Author: Doris

Donald, can you look at the HTML in the past two posts and tell me what to remove in the flickr links to get rid of the banner on the top? Many thanks. xoxo -Doris

Today is Independence Day in Argentina and to celebrate, Keyla made us these amazing empanadas for dinner. Cheese filled and more Italian flavored with basil and tomato that I would have imagined, they were delicious.  I’m learning now that Argentinian cuisine has more in common with Italian food than with Mexican food (it’s not as spicy and there is more pasta).  I could have eaten them all.

After dinner, Keyla put Edda to bed while we did the evening cleaning up and wouldn’t you know it?  Edda went right to sleep for her!  Sigh.  What have I been doing wrong for three nights in a row now?  Hopefully, she will sleep right through the night.

It’s been going on for about a week now, Edda’s been terrible to put to bed.  Usually, Edda is a delight at bedtime, she’ll snuggle up quietly next to me and just hang out (listen to a book or watch a movie) and then peacefully go to sleep.  Sometimes it can take up to an hour, but it’s a quiet relaxing time that I look forward to most nights of the week.  We came home from Italy, all jet lagged and it took about a week to settle back into East Coast time and I figured we were home free with Edda.  But since she’s readjusted to Rockville time, she’s just been fighting bed time all week.  I mean really fighting, like yelling, hitting and swinging her limbs in all directions for over an hour at night.  She seems good at camp and good during the day, it’s just this bed time stuff that has turned into some angry shenanigans.  I’m flashing back to the terrible summer a couple years ago where Edda screamed for long periods of time for reasons that we could never figure out.  Puberty?  Mood swings? Painful teeth? Headache? Pissed that she has to go to bed at 9pm?  Who knows?  I hope it goes away soon.

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These days, I’m just working steadily at work and I’m enjoying this bit of rest time between semesters at school.  I’m relishing this downtime.  Many of my friends that I started nursing school with are now done and finding jobs in the area.  I kind of shake my head and wonder how this is all going to play out.  Am I really going to find a job where I’m going to work on the weekends and rotate into/out of night shifts and do my regular work at the same time? I guess I am.  I’m too deep in to turn around now.  Summertime is the time to update all my paperwork, I renewed my CPR certification and I got retested for TB.

I used to sign Vince up for camp every week of the summer, but a few summers ago, he asked if he could have a few weeks to just chillax.  So this is a down, unscheduled week for him.  A down week for him means more a bit more work for me – texting moms, arranging rides and activities and just generally having him underfoot making messes and then not fully cleaning up.   Today, for example – he set all the fire alarms off in the house for at least 5 minutes and partially melted a portion of our plastic deck (Well, it wasn’t really him that did that, it was the sleeping boy pictured above, but I’m just filing it under the “Vince” tab).  The down week is ostensibly for recovery, but in reality it just allows him to play computer games all with as many friends he can convince me to allow to sleepover and stay up until 3am.

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Edda’s days at camp are fun filled.   Lots of time in the pool and lots of time with her one-on-one counselor, Kara.  Kara was her 1-1 last year and so I was beyond thrilled that she requested to work with Edda again this year!  <3

On the actual 4th, we invited Nat and Dara over for dinner.  We did grill, but instead of the traditional hamburgers and hot dogs, we made a Thai feast.  Jeremy and Vince wanted to try out the tiny camping stove to see if it would hold up to cooking the feast – it didn’t do badly, but we did have to fire up the regular grill for the bigger pieces of meat.

First up: Chicken satay with peanut sauce.

You can see the camping stove a little better in this picture.  It’s a tiny thing, all you need are a few sticks to keep it going – you can see the supply of sticks on the table next to the little grill.  Next up, beef steaks for the spicy Thai beef salad.

It was a delicious meal.  There was also duck curry which was really, really good – though Jeremy didn’t cook the duck in the curry, he got it take out from Great Wall (Kim Sam has forever closed down.  sniff. sniff) and put the already cooked duck into the curry recipe.

We did end the meal with the traditional American flag in fruit.

Katherine, we did give Nat and Dara their wedding gift and Vince managed to pull off the price tag before they saw it.  It was a beautiful choice, I didn’t get a photo of it & them though 🙁

Keyla and Edda celebrated the 4th by enthusiastically displaying their USA headgear.  Did you know in Argentina (and other places, I assume now) pronounce USA like ooosaa? When Keyla first said this I was confused, ooosaa?  What’s that?  Apparently it’s how the USA is known in places other than the USA.  Anyways, hooray oooosssssaaa women’t soccer team.  Way to go!

Vince came home from scouts on Saturday.  It’s nice having him at home again.  Even though he spends a lot of time in his room, it’s much quieter in the house without him.   He got his camping merit badge and a pottery merit badge at camp – he always says he has a lackluster time, but I think he’s just being too cool for school.  Poor guy, came home from a week in Rome (no internet) a week at scout camp (no internet) and then landed in our house where, alas, we had no internet.  The biggest news of the holiday weekend was that our internet went down on Friday morning and Jeremy spent 100 minutes on hold with Verizon to get an appointment for today (Sunday).  We went more than 48 hours without the internet.  It was like we were living in 1990 (well not really since we all had cell service).

As a result of my inability to surf the internet freely for celebrity gossip or to do any sort of online shopping (I don’t really like surfing the web on my phone), I actually read a book.  I’m reading one of the true crime variety which is both fascinating and repulsive and I think it puts me in a bad mood.  I probably should stop reading it because of the bad mood, but now I want to know what happens!