Author: Doris

Beautiful fall weekend! Vince played his last soccer game – he had a great time on this low-key team. Wanted to play, wanted to be there – such a nice thing. It did not hurt that he was on a winning team and that he had a friend and made friends on this team. He left trying to convince everyone to sign up for basketball which is the winter sport we are doing.

I was strangely possessed to make a cake from a box – I haven’t made a box cake in a long time, I think I just wanted to see how it turned out. Of course, homemade is better, but this cake sufficed for the post-game party.

I started getting all Asian-mom on Vince with his violin practicing exactly a month ago and although I have yet to hit him or yell at him, he has practiced triumphantly (and begrudgingly) for 30 days in a row. There have been tears and there have been bribes, but I think we made a lot of progress in the past 30 days – mainly to learn that there are some things that are hard and not fun and if you work at them, you will get better. We are well on our way to Carnegie Hall (just kidding – I’m just hoping to make it to the next recital).

Although the bribe for making it 30 days was a video game for the Wii, we decided to go out yesterday to celebrate by having dinner at the bubble tea place down the street.

Edda was a little confused by the bubbles.

Last night, Edda was in a good, vocal mood, and I tried to ask her to say “mom”. I think she was trying – I tried really hard to turn in my head the sounds she was making into the word “mom” but I couldn’t hear it. No matter – she kept chattering and eventually fell asleep in my arms.

I try hard to find meaning in the routine things I do everyday. That in the face of hard, difficult days, that one can put one foot in front of the other and proceed forward – that the forward motion might not seem to be very much, but at least it is something. Sometimes it can seem like the days are all the same, that all efforts are futile and that there is no point to it all – but I know that is not true. Be good to each other.

When I first started working from home (3 years ago now), I started cooking dinner so that the family would be ready to eat the within 15 minutes of Jeremy walking in the door. I’m not the natural cook in the house, everything I learned, I learned from watching Jeremy cook. I tend to wander over into fish stick territory – easy prep, easy cleanup (especially if you line the cookie sheet with tin foil). Anyways I was cooking, cooking and cooking three years ago and I asked Jeremy if he was pleased that he got to eat as soon as he walked in the door. Jeremy replied that although he did enjoy my food, as far as he was concerned, cooking was something that *he* loved doing, so I was really doing him no favor by cooking every night because I was depriving him of something that he really enjoyed.

So then I got a little huffy and I stopped cooking dinners. For like 2.5 years. If I needed to cook dinners, I would make my world famous fish sticks and tater tots. It got so bad that Vince was concerned whenever Jeremy went on a business trip that I would be unable to feed the family. I can’t believe our little petty argument went on for 2.5 years – I am not usually one to hold a grudge, but apparently I can do it for years. Jeremy likes rotating favorites and I like making new recipes and cooking it only once, so without me cooking, Jeremy thought we were only eating like 4 kinds of dinners on the weeknights – it was getting a little boring.

So now I cook 2-3 nights a week – last night I made a vegetarian meal (at least for the grown ups) – spinach, beets, potatoes, carrots, pecans, goat cheese and a fried egg. Yummy!

Loving kindness.

I haven’t run for a few days because the inside of my ankle has been feeling weird. Weird meaning that it hurts. And it’s a little swollen. It’s nice that you can google “pain inside ankle” and just self-diagnose yourself as having posterior tibial tendonitis and feel good about yourself that you didn’t need to go to some fancy doctor who would have told you just to stop running. So I’ve decided to take a few days off and maybe eyeball my new running shoes as the culprit and leave it at that. It just turns out that my running partner is not feeling well today – so luckily I didn’t have to be the only one bailing out of this morning’s run.

It was a lovely weekend – on Saturday, Jeremy spent the day in Virginia and Vince spent the day in southern Md and it was just me and Miss Edda all day. We spent part of the day with some of our friends with Rett Syndrome at the Blue Sky Girls event in College Park, MD.

We were a small but mighty group!

We ducked out a little bit early, Edda was starting to be unhappy with it all and I wanted to spend the day just the two of us together.

Our first stop was IKEA where we enjoyed the famous meatballs. And then we walked around the whole market place – Edda joyfully yelling “Bah!” and me window shopping at all the awesomeness that I wanted but did not need.

Second stop was at Target and the third stop was home. Once I got home, I had all the good intentions of studying parts of the skull, but really I lay down on the couch, put the book next to me, Boba sat on my chest and I fell asleep for a few hours. Edda watched TV and periodically sat on my head. It was a wonderful afternoon.

We went to Edda’s neurologist on Friday. He’s recently taken a job with Children’s as the Medical Director of pediatric neurology which started on Sept 1. So, more than a month ago, when we were in the midst of Edda’s crazy, unhappy moods, we made the earliest appointment we could which was on Friday because he wasn’t seeing patients for the first 6 weeks of his new job.

Of course, over the span of the last months or so, Edda’s moods have swung back to being more and more herself. Usually chipper, predictably pissed at waiting in line or going on a walk in the park. So we walked into the neuro appointment basically clueless about what to say about Edda.

We brought Dr. Difazio back up to speed with Edda’s summer and then he said we did everything that we could and got ready to pack up. We congratulated him on his new job and he ask (because I was wearing the T-shirt) if I had run the local half marathon this year – he’s also a runner – and I laughed and said that I had just volunteered this year.

So we were walking the kids to school – Boba, Ruby, Vince, friend and me. Minding our own business. Pooping:

and picking up the poop:

Just your regular morning routine. After Vince and pal were dropped off, I went behind the school to the tennis courts where I meet up with a few other doggie comrades. There we were – chatting about the crap that we always chat about – while the doggies enjoy their time running around chasing balls. After we were there a few minutes, the Rockville police comes by and tells us (very nicely and kind of apologetically) that even though we were in the tennis courts, we were still breaking the city’s off-leash law. So I got a written citation and Ruby and Boba and I are all semi-criminals now. I guess I need to find a private yard to hang out in. Sigh.

It was a really busy weekend – usually I don’t like packing so many things in a weekend (really one needs some time to watch bad TV and eat cookies), but somehow the schedule just worked out that way. So, in addition to celebrating turning 40 and having my in-laws in town, I also managed to squeeze in a 10K run on Sunday morning just before the rain started pouring. Originally, I signed up for this because I thought I would be training for the Disney princess half-marathon in Feb with (at least) two local Rett mom friends, but I’m just not that into it in so many ways the least of which is that I don’t really want to run for more than two hours in a row.

This 10K I ran in just slightly over an hour which is way better than I thought I would do – it was flat and fast and I had a pal to chat with the whole time.

I’m so pleased I’ve been running 4-5 a week for months now, it’s really been such an accomplishment for me 🙂