Author: Doris

The hip thing in professional photography these days is flare! I do troll wedding photographers’ blogs and everyone loves the flare. (Vince is a little grumpy and underexposed.)

We are trying out a new routine in the house. Usually Jeremy and I both put the kids to bed together, which usually means that all 4 of us are in the family bed – which is fine, it’s actually great, but it also means that both Jeremy and I secretly hope the other adult person will get the sippy cup of water for Edda or get Vince to floss his teeth while we both try and surf the web for: political analysis, industrial tricycles, or kid’s pants on ebay. So this meant that bedtime often crept from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. We were not being efficient.

So now we are trying it a different way. Since Jeremy gets the kids up and dressed in the morning, I’m going to be in charge of the night time routine. So tonight, the whole thing from putting Edda in the bath to tucking Vincent in was 45 very short and efficient minutes.

Last night, we headed off to Southern MD for an informal gathering of local girls afflicted with Rett Syndrome and their families. There was a pizza and conversation and also a lot of snuggling.

Looking down:

Looking up!

Fridays are my favorite days! I love the idea that the weekend is coming more than I actually like the weekends – mainly because I still like the routine of the weekdays plus the added anticipation of not going to work the next day.

Somehow this Friday evening is off to a rocky start. Jeremy and I got into an argument as soon as we met to bike home together after the subway ride home, which is the main reason that this Friday is off to a rocky start, but I’ve just discovered that many of Vince’s new winter pants are totally worn through the butt and the knees and it’s only November and also that his first adult tooth is coming in behind a baby tooth that is refusing to fall out and pointing kind of backwards toward the base of his brain.

All I can think about is the cost of new pants and also the cost of straightening out that first insanely crooked tooth! Oh, of course, the house is also a mess – as usual.

I don’t know why I’m in a funk, this is actually a great, great week!

While I was at the ballet gala, Jeremy and the kids went for a bike ride to the town center for some hamburgers.

I wanted to highlight the transformation of Donald’s high school bike. Note the yellow milk crate attached to the back of the bike with flashing lights bungee corded to the outside of the milk crate. He is saving his pennies to buy fenders for his beloved commuting bicycle. Jeremy has actually gone grocery shopping with his crazy bicycle. We are still commuting back and forth to the Metro on our bikes, it’s my one source of exercise, my 10 minute bike ride.

Well… I suppose it was quite an exhillarating night. I know all y’all are east coasties, but I thought I would share some of the going ons over here in Cali-forn-i-a. Most of you are spared from the insanity that are the California Proposistions, but somehow, somewhere, the politicians decided it would be wise to let the public vote directly on laws. Of course, it’s not like californians really understand the impact of the laws that they are vote for/against. What’s 10 billion in bond payments for a high speed rail system?

Anyhow I’ll make two comments here…

1) Sadly, Prop 8 seems to have passed by a 52-47 margin. I don’t know how gay marriage affects any straight person’s lives… So I was surprised that it passed.

2) SF has it’s own propositions too. Here’s a funny one. Complete with arguments/rebuttals. Ha. It was defeated 70-30. 🙂

Last Saturday night, I went to the ballet school gala (I did wear the burgundy dress). I had a nice time – I wanted to showcase Christine’s centerpieces:

As I said before, I had never gone to a gala before. I went mainly because I wanted to support the effort that went into making the centerpieces, but also I wanted to spy on a gala and see what it was all about. I learned that cool lighting can really change a room – that a live auction is pretty fun if you have a couple hundred or maybe a thousand dollars to spend on stuff. (I did win a bud vase at the silent auction, which was much, much less than a thousand dollars. Woo hoo for me!)

We are staying up on election night – all watching the returns (well, all of us except for Edda). Jeremy took the day off and spent the day canvassing and manning phone banks in Northern VA. We just heard that PA is called for Obama, which I’m sure was due to Jeremy’s diligent 4-hour volunteer effort there ;).

Here’s what it looks like at our election tracking headquarters, Vincent is the most manic of us all.

As one of our last big road trips before turkey day (only 3 weeks away!), the four of us ventured to New Jersey to visit my friend Ingrid (who works so hard fundraising to find a cure for Rett Syndrome and runs Girl Power 2 Cure and helps to run RSRT) and to meet her family, in particular, her daughter Sarah who also has Rett Syndrome.

Edda got to go to Sarah’s school and was her “share” at show-and-tell. It was really sweet and touching.

About 5 weeks ago, when I was in the midst of a cloud of grumpiness, I discovered a small lump on the side of my neck. Do you know when you google, “lump on neck”, it pretty much means that you have lymphoma. So my heart sank, not only was I dealing with fundraising, my job, the kids, the house, I was going to have to find out that I had lymphoma and that it was going to be bad.

So I trundled off to my family physician who said that it’s one of three things: 1. a benign growth, 2. a response to an infection or 3. cancer – and he said all three with equal weight in his tone of voice. So he said that we could do three things – wait to see if it got bigger, take a course of antibiotics or see an ear, nose, throat guy. I asked if I could do all three. So the antibiotics did nothing, it took me 5 weeks to schedule the ENT guy, so in essence I was waiting to see if it got bigger and on Halloween, I finally got to see the specialist – who assured me that after feeling lumps on necks for 35 years and my particular lump for a few minutes, this was a lipoma – a benign cluster of fat which has probably been there for a million years. And he said if it was cancer, it would have gotten bigger over the course of the 5 weeks I’ve been poking at it. (It has gotten some intense poking over the course of 5 weeks.)

I’m quite relieved and happy, of course. Sometimes I think life is like dodge ball, you see all those balls coming at you, ready to knock you over, some of them miss you and some of them hit you full force on the noggin (or lymph node).