing table worked, especially my dad.

We rearranged the house again, this time focused on the Christmas tree and the space in front of it to make a concert hall-type seating arrangement.

A little reception afterwards with pie, tea and pastries.

All the performers and attendees!  Merry Christmas & Happy Boxing Day!