Back at the Hospital: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 21

Posted on September 10, 2020 by Steph

In the past nine days, North’s been to an urgent care once, the ER twice, and admitted to the hospital for two days and three nights. It’s gotten to the point where when discussing some mundane family plans, like when Beth, Noah, and I will finish our currently-in-progress game of Settlers of Catan, we’ll append things like “assuming North’s not in the hospital.”

Before the Hospital: Wednesday

North’s online classes meet Monday, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Wednesday is supposed to be a day to do homework and go to teachers’ office hours. The first week of school, North didn’t have much work, so they used Wednesday to finish the last of their summer homework assignments. We also had a 504 meeting for seizure-related accommodations, with the ninth grade counselor and several of North’s teachers. It went surprisingly well. We tried to get a 504 plan for Noah’s ADHD twice, once in elementary school and once in high school, but were denied both times. We thought this accommodation would be easier to get, but not to have it granted in the meeting. I didn’t even know that could happen.

ER Visit: Wednesday Night to Thursday Morning

I was feeling happy both about that and the summer homework finally being done, so of course on Wednesday evening, things went sideways. Beth was at the grocery store when North told me they needed to pee, but they couldn’t. They’d already tried running the faucet in the bathroom, so I suggested a warm bath. By the time Beth got home, North was very distressed, so we decided they’d go to Children’s. I stayed home because there’s still a one-parent rule in the ER, but Beth and I were texting through the evening. Apparently it was a strange night at Children’s, very crowded in the ER and there was a group of twenty-somethings who seemed to be having a tailgate party, playing music and smoking pot in the garage.

It took a while to get seen because of the crowd, and when they finally were, the doctors wanted to do a bladder ultrasound. If you’ve ever been pregnant, you know that means your bladder needs to be full, so it was 1:30 in the morning before North finally got a catheter to empty their bladder. They didn’t feel as if was completely empty, though, so they went to the bathroom and were able to go on their own. Because of that and because the urine sample and ultrasound didn’t show anything unusual, North wasn’t admitted and they came home.

Back to the Hospital: Thursday Night to Sunday Afternoon

However, the next morning when North woke up they were unable to go again. Beth called our pediatrician for advice. We tried another bath, this one with candles and rose petals (from our rosebush) floating in the water. I was trying to make it as relaxing as possible, but no go. It was dinner time before we got a call back from the pediatrician, who sent us back to the hospital, calling ahead to let them know we were coming and recommending admission.

This time Beth drove us there and dropped me and North off at the ER. One of the intake people recognized North from the night before. (This reminded me of the paramedic who came both times we called 911 this summer. And then sometime during the hospitalization I’m writing about now, one of the neurologists actually remembered North from the complex migraine that paralyzed their hands and feet in fifth grade). What can I say? North is well-known in greater metropolitan Washington area medical circles.

While we were talking to the triage nurse, North seized and all of a sudden all kinds of people rushed in offering oxygen and asking if we had rescue medicine on us, so I had to explain it wasn’t epilepsy so there is no rescue medicine and this wasn’t the problem that brought us here. It wasn’t even a very long seizure, something we’d pretty much shrug off at this point.

Once we got in an exam room, they wanted to do another ultrasound, so again, there was a long wait for the catheter. By this point it had been something like twenty-one hours since North had peed.

Now something I haven’t mentioned yet is that North had been feeling sick to their stomach since Sunday morning after breakfast and it was now Thursday evening. During this whole time they hadn’t eaten except to suck on some candy Sunday afternoon. They were drinking but probably not as much as usual. Still, they were very uncomfortable and as the doctors and nurses discussed whether or not they were dehydrated and needed iv fluids—opinions on this issue were divided—I kept asking everyone who came in the room, over and over, if they could get a catheter. Finally, they did. They also got some anti-nausea medicine and then they were hungry for the first time in days, so I asked a nurse if we could get something to eat. She came back with apple juice and an assortment of crackers. North ate a bag of goldfish and some saltines.

After the ultrasound, two different medical personnel told me North did not have a tumor blocking their urethra—that was something I hadn’t even thought to worry about yet. North got their fourth covid test of the summer, and we got a room. It was one a.m. before we got to bed. Then North was being examined and catheterized again with the lights on from four to five a.m. and a med student came in and woke us up at seven-thirty, so neither of us got much sleep.

Friday was kind of blur, honestly, as I was really tired, but there was a parade of medical personnel who came by, nurses, a physical therapist, an occupational therapist, neurologist(s), urologist(s), etc. Beth came by in the late morning and we overlapped for a couple hours and listened to doctors and played Clue with North. I left for home in the early afternoon. Once home, I put in a load of laundry, slept, and updated my mom on the situation. I’d hoped to work but I was just too wiped out, even with the nap, so Noah and I ordered pizza and watched The Witch.

Back at the hospital, North had an MRI but seized during it, so they didn’t get the images they wanted. The doctors wanted to do a test to see if going an extended period of time without using the catheter would cause North to be able to pee, but it only caused them a lot of pain, so we never repeated the experiment.

I slept nine hours Friday night and stayed at home long enough Saturday to keep doing laundry, menu plan for the next week, make Beth a grocery list, and to work some—with a nifty new two-monitor setup Noah made for me—and I went back to the hospital in the late afternoon. While I was gone, they tried another MRI, with Valium, but it didn’t keep North from seizing. Apparently it’s harder to get slots for the MRIs with an intravenous sedative scheduled because you need a different kind of tech to do it. In their down moments, North tried to watch some of the classes they’d missed Thursday and Friday and do homework.

Beth and I overlapped again for several hours that evening during which we watched an episode of Gilmore Girls with North. Beth needed to stay at the hospital because a nurse was going to show her how to use the catheter. If she could do it successfully that night and the next morning, North could be discharged. She got it on the first try and went home. I spent another night at the hospital with North and then Beth came back in the morning, used the catheter successfully again and North was discharged. We had lunch in the hospital cafeteria– which, strangely, is a treat for North– and went home.

Back Home (Mostly): Sunday Afternoon to Thursday

We were all very glad to be at home together, but frustrated that the new problem had not actually been resolved. North still needs to have the MRI, which is supposed to rule out any spinal compression from their herniated disk, and we need to secure appointments with neurology and urology.

We had most of Sunday and nearly all of Monday at home. North got caught up on schoolwork, Beth grocery shopped, I wrote a batch of postcards to Florida voters and Noah and I made dinner (pasta with basil-mint pesto and fresh mozzarella) on Sunday. Then we went out for frozen yogurt, which we’d meant to do the Sunday prior. Ice cream or frozen yogurt the night before the first day of school is a family tradition, but North had been either sick or in the hospital for a week and we are not people to skip something like that just because it’s a week late.

Monday, Beth made homemade waffles for breakfast because she always does that on three-day weekends and I made a peach-berry cobbler to celebrate the end of the first week of school. Noah and I watched the series finale of The Magicians. Zoë came over for a three-hour porch visit with North and had some of the cobbler with us. We had a backyard picnic for dinner and then went out for Noah’s last-night-of-summer vacation ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s.

On the way home I said something about everyone getting to sleep at home two nights in a row. I should not have said that. North suddenly developed symptoms of a painful UTI shortly after we got home. She and Beth tried an urgent care but they couldn’t handle a catheter, so they had to go back to the ER. It was “uneventful” in North’s words because they were diagnosed with a clear-cut ailment and treated for it. It did keep both Beth and North up late, though. It was two-thirty before they got home.

Meanwhile, in news of the other kid, Tuesday was Noah’s first day of the semester. He only had one class, Audio Production II. On Wednesday he had the remaining three: a computer science class, Ethnomathematics, and Intro to Philosophy. We weren’t able to get much information about his classes out of him. They are all “fine.” They’re all small, roughly twenty-five students each, except for Audio Production, which is about ten. He thinks this audio class might be more hands-on than the one he took last spring, which he would like. He declined to take Cinema Production II this semester because he’d rather have it in person. This makes sense, as the excellent film studios are a big part of what drew him to Ithaca.

North says their favorite class is Japanese because it’s interesting learning such a different language. But they also appreciate that yoga is the only class they are allowed to attend in bed. One day in sculpture class they were assigned to make an assemblage of items that represented their morning. North chose Sunday morning, the day they were discharged, and arranged their mask and some medical debris around their stuffed monkey Muffin, who always goes to the hospital when they do.

Tuesday we also had our first appointment with North’s new psychologist. She seems nice and she does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which has been recommended to us for Functional Neurological Disorder by more than one person, so for now, we’re hanging our hopes on it.

Wednesday morning we couldn’t wake North for their first or second class, despite repeated efforts. They slept fourteen hours, from ten p.m. until noon. This was worrying, but when Beth called the pediatrician she thought it could just be fatigue from fighting off the UTI. This would be less of a problem if all of North’s teachers posted video of their classes for students who’ve missed them, as they are supposed to do. But not all of the teachers are doing it and North has been missing a lot of class.

Wednesday at dinner North said high school is hard, but I told them not to judge it based on two weeks full of medical drama. We trust it will get better—we just don’t know when. And in small sign of normalcy, North was able to attend all their classes on Thursday. (Only three out of the four met because their algebra teacher’s house flooded in the torrential rain and he had to cancel class.) It was the first time they’d been to all their classes since Tuesday of the previous week. I’m taking it as a win.

Report from the Fourth Quarantine: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 19

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Steph

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After the first forty days of our new pandemic lives, and then again after eighty, I wrote posts marking off each traditional forty-day period for a quarantine with lists of forty things. I skipped one hundred twenty days because that was the week after North stopped walking and was hospitalized and it wasn’t a good day for me to write or for Beth to post. (It’s true—I am so tech-challenged I don’t post my own blog.)

I missed the one hundred sixtieth day, too, but it was only yesterday, so I’m plowing ahead with forty things about the past week:

On Monday, North and I made an unbirthday cake because it wasn’t anyone’s birthday. I did this five years ago on a whim and North still talks about it so I thought it might be cheering to do it again. The cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting.
There wasn’t room for the leftovers in the fridge, so I left the partially eaten cake in the oven and forgot it was there while I was preheating it the next day to roast eggplant, but I remembered pretty early in the preheating process and the frosting just got a little runny.
However, the next day when I was preheating the oven again for roast cauliflower, I left it in longer. The crumbs on the empty part of the pan burned, but the cake didn’t, and the frosting actually acquired a pleasant toasted marshmallow taste, so all was not lost. I do think it’s a good demonstration of how preoccupied I am these days. Fortunately we finished the cake on the third night, or who knows what would have happened to it?
Tuesday we got notice that Ithaca College is going completely online for the fall semester. This wasn’t a complete surprise, given what’s going on at other colleges and universities that have opened for in-person classes and had to shut down. I’m not critical of the school’s decision, but I am sad for Noah.
He’d been tracking Maryland’s numbers, which have been trending in the right direction to get off New York State quarantine list, so I think he was hoping to be allowed back on campus. We all have mixed feelings, of course, but it seems no matter what, he isn’t going to have a normal college experience, at least not in the first two years.
On Wednesday North had their longest seizure ever. It lasted more than an hour and a half and sent us to the emergency room.
For several days before this, they’d been having one to three of what we now think of as the medium-length seizures a day, the ones that last around five minutes. (Since then they’ve increased and yesterday they had six.)
When I got home from my morning walk a little before eleven, Beth was sitting with North, whom she’d found seizing. When it had been going on for at least ten minutes (North later told us it was closer to twenty or thirty) we called 911, for the second time in a week and a half.
When the paramedics got there, one of them remembered North. This isn’t something any mother wants.
This time we didn’t get a choice of hospital—we went to the closest one. Given that the last time we called 911, the paramedics weren’t even sure we should go to the hospital, this made it seem more serious.
As we did last time, I rode in the ambulance, but in the front this time, not because I asked to, but because there were a lot of medical personnel in back with North. Meanwhile Beth followed us to the hospital in the car and waited outside. North got two anti-convulsant shots in the ambulance.
When we arrived, there were so many people crowded around North in the tiny exam room that there wasn’t room for me and I had to stand in the hall answering intake questions for people with clipboards.
Eventually, people cleared out. When I got in the room, North had an IV with a different kind of anti-seizure medicine, and eventually they started to recover, though they’d intermittently slip back into smaller seizures. It was sort of like a series of aftershocks. It was 12:20 by the time they stopped all together.
Beth brought North’s stuffed monkey Muffin from home and had a nurse bring it to them. He was conscientious about wearing a mask.
North got their second covid test of the summer and it was negative.
We were there until three o’clock and several times various people told us we would probably be transferred to Children’s. As bad as the experience was, Beth, North, and I were all thinking that maybe it could be the impetus for more timely scans. We already had an EEG scheduled for the first week of September, but we were all hoping for answers sooner.
ER visits have a kind of rhythm to them, in my experience, and once it seemed we were in the wait-alone-a-long-time part, it was hours past lunch time, so I decided—with North’s encouragement—to go see if I could find us some food.
It took me a while and a number of redirects from passersby but eventually I found the coffee shop where I bought yogurt, grapes, Cheetos, and an iced latte. The cafeteria was in sight of the coffee shop but I was in hurry to get back because North was alone so I thought we could get by with what I bought.
I got lost again getting back to the ER and had to exit the building because some doors are blocked off now to stop people from circulating as freely through the building as they did pre-covid. I ran into Beth, sitting outside the main entrance, so I gave her an update. (Of course, we’d been texting the whole time.)
Beth had North’s phone she’d brought from home and she let me know that Zoë, who was supposed to come over that afternoon and had knocked on the door only to have no one answer, had been calling. Beth filled Zoë in.
When I got back to North’s room, they had a balloon and a teddy bear and some hard candies, which had been delivered by a social worker. The balloon looked like a cookie and said, “One Tough Cookie.” Apparently the first words the social worker spoke on entering the room was, “I hear you’re one tough cookie.”
This whole interaction reminded me of the volunteers with the heart-shaped balloons in The Hostile Hospital (Series of Unfortunate Events, book eight), but Beth said, even if they had no way of knowing it the balloon’s message is true of most patients, in North’s case, it is.
Shortly after this the doctor came back and told us North was being discharged, not to Children’s but home. We were surprised, and frankly disappointed not be able to get more answers that day. He also advised us not to come back to the ER, but to ride the seizures out at home, no matter how long they are. He seemed to be of the opinion that it wasn’t any of the medication North received that stopped the seizure but that it had burned out on its own and he said medicating a non-epileptic seizure could do more harm than good.
All the medical professionals we’ve seen suspect North’s seizures are non-epileptic, which seems to cause a lot of them to lose interest. Beth really had to advocate to get the EEG we do have scheduled. When telling us North wasn’t being transferred to Children’s, the doctor actually said “It would be a waste of a transport.”
The next day Beth went to work trying to get an EEG before September. Both our pediatrician’s office and North’s psychiatrist have been working their contacts to find us a bed at either Children’s or Georgetown. We’ll take whatever we can get first. Among other reasons, we need an official diagnosis before the school system will even begin to talk to us about accommodations and it’s clear North is going to need some.
In the meantime, we made some changes at home. We stopped leaving North alone except to go to the bathroom and they’ve been sleeping in Beth’s and my bed with Beth while I sleep in their bed. They are not crazy about the lack of privacy. (And today we relented a little, leaving them in alone in a safe position in our bed for a half hour or so. They did have a seizure during that time, but they didn’t fall off the bed so I guess the experiment was a success.)
So, life goes on. Thursday it was North’s turn to pick the weekly after dinner family activity so we had a faux campfire, with microwave s’mores, votive candles on the patio table, what stargazing was possible on a cloudy night, and a chorus of crickets and cicadas.
Friday in physical therapy North walked 185 feet with a walker, surprising the physical therapist.
After North got back from PT, my friend Megan and her daughter Talia came over for a socially distanced backyard visit.
We all met twelve years ago when North and Talia were in preschool together. Megan is one of my best friends and North and Talia stayed in touch throughout elementary school because they were on the same rec league basketball team—the Pandas, as long-time readers will remember. After attending different elementary and middle schools, they will be at the same high school, and North thought it would be nice to get re-acquainted.
It was nice. I positioned chairs in the backyard in pairs far away enough from each other so that the adults and the teens could have separate, private conversations. This was only my second get-together with a friend since March and it was good to talk in person to an adult other than Beth. It turns out I had a lot to say. I think I monopolized the conversation, but I’m guessing Megan will forgive me.
As for the kids, North said it wasn’t awkward, even though they haven’t seen each other in a few years. Also, we prepared Talia for what North’s seizures are like, but they didn’t have any more than a few seconds long during the visit.
While Megan and Talia were over, we got a phone call from our pediatrician letting us know they were getting closer to scheduling an EEG, and they thought they could get one early next week. Fingers crossed.
Saturday morning, Beth, North and I had a telemedicine appointment with North’s therapist and at the end he offered to write his own letter to the school, in support of accommodations: we want North to be allowed to have their camera off so they’re not seizing online, extra time on assignments if they seize during one, and no penalties for not participating orally if they’ve just seized and can’t speak.
That afternoon we went for an outing at Downs Park in Anne Arundel County. We got Chinese takeout and ate it at a picnic table in the park, then we went for a walk. North alternated between using the walker and the wheelchair. I’d say they walked about half the time, which was encouraging to see.
The park had nice views of the Bay, some wooded trails, an aviary with a red-tailed hawk, a Great Horned owl, and turkey vulture, all injured. The vulture was being rehabilitated to be released, but the other two were permanent residents. (The owl only had one eye so probably didn’t have the depth perception to hunt, Noah guessed.)
While we were there we found a moss-covered stone bench with a plaque saying it was a wishing bench, so of course, we felt compelled to sit on it and make wishes.
I won’t tell you what I wished for because everyone knows if you tell a wish it doesn’t come true. But if I’d had a second wish, it would have been less personal and more political. I bet you can guess what it is.
And speaking of politics, we haven’t been to as many protests as I thought we would this summer, for reasons that are probably obvious, but I’m sorry we weren’t able to make one in support of the post office this weekend. Did you ever think we’d need to protest for the post office? But that’s where we are. For now I’ll have to content myself with writing postcards to voters. I mailed my six hundredth one today, in another batch encouraging Democratic voters in Florida to enroll to vote by mail.
Keep doing whatever you’re doing to help our country weather this dangerous passage and if you have any wishes to spare, send a few our way.

Green Light for the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 16

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Steph

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The first day North was out of the hospital, Beth texted me from their physical therapy appointment: “Green light for the beach.” Apparently, the therapist thought it would be fine to go.

So we went.

Saturday

We got a late start out of the house at 2 p.m., two hours later than we intended, and then there was a lot of traffic before the Bay Bridge, so it was almost four-thirty when we stopped at our traditional lunch spot, the Taco Bell and Dairy Queen right past the bridge (and yes, we did wait that long to eat lunch, snacking on garlic rye crisps and dried apricots in the car).

We stopped at our favorite farm stand and got a lot of produce, and arrived in Rehoboth around 7:30. We were all charmed by the house, which was nicer than it looked in its online pictures. It was wood-paneled with a soaring ceiling over the dining room and a sort of indoor veranda over the living room. The kitchen was a cheerful aqua color and spacious. There were two screened porches, a big one, and a little one with a desk I used as a writing table to write a lot of this post. It was also more house than we needed—five bedrooms. It’s harder to find little two or three bedroom cottages than it was in the nineties when we started vacationing in Rehoboth. Sadly, a lot of them have been torn down and replaced with larger houses. But the space allowed us to spread out. Noah and I used one of the extra upstairs bedrooms as a reading room, and all week I kept imagining how we’d assign the rooms if we had our mothers and my sister and her family with us. We missed them a lot.

The only two drawbacks of the house were that 1) it wasn’t particularly accessible (we’d rented it back when North was on crutches, but not in a wheelchair) so we had to lift that chair up and down the front and back steps over and over, and 2) when we got there the thermostat was in a lockbox and set to 73 degrees and for the first couple days we were freezing, until we got the realty to open the box and let us set it.

The main reason we’d chosen this house was that it was a block from the beach, and we imagined North would be able to get to the beach on their own and would spend hours every day swimming. Clearly, that plan would have to be adjusted.

After unpacking the food, Beth, North, and I slipped down to the boardwalk. We were near the south end of it (we usually stay further north). There was an accessible path made of woven plastic that extended a little ways down the beach, close enough to see the water, so we wheeled North down it. We returned to the boardwalk, found the nearest beach wheelchair shed (five blocks away and closed for the day) so we’d know where it was, and then we peeked into Funland to see what their safety procedures looked like, but most of the entrances were blocked off and we couldn’t really see. Beth did manage to talk to an employee and ascertained that the Haunted Mansion was accessible. I don’t think North would want to go if they couldn’t do that.

We opted to turn around there because the crowds were getting thicker and not as many people were wearing masks as I would have liked (maybe half). Besides, it was getting late. We had a cold supper of cheese and crackers and fruit, as late as Europeans, Beth said. (It was past nine.) Then North did their physical therapy exercises and I cleaned up the kitchen and we turned in late (for us—it might have been eleven).

Sunday

Beth went out in the morning to get some breakfast groceries and we all ate and Beth and North went for another stroll on the boardwalk while I was still eating. When they returned they reported the crowds were sparser and a higher percentage of people were wearing masks in the daytime. I hit the beach around ten. It was a warm, muggy, foggy day. I could see the lifeguards from the water so I assumed they could see me, but the next lifeguard stand to the north was shrouded in fog and I couldn’t see the one to the south (which was further away) at all. The houses up on shore were partially obscured. It was kind of an eerie swim, but good to be in the water.

I swam about forty minutes, then took a short walk and returned to the house so Beth and I could menu plan and make a grocery list. Once that was done, she left to go shopping, and I had lunch, read with Noah in our reading room, and then put the groceries away when she came home, and made lunch for North.

Around three, the kids and I left for the beach. The sky was darkening as we walked to the beach wheelchair shed and many more people were leaving the beach than arriving. This seemed like a bad sign, but I called for the beach patrol to unlock a chair for us. Someone arrived pretty quickly and soon we were rolling North down to the water. Their goal was to sit on the wet sand and feel the water on their feet and legs. It’s such a nice service that these chairs are available for anyone who needs them for free, but just as the big, puffy wheels hit the wet sand, the lifeguards heard thunder and blew their whistles and everyone had to get out of the water. So North’s vision was not realized that day. I was hoping to salvage the outing by asking if they wanted to stroll down the beach in the chair, or maybe just stay where we were and watch the waves, when a lifeguard came over and explained we had to leave the beach, not just the water.

We returned the beach wheelchair, got North back into the regular wheelchair, and pushed them up to the boardwalk. It was nice to have Noah’s help whenever he came to the beach. (And I would like to have the upper body strength of a nineteen-year-old boy who doesn’t even work out.) I eyed the boardwalk, wondering if a consolation prize of a trip to Candy Kitchen was feasible, but everyone who had left the beach seemed to be on the boardwalk now, plus the people who’d already been there, so we turned back. The storm never materialized.

Back at the house, Noah and I watched The Magicians while Beth and North watched The Fosters and then I blogged on the writing porch, while Beth made a dinner of veggie burgers and hot dogs, corn on the cob, potato salad, and watermelon.

After dinner, we ventured out to see if the boardwalk was less crowded on a Sunday night than a Saturday night. The answer was not really, but by ducking down side streets and looping back, we avoided the biggest crowds, and we got ice cream on Rehoboth Ave. We also got a better look into Funland. What I saw in terms of distancing and masks was encouraging. We returned to a less populated part of the boardwalk to eat our ice cream and I stayed a bit after everyone else had gone home to watch the sky over the ocean get pinker and then grow dark.

Monday

I was on the beach by 9:45, leaving North and Beth at the dining room table, attending their online summer school course and working, respectively. It was a hot, sunny day so I went straight to the water where I swam for almost an hour. I saw pelicans and dolphins and only left the beach, reluctantly, at 11:15 because I didn’t want to get too much sun.

At the house I made lunch for myself and North, who had just finished class, then I read with Noah, and wrote some get-out-the-vote postcards for a special election in Tennessee. Beth drove me to the post office to mail them so I could get North to the beach sooner.

This time the day was sunny, with no hint of lightning or thunder so we got the beach wheelchair down to the water and I eased North out of it so they could sit on the sand, with the water running over their legs and sometimes covering them as high as their chest. I noticed when the water moved their thighs they were able to move them back into position without using their hands. They said it was partly being able to move better in the water, and partly the water itself, changing direction and pushing their legs back.

I texted Noah to come because it was almost time to return the beach wheelchair. Getting North down to the water was doable (but difficult) with one person, but getting back was definitely a two-person job.

We got Grandpa Mac (build-your-own-pasta-bowls) delivered for dinner and watched Babette’s Feast, after a half-hour negotiation about what to watch. I hadn’t seen it in decades, but it holds up and the kids liked it, too, especially North.

Tuesday

I took North to the beach in the morning. North thought they’d try sitting in the chair, pushed a little bit into the water because the man who checked out the chair said you can do that and North thought they’d get less sand in their suit that way. But even with the brake set, the chair crept forward when the sand under its wheels eroded in the waves and I was struggling to control it when three beachgoers ran to help. After that, I parked it on the dry sand and North scooched down to the water again. While we were in the water, we saw dolphins and pelicans but the most exciting thing I saw was North kneeling, sometimes holding my hands, but sometimes unsupported when the water got deep enough around them. Beth got to see it, too, because she’d come to help get North off the beach. (Unfortunately, they felt weaker the next day and attributed it to overexertion and were never able to do it again.)

Noah and Beth usually do a puzzle on vacations and this year they had a challenging one to tackle. It was a Frank Lloyd Wright design meant to evoke saguaro cacti and cactus flowers. North got it for Noah for Christmas. Beth and Noah started it Tuesday after lunch.

While they were getting started, I ventured to Candy Kitchen and made a big purchase because we’d decided to limit ourselves to one trip this year instead of a few. I got fudge, sea salt caramels, gummy pizza slices, truffles, and a few other things. The boardwalk wasn’t crowded at all and when I arrived I was the only one in the store. Beth and I decided, based on patterns we’d observed, that from then on we’d only go the boardwalk on weekdays, during the daytime. Other than Candy Kitchen and the grocery store, we also kept out of the indoor stores we usually visit—the tea and spice shop, our favorite coffeeshop, t-shirt shops, the bookstore, the crocs outlet on the highway. We also skipped the water park, not that North could have gone this year anyway.

After I got back with the candy, Noah and I took a late afternoon trip to the beach. He brought his drone and got some great footage. While he was filming, I had a nice swim. It was sunny and the surface of the water was silvery, with all the little ripples sharply defined. It was clearer than usual, too, and I could see a little fish about the size of my finger swimming near the surface. I also saw a couple of jellyfish but I didn’t see the one that stung the inside of my wrist. It left a red mark, but it faded quickly and hurt less than a bee sting. (I was in a good position to judge because the prior week while waiting for a bus to go to the hospital, I was stung by a bee and the memory was fresh.)

Beth made her traditional beach week meal that night—gazpacho, salt-crusted potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, and a spread of fancy cheeses. This year she added watermelon agua fresca to the meal. (North chopped ten cups of watermelon for it.) We called it Beth’s Feast and before we ate, Noah said, “Not a word about the food.” (This is a line from Babette’s Feast.)

While I did the dishes, Beth and Noah watched The Mandalorian, then we all played Cards Against Humanity and then Beth and North went for a walk while Noah and I watched The Magicians.

“We did all the things,” I said to Beth as we went to bed, but despite our busy evening, I couldn’t sleep that night, so I slipped down to the beach after Beth had fallen asleep, to stand on the sand and watch the heat lightning.

Wednesday

I woke up stiff and sore from pushing the beach wheelchair uphill the day before, but a morning swim, followed by sitting in a beach chair in the sun watching the waves, helped loosen me up. After lunch, we all headed to the boardwalk for treats. Noah and I shared a paper cup of fries, and North and Beth got gelati (a parfait of soft serve and Italian ice). I wanted funnel cake but I didn’t think it would be wise to eat it right after fries, so I decided to wait.

Noah went home while the rest of us went to the beach. With two adults, we could let North go a little deeper into the water as we each held one of their hands to stabilize them as they sat in the water. Some of the waves were big enough they could duck their head under them. Before we left, I had a brief swim. It was another sunny day with calm water in blue, green, and brown sections.

After we returned the beach wheelchair, Beth and North headed home and I got my funnel cake, which I ate very slowly in the shade of the porch of the restroom pavilion next to Funland. I only ate half of it—those things are enormous.

Next I came home and made dinner (a cucumber salad with yogurt-dill dressing and hard-boiled egg grated over it). It was ready early so Noah and I read before dinner and then after dinner Beth and the kids played a game they found in the house, while I blogged.

Thursday

Beth and Noah were out the door by eight the next morning. He wanted to fly the drone on another part of the beach, over some of the more iconic boardwalk businesses before many people were there. He flew over the Dolles sign and some dolphins, (but from pretty far away because he didn’t want to disturb them). Here’s about five minutes of his footage from both drone expeditions.

North got up twenty minutes after they left, just as I was about to wake them for their 9 a.m. Foundations of Tech class. (They decided later that day they wanted to drop half of the class and do the equivalent of a semester instead of a year over the course of five weeks because they were finding it more difficult than expected and they would have a lot going on with doctors’ appointments once we got back home.)

I made them breakfast, then headed to the beach, where I spent an hour and forty-five minutes at the beach, swimming and watching the waves from the sand.

I returned to the house, showered, read with Noah, and then we all walked down to the boardwalk again to have lunch at the crepe stall in an alley off Rehoboth Ave. It was while we were eating lunch that I finally agreed to North’s plan to go deeper in the water inside an inflatable ring with a mother on each side. (I was surprised they got Beth on board before me, as she’s generally more cautious about this kind of thing.)

Beth went to a 5 & 10 to purchase the ring, while I secured the beach wheelchair and then we all met up. It was tricky getting into and out of the water, but in between North had an experience more like swimming and they didn’t drown, so we considered it a success.

We couldn’t stay in the water too long, though, because North and I had reservations at Funland, which is operating at 20% capacity, with distancing on the rides and masks required. As a result of the reduced crowds, there were no lines to speak of, and people were pretty good about distancing. Not all of the rides are accessible, but two of North’s favorites, the Sea Dragon and the Haunted Mansion, were so they rode them three times each. I accompanied them in the Mansion and having never done it three times in one day before, I can now tell you on the second ride you notice little details you missed the first time, but by the third time it’s pretty much given up all its secrets. North also rode the helicopters twice and the bumper cars once. They were a little frustrated by a few rides that would have been accessible if not for one step up.

“Today was fun,” they said as we proceeded down the boardwalk toward home, where penne with a tomato-mushroom sauce Beth and Noah had made awaited. We ate dinner listening to a presentation about the fall semester at Ithaca on a laptop. Then after I did the dishes, there were games, and work on the puzzle, and blogging. But sadly, Beth was up late working, for the second night in a row.

Friday

I woke already sad to be leaving in a day. Sometimes at the end of beach week I feel peaceful and satisfied, but sometimes I’m just really sad and I already knew what kind of departure this was going to be. Rain was predicted in the morning, so we spent it inside. Noah and I read and watched the season four finale of The Magicians while rain pelted the windows. It was over by lunchtime, so we all went to the beach and North got to try out the ring again. We never really mastered getting in and out of the water. It’s a terrifying process actually when the waves are deep enough to go over your child’s head, but not deep enough for them to float in the ring, though North seemed pretty unfazed by it. And then Beth got knocked down by a wave on the way out and skinned both her shins. But in between, we spent a nice hour in the water and it made North very happy.

The sky was all kinds of sky at once, part overcast, part sunny, with dark gray storm clouds out at sea. These had black strands hanging down Beth thought might be rain. When we got out, Beth and the kids went to the boardwalk for treats, but in a last-day calculus, I decided I’d rather have more beach time than ice cream so I stayed. A big pod of dolphins showed up and started fishing in front of me, splashing, and flipping their tails out of the water. (I saw the back third of one of them all the way to the tip of its tail.) They were there for a half hour. It was kind of magical. I also saw osprey soaring over me with fish in their talons. I’d been seeing that all week, the fishing seemed better than usual for them.

When my family returned, just missing the dolphins, we walked toward home, but as we got close I realized I wasn’t done yet, and I split off again to return to the beach just in front of our block, where I rested on my towel and then sat up and watched the ocean, and then had my last swim in the golden early evening light. The water was calm, as it had been all week, so I floated on my back and looked at the cottony clouds and a gull circling over my head.

Back at the house, we had pizza delivered and ate it on the screened porch, and talked about how we’d missed being with our usual beach crew of extended family. Then I cleaned the kitchen, Beth and Noah finished the puzzle, we all watched an episode of Speechless, and started to pack up the house. We knew from our experience trying to get on the road a week earlier, it takes longer now that North can’t help as much and there’s more equipment to fit in and on top of the car.

Saturday

As a result of doing a lot of leaving-the-house chores the night before we got out of the house pretty smoothly and close to on time. Beth drove to the realty to return the keys while the kids and I went to the boardwalk to say goodbye to the ocean. This ritual had to be revised because it wasn’t worth the hassle of getting North down to the water, so instead we brought the water to North. We left the chair at the end of the plastic path where North could see us and we stood with our feet in the water for the requisite twenty waves, then filled a plastic water bottle with ocean water, came back and poured it on North’s feet.

And with that, our strange week at the beach was over.

Until (40 More Things): Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 10

Posted on June 4, 2020 by Steph

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Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons

From “Ella’s Song,” by Bernice Johnson Reagon

It’s been another forty days since my last “40 Things” post. It was my intention to mark our eightieth day of semi-quarantine with another list of forty things and I seem to be going through with it, though I really wasn’t expecting a nationwide wave of protests to be added to a pandemic when I was first thinking about writing this.

I could write about how hopeful the slow ebb of the first wave of the coronavirus made me feel, how things suddenly feel different than they did forty days ago, even though I’m pretty much counting on an eventual second wave. But that feeling’s been largely overshadowed by current events, so maybe I should write about my horror at the death of George Floyd, the sheer sadism of it, and my anger at how the protests have been met, especially those in D.C., because I call the D.C. metro area my home. But I could also write about the less consequential things we’ve been up to since Memorial Day because I do want these posts to be a chronicle of what everyday life was like for us during these strange times. I’m just going to do all three, in roughly chronological order.

On Memorial Day, George Floyd was murdered. You know the circumstances. What strikes me about it is how long it took. This wasn’t unconscious bias causing someone to make a terribly misguided split-second decision. This decision was made over and over again, to keep doing it, to keep killing him, despite his pleas and those of onlookers.
Protests spread across the country and were met with violence almost immediately. Even journalists are getting harassed and injured. I find this stunning. There’s no free society without a free press.
Two days after Memorial Day, Noah cast his first non-municipal vote (in the Maryland primary). I know a woman who made a cardboard voting booth for her eighteen year old daughter to use to fill out her ballot at home. I didn’t go that far, but I did take his picture at the mailbox, because it felt like a milestone.
And while voting itself isn’t going to solve everything, it’s part of the solution. That’s why Noah has applied for summer/fall internship at When We All Vote.
That same day, the death toll for covid-19 reached 100,000 in the United States. I knew it was coming because I watch those numbers pretty carefully, but it shook me anyway, all those deaths, so many of them avoidable, and resulting from the incompetence and indifference of our national leadership.
Thursday of that week there was a car crash outside our house. The car ended up on its side on the sidewalk in front of our house. Fortunately and surprisingly, no one was seriously hurt, but it took out part of our retaining wall and fence and a decades-old butterfly bush, which may seem like a trivial thing to be upset about right now, but I was.
North was in the yard at the time and very shaken up. They didn’t see what caused it but they did see the out-of-control vehicle speeding toward them.
Noah made his first 911 call to report it. I am aware of the irony of calling the police this week, but it didn’t seem like a situation that was likely to get anyone killed.
And then an old colleague from my teaching days offered me a replacement butterfly bush she’s digging up from her yard. I was touched by this, as we don’t know each other too well. Thanks, Phyllis!
That night it was my turn to pick our weekly family activity and I chose a walk to Starbucks, but it turns out it closes at 2 p.m. these days so I proposed a short walk around the neighborhood instead. I chose this activity because I’ve been trying to get North to be more active. We strolled about fifteen or twenty minutes, and I was glad to see North walking that long. The combination of their pain and not really having anywhere to go has led to them rarely leaving the house.
My mom pointed out this is a role reversal because Noah, who tends to be a homebody, has wanted to go on frequent outings so he can fly his drone.
On Friday morning I was going to take the kids on the delayed Starbucks run, but about three-quarters of a block from home, North decided it was going to be too much, so we went back home. One step forward, one step back…
Later that day North was ambulatory enough to participate in our annual porch swabbing. This is a chore the kids actually enjoy. We take everything off the porch and they pour buckets of water on the dusty floor and sweep it off with a push broom. Then we scrub the bikes and porch furniture and other things we keep on the porch and haul it all back up.
They also do this every year.
https://youtu.be/KpYCiK6zmZo&rel=0
The next day was Saturday and we went strawberry picking at the farm where we go blueberry picking almost every July. We’ve been going there for years but we’d never picked strawberries because they ripen before school’s out and Noah always had too much homework for an outing like that.
This was fun and because the berries grow close to the ground North spent a lot of time sitting on the straw between the rows and didn’t have to wrangle crutches and a basket at the same time.
We reminisced, as we always do when picking berries about how much harder it was with little kids, especially when we overheard parents saying things like “Remember, only the red ones” and “We don’t really need any straw in the basket.”
If you’re local and wondering what it’s like to pick strawberries in a pandemic, I was very impressed with the way everything was thought out and organized. You have to make reservations ahead of time online and you can pre-order anything you want from the farm stand for curbside pickup. The signage made it clear where you were supposed to go and people in the field were good about distancing and wearing masks and there was a drive-up stand where you could get strawberry slushies and warm doughnuts and kettle corn, so of course, we did. (We ate the doughnuts at a picnic table at a nearby park.)
If you’re local and you have time to do something besides protest this weekend, it’s probably the last weekend of the season for strawberries.
We came home laden with vegetables, ribbon noodles, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, and four quarts of strawberries. (We restrained ourselves from picking more than we could eat.)
I used some of them to make strawberry soup, which was basically like a smoothie in a bowl—I even put whipped cream on top—and much to my surprise, neither of the kids seemed to think it was a proper dinner, even with accompanying cheese and crackers.
That same day North’s new adult-sized forearm crutches arrived. They like having taller crutches, but they lament the lack of bright colors in the adult sizes. There’s a little purple on the new ones, but they’re mostly black.
North also met up with Zoë for the first time in two months late Saturday afternoon. A couple days in advance of Montgomery County entering Phase 1 of its reopening, we said they could go for a walk on Sligo Creek Parkway, which is closed to traffic on weekends and wide enough for a socially distant walk. Not seeing any friends for months has been tough on North, so I’m glad they got to see Zoë, walk together, and then soak their feet in the creek.
They’re planning to get together again next weekend and roast marshmallows at Zoë’s family’s fire pit.
North will have another opportunity to interact with their peers for two weeks in July because the director of their cancelled drama camp reconfigured the camp as an outdoor, socially distanced version of itself, and it’s back on. It will only be a half day and I’m really not sure how the kids are going to be able to project well enough to be heard in masks and all far apart from each other, but I trust Gretchen to make it work. The camp is not run out of the recreation center anymore and it’s by invitation only and North keeps saying, with some amusement, “I got an invitation for a private camp.”
On Sunday, Beth, Noah and I went to fly the drone at Savage Park in Howard County. As we travel into the outer suburbs it’s interesting to see how many people are wearing masks. To me it looked like fewer than in Montgomery County, but more than in Anne Arundel.
We walked over a very cool railroad bridge that spanned the Little Patuxent River, near the historic cotton mills, and then into the park. We went first to a big field with four baseball diamonds and a lot of green space in between. The dirt on the diamonds was neatly raked, with only a few footsteps. I wondered a little sadly how long it had been since anyone played ball there.
Beth tried her hand at flying the drone.
Next we took a path through the woods and down to the river. Noah flew over the water and I waded into the water, partly because I’d stepped right into a patch of poison ivy and the leaves had brushed my bare ankle and I wanted to rinse it off, but also because it’s pleasant to sit on a rock in a river on a day that’s warm but not hot, with your feet in water that’s cool but not cold. Beth sat on a dead tree that had grown in a shape very much like a bench before it died.
After we’d been there quite a while, Noah said, “Look at the snake” and he pointed to the tree branches over Beth’s head and there was a big, black snake there. Then we watched as very, very slowly, it made its way into a surprisingly small hole in the dead tree. It was quite the tight fit at the snake’s middle portion, but it got inside the presumably hollow tree.
The next day was Monday. I always mail work-related clippings to Sara on or near the first of the month. In April and May I just put stamps on the envelope and dropped it in the mailbox, but I decided to mark being in Phase 1 by going to the post office in person and running some errands in town. Beth drove me to downtown Takoma and I walked home because I’m still wary of public transportation.
None of the places I went—the post office, Takoma Beverage Company for an iced latte, or CVS—were places you couldn’t go before Monday, but I hadn’t been to any of them since March so it felt celebratory. I bought a spare pair of reading glasses and some treats and it felt like such a luxury, especially when I walked to Opal Daniels Park, which was nearly deserted, and sat on a bench and drank my coffee and dunked Oreos into it.
That evening peaceful protests in front of the White House were broken up with tear gas and rubber bullets, twenty-five minutes before the 7 p.m. curfew so the President could pose in front of St. John’s Church with a Bible. The hypocrisy of this is just astounding, especially when you consider that parishioners and clergy can’t even use the church now, as it’s inside the new security perimeter.
People are still demonstrating, however. Families we know have been there, with kids. It feels really important, but it also feels dangerous, not just because of the police/military, but because of the crowded conditions. So far, we haven’t gone. But Beth, North, and Noah have all contributed to bail funds. (They all decided to do this independently of each other.) And we’re considering going to a smaller protest in Takoma this weekend.
People are helping other people, too. The man who took in the protesters fleeing police lives just several blocks from the apartment where we lived before Noah was born and during the first year of his life.
The day after the protests were violently quelled was the first day the Post reported fewer than five hundred deaths nationally and fewer than twenty-five in Maryland. Not long ago, figures twice that high would have seemed like a good day, so it was a welcome reminder that we seem to be slowly turning the corner on that front, at least for now.
The next two days, though, figures were much higher, close to one thousand each day.
North made sign that says “All Lives Can’t Matter Until Black Lives Do.” It remains to be seen if it’s a yard sign, or if we’ll take it to a protest.
They also painted a background of vines on their backyard mural. They’re going to add flowers next, because we still need art and beauty.
And this shouldn’t need saying, but it still does: Black lives matter.

Vault Year

Posted on February 29, 2020 by Steph

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Two leap years ago North was in kindergarten in a Spanish immersion program and I wrote a blog post, called “Leap Year” about how kindergarten is a year of social, cognitive, and physical leaps. That year North learned to spend a longer day away from me than in preschool, they learned to speak Spanish, and they learned to read and write in both English and Spanish. Plus, they learned to jump rope and pump on the swings. It felt like a big deal.

Then one leap year ago Noah was in ninth grade and I wrote another blog post, called “Hop Year” about how the transition from middle school to high school had gone smoothly and how being in a high school humanities-based magnet program wasn’t that different from being in a middle school humanities-based magnet program.

Well, here it is, four years later and Noah’s in the midst of another transition, this one bigger than starting elementary or high school. He’s living away from home, managing his own life, taking the first steps of young adulthood. I thought I should write a leap year blog post about that. “Vault Year” seemed appropriate, given the magnitude of the changes.

The problem, of course, is that he’s not here, and while we do text, he’s not what you’d call forthcoming with detail, so I’m not sure I know enough about his life to fill up a blog post. (Maybe that’s why when the Ithaca College magazine comes, I read it with more curiosity than my own alma mater’s magazine.) But here I am, giving it a try.

By the way, if you’ve got your own college student or soon will, my blog friend, Swistle, has two sons in college and recently wrote about communicating with college students. Here’s her take on it.

Here are some things I know:

He applied to be a video editor at ICTV, the college television station. He got his pick of several shows and chose two—one he describes as “a Ghostbusters knockoff” and another one that’s “a sitcom about artists.” But there are so many editors he hasn’t had a chance to work on either show yet, which is frustrating. Something similar happened last semester. He may have only edited one episode. When he worked on his high school’s news show during his junior year, he was editing it on a daily basis. I wish he was getting more hands-on experience outside of the classroom.
He’s playing percussion in a band for non-music majors. It meets once a week and he says the band teacher is “less intense” than his high school band teacher, who used to send the musicians and their parents extremely long, online pep talks every week that contained gems like this: “How do you make a strong, sturdy blade? …… You have to plunge it into the fire and Keep Hammering…” (I’ve kept some of the messages in my email for their entertainment value.) Noah’s been practicing in his room with just his drumsticks and when he comes home for break he wants to bring his portable practice pad—which he used in elementary school before he got his own drum kit— back to school with him to facilitate this.
His favorite class is Intro to Media Industries, which, according to the course catalog, is about the ethical, legal, technological, economic and creative issues raised by new media. He says it’s interesting. Overall, his workload is lighter than last semester.
Left to his own devices, he’s most likely to spend his free time watching movies or television in his room. But he’s got a couple friends and one of them is able to convince him to go out and do things once in a while, like go to an Oscars viewing party.

I think that’s it. I’m tapped out. But that’s kind of the point of this year. He’s making his own way and we don’t know every little detail of what’s going on with him. And I think it’s going well. He seems happy, his grades were good last semester, and I expect the same this semester, though I haven’t asked. I think he’s still considering taking next semester off to volunteer for a campaign (either for whoever wins the Democratic primary or maybe something down ballot), but I’m not sure.

I can ask him in person soon because he’ll be home for spring break in a week. I’m looking forward to seeing him. We have no big plans, because North will be school that week, but we’re thinking of going to a maple sugar festival at Cunningham Falls State Park the Saturday before he goes back to school. It’s a little ironic, as Western New York is more maple sugar country than Western Maryland is, but it sounded fun.

Meanwhile, North thinks I should do my next leap year blog post about their senior year of high school, even though it’s the last year of something and not the first. It’s the year before the leap, they pointed out. It’s possible by then they’ll know where they’re going to college, or at least have it narrowed down to a few choices. It seems a lot closer and more real than it did when Noah was in middle school and I was barely thinking about college. Now that we’ve launched one kid, it seems like something that actually happens, not some abstract theoretical concept.

Of course, there’s still high school to get through. Thursday after school North proposed a walk to Starbucks because they didn’t have an afterschool activity and it was a sunny day, if a bit chilly, and we both had Starbucks gift cards from Valentine’s Day burning holes in our pockets. While we were there we talked about the pros and cons of the school they were assigned in the lottery, their first-choice school, and the Visual Arts Center. They won’t hear the results of the second chance lottery for a month and the VAC will be accepting students off the waitlist for another two months, so nothing has changed since the last time I wrote about this. North is simultaneously impatient to know where they’re going and sanguine about all the options. No matter how it turns out, I’m looking forward to seeing how their high school years unfold. I know now how fast they will go by.

Seize the Day

Posted on August 3, 2019 by Steph

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As Beth, Noah, and I walked toward the music school building at the University of Maryland for North’s choir camp concert on Friday afternoon, I said that after Sunday we’d be all finished with this summer’s performances.

“Yah!” Beth said.

“They’re not that bad,” Noah joked and Beth explained her comment had not been about the quality of the performances, which we always enjoy, just the logistics of rehearsals and performances. The past week had been one of the more hectic weeks of the summer with North at chorus camp in the daytime and Sweeney Todd rehearsals and performances at night. (And it happened to be a week when Beth was out of town for a week-long business trip to Las Vegas. She’d only returned the evening before.)

It’s true one of the ways I mark our progress through any summer is in performances. And by that metric, we’ve zipped past a film camp screening, five performances of Sweeney Todd, and choir camp concert since I last wrote. We have just two performances of Sweeney Todd to go (one of which is in progress right now).

Film Camp

Exactly a week after North was in Wicked at musical theater camp, the kids at the film camp where Noah was a counselor screened their films at Rhizome, a local art space where the camp was held. It’s a clapboard house with a front porch decorated with strings of large colorful beads, a screening room on the first floor, and gallery space upstairs. The house and the neighborhood offered a lot of diverse spaces for filming. In addition to the porch and interior of the house, the kids used a nearby alley and a small plaza in front of an office building and the lobby of the same building.

The camp director was Noah’s media teacher in tenth grade and he’s the faculty sponsor for Blair Network Communications (the school television station) and Silver Lens (the documentary team). Noah was on BNC his junior year and Silver Lens his senior year so he and Mr. M know each other well. For two weeks Noah helped him teach a small group of middle schoolers how to write scripts, film, and edit.

On the third Friday in July, the audience gathered in the screening room. Mr. M and some of the campers spoke about their experiences at camp and then Mr. M showed some of the practice film they shot while working on camera skills. There were two short feature presentations, interconnected films, the first about the persecution of animal-human hybrids (I’m guessing some of these kids saw Sorry to Bother You) and the second about the hybrids’ rebellion. Each film was about eight minutes long. In addition to his behind the scenes roles, Noah played two goat hybrids, a lawyer, and a pro-hybrid human protester. The films were a lot of fun and afterward Mr. M was effusive in his praise of Noah. One of the campers chimed in that he’d been “invaluable.”

Camp Mommy

Both kids were home the following week. Whenever there’s a week like this in the summer, we call it Camp Mommy. North went to the U.S. Botanical Gardens with their Highwood friend Lyn and we made soft blackberry cookies for a family friend who was in the hospital. (They were kind of like scones, but crumblier.) The kids and I took walks together most mornings before it got too hot. They did house and yard work and North helped with dinner most nights and thought to bring in the laundry one afternoon while I was on a conference call and it started to thunder. Noah started deep cleaning his room and stripping it of knickknacks he no longer wanted (a lot of which were actually North’s, abandoned two years ago when they got their own room).

We took most of the castoffs to the fairy tree near the playground. Wait, your neighborhood doesn’t have a fairy tree? It’s a tree that’s hollow at the bottom where people leave toys and decorative items and then other people take them home. I am a habitual contributor as the house is still full of the kids’ old toys and this is more fun than taking them to the thrift store. One day when we went to drop off seven child-sized bracelets, we found someone turned the collection of items there into an art installation. A large Batman doll was seated on a brick, with a rubber duck keyring dangling from his wrist and a Chinese rabbit we’d left there earlier suspended over his head. I put one of the bracelets around his neck and scattered the rest on the ground around him.

Tech rehearsals for Sweeney Todd started that week so it was nice North didn’t have any place to be in the morning after late nights at the theater. And right before Beth left for Las Vegas we developed a cascade of interconnected plumbing problems that lead to multiple visits from plumbers and a contractor, the removal of our dishwasher, and water damage to a basement wall. So, that week and the next I spent a lot of time coordinating with workers and washing dishes by hand. Noah said I was “partying like it’s 1899.”

Choir Camp

This was North’s most transportation-challenging week of the summer. Sweeney Todd opened that Friday and I had to figure out how to get North home from the theater late at night with Beth out of town. I ended up finding rides for every night, so I didn’t need to take a Lyft out there to pick them up. Thanks, Lane! Thanks, Yulia! Starting Monday, North was in choir camp in College Park in the daytime. They had to miss the first day (Sunday) because they had a Sweeney Todd matinee, so I went up there to collect their music and find out what electives they had (songwriting, theater, and ukulele). Getting to College Park is a little trickier than North’s other day camp, which is in Takoma Park, but after Noah and I helped them navigate the trip there and back on Monday (it involves switching buses at a transit center) they were able to get themselves to camp and back on Tuesday.

To make matters more complicated, Monday and Tuesday were days off at the theater, but Wednesday there was a brush-up rehearsal and a show on Thursday night so they had to go straight from camp to Silver Spring, grab some dinner there and then go to the theater. Wednesday I picked them up at camp and accompanied them to Silver Spring and took them out for pizza and bubble tea before rehearsal started. Thursday they made the same trip alone (and even figured out a better two-bus route than the bus-train-train one I’d used the day before). This was good because it meant I could be home for the contractor, who at 7:56 a.m. had changed his arrival time from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Beth got home that evening, after seven and a half days away, and we were all very happy to see her. She ate dinner and crashed, napping until it was time to go get North at the theater. The next day she worked from home and we all set out for the concert a little after one p.m. This was our eighth year of going to band, orchestra, and chorus concerts at the University of Maryland so we knew what to expect. The fifth to seventh grade orchestra played first, followed by the eighth to tenth grade orchestra. (Orchestra and chorus camps take place the same week; band camp is the week previous). The chorus performed last.

Their first song, North’s favorite, was “Seize the Day” from Newsies. (It should surprise no one their favorite piece was from a musical.) The junior counselors who were accompanying the chorus on various instruments all wore newsboy caps, which was a nice touch. Next was a pretty sixteenth-century Italian song, then a traditional camp meeting song, “No Time,” (which North sang one year in Honors Chorus) and a traditional South African song with an accompanying dance. This was possible because rather than standing on risers, the singers were on wide platforms built into the stage, so there was room to move around and stomp. North managed the forward, backward, and side to side steps on crutches and even stamped lightly. The last song was Harry Belafonte’s “Turn the World Around” with steel drums to give it a Caribbean sound. It was an uplifting tune and I found myself thinking of the Democratic debates I’d stayed up late to watch earlier in the week, allowing myself to feel a little bit hopeful and wondering which candidate can turn the country around. It sorely needs it.

After the concert we went out for ice cream at the University’s ice cream parlor, then later that evening out for pizza. On the way home we saw a rainbow. I wondered if it was a good omen.

We’re going to see the closing performance of Sweeney Todd tomorrow. Then the kids have another week at home together before North heads off to sleep-away camp. I think the second session of Camp Mommy will feature a creek walk, a trip to Langley Park for a pupusa lunch, and the filming of a music video. I may also take North and Lyn to a movie and to splash in the fountain in Silver Spring. It’s not looking like I’ll have much work for either Sara or Mike, and honestly, this week I don’t mind. Noah has only two and a half weeks of summer break left and North has four. I want to seize every day.

Chasing Stars

Posted on November 17, 2018 by Steph

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The night of the midterm elections we gathered in front of the television with popcorn and Halloween candy to watch the results. I thought I might overeat from the stress, but I soon found I’d crossed over into too-nervous-to-eat territory, especially as the House victories did not pile up as quickly as we would have liked and Noah, who was watching both the television and FiveThirtyEight on his laptop, announced that the probability of the Democrats taking the House had dipped. When it got down to 39 percent, he looked stricken and I thought how 2016 was his only reference point for following and deeply caring about an election. “It’s happening again,” he murmured.

But as you know, it didn’t. The Democrats took the House and there’s a remarkably diverse group of firsts headed for Washington, DC—the first Muslim women, the first Native American women, the youngest Congresswoman ever. Democrats gained seven governorships and didn’t lose any, and they made gains in state legislatures across the country. If it wasn’t for losing ground in the Senate, and some heartbreaking close misses at more Governorships in Georgia and Florida, it would have seemed like an unalloyed victory. We all went to bed past our bedtimes, more relieved than ebullient.

The next day I checked and the candidates I wrote postcards for did worse than average—only about twenty percent won—and that was disappointing, but Beth pointed out they wouldn’t recruit postcard writers for safe races, so I’m planning to write some more for Mike Espy’s Senate run-off in Mississippi this weekend.

And, as you also know, in the week and a half since the election, the wave only got bigger. Every time I hear how many seats the Democrats won in the House it’s a different number, but I know it’s in the mid-thirties and there are still undecided races, including at least one of my postcard candidates in California. Meanwhile the losses in the Senate are smaller than initially predicted. My postcard victory rate is up to about twenty-five percent.

Two days after the election, there were pro-Mueller investigation rallies all over the country after the President fired Jeff Sessions. There were two nearby, one in front of the White House and another one, which was more convenient but probably less impactful, in downtown Silver Spring. All day I was torn between which, if any, to attend. One complicating factor was that North had left the house without their ukulele, which they needed for a coffeehouse rehearsal after school, and they’d also forgotten their script for play rehearsal after that. I wasn’t sure if delivering the instrument and the script to school for them would constitute helicopter parenting but it would have taken me within walking distance of the Silver Spring protest, so I was considering that plan, even though it would have gotten me there very early and I’d promised to read several scenes of King Lear to Noah after school.

But then North texted me to say they’d found a ukulele to borrow and Noah came home and wanted to know if I could also quiz him on a huge pile of notes for a test in his Logic class on the history of mathematics and I hadn’t managed to make dinner ahead of time, so it seemed simplest to stay home, read Lear to Noah, quiz him on the Logic, and make a tomato-eggplant stew.

Beth went to the White House protest and because North thought I might be at the Silver Spring protest and they were in that neighborhood with time to kill between rehearsals anyway, they went to that one and sent me short video of people chanting. So the Lovelady-Allens were represented at each of the rallies even if we didn’t all make it.

Middle School Coffeehouse

The next day we attended the coffeehouse at North’s school. They were going to play the ukulele and sing their original song “Chasing Stars.” I know most of you saw the music video Noah and North made of it when I put it on Facebook in July, but just in case you didn’t, here’s your chance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z06ftRZQA0&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR0HkAanJQZociqzdjXi_4SqPTvvLIl19WL821AJVptXAvAd-NdHVixCzkg

The advertised start time for the coffeehouse was 6:00 and the performers were supposed to arrive at 5:45, so North left fifteen minutes before Noah and me. Noah had stayed after school to finish the Logic test and I was hoping he’d have time to practice his drums before we left but he took a long time to get started and after only fifteen minutes, I had to tell him to stop. Or I thought I did. The bus got us there at 5:50 and then we waited almost an hour for the coffeehouse to start. Apparently, there had been a mistake in the publicity and it wasn’t supposed to start until 6:30, then the band and orchestra teacher announced, much to Beth’s and my dismay, that they were delaying the start because the rain might be slowing traffic. So… let’s say it would have been safe for Noah to finish drumming. I was frustrated because he’s been so busy he’s been skipping practice a lot. I was also bored because in our rush to leave the house, I’d forgotten my phone and I hadn’t brought anything else to read either. I tried to take my own advice—given in a recent ghost-written blog post—about using unexpected waiting time as an opportunity for mindfulness, but I failed at it.

Once it finally started, the show was very nice. North went second out of ten performers. They sang well, but looked nervous, especially at the beginning of the song. They relaxed into it somewhat as they went on. As I told them later, when I used to give conference papers I always liked to go early so I could enjoy everyone else’s presentation and they nodded, either agreeing or humoring me.

And there was a lot to enjoy after North’s song. There are many talented singers and musicians at their school. Kids sang songs by Adele, the White Stripes, and Vance Joy and other pop singers. One boy played “Fur Elise” on the piano and there was a violinist who played a very impressive and intricate piece. North wasn’t the only one playing an original composition. A boy who went to North’s elementary school and attends the same church as Beth and North played a song he’d written on the piano and two more boys performed their own jointly written song for guitar and mandolin. Everyone did a great job.

Toward the end of the show, there was a sixth-grade girl whose background music cut out in the middle of her performance of “Feel Better When I’m Dancing” and she just kept singing, completely self-possessed. Eventually people in the audience started clapping and stomping their feet to the beat to replace the missing music. It was one of those moments that makes you feel better about humanity. Also, I think that girl is going places.

Snow Day

About a week later, North was supposed to have the chance to perform “Chasing Stars” again at their induction into Tri-M, the music honor society. They were elected the President of their school’s chapter last spring, so they were going to give a speech and sing.

But we got a couple inches of snow that morning and school and all after school activities were cancelled. This is the earliest measurable snow I remember having in all the sixteen and a half years we’ve lived in Maryland and the latest in the morning a snow day has ever been called. I got an alert on my phone at 5:00 a.m. saying it would be at least a two-hour delay, with a possible cancellation, to be decided by 7:00. This is pretty standard procedure. At 6:50, the alert said it would be a two-hour delay. I didn’t quite trust it, though, because it was still snowing and it was supposed to snow until noon. Sure enough, at 8:45, fifteen minutes before Noah was supposed to leave the house, Zoë called and North put her on speaker phone and I heard the dreaded words, “No school!”

North was actually disappointed when the two-hour delay was called because the seventh grade had a field trip to Medieval Times planned and the students had been explicitly told a two-hour delay would scotch it, but North was consoling themselves with the fact that the induction ceremony would go on if there was school. Well, so much for that.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate snow days? Yes? Okay. I’ll spare you the unreasonably emotional rant. I mean, what’s the point in saying it all again? It really makes no sense now that my kids are old enough not to be underfoot all day. Still, I felt really sad that morning, actually crying at the kitchen window as I watched it come down. I’m not sure exactly why snow days do that to me, but I have a theory it’s a trigger for me because my father died shortly before the big blizzard of 2010 that had the kids out of school for weeks. Fortunately, snow when we’re away from home doesn’t have that effect on me, so if it snows while we’re at Blackwater this Christmas, I can enjoy it.

North, perhaps wanting to avoid their morose mother or perhaps hoping to escape before I thought to give them a chore, left the house shortly after nine, meeting Zoë at a park. They spent the rest of the day at Zoë’s house, where the two of them made a snowwoman in a bikini, played with Zoë’s Guinea pigs, and watched television, not returning until after dinner. Noah spent most of the day in his room working on his senior presentation. I folded laundry, worked, and went on some errands, partly to get out of the house, partly because I needed stamps for the weekend’s postcard writing. I even stopped in a nearby store thinking I might try to do some holiday shopping but apparently that was a bridge too far because I started thinking about the impossibility of anything ever genuinely pleasing anyone and then I decided maybe I should just go home and leave the shopping for a less grim day.

High School Film Screening

The next day was Friday. There had been some speculation that there might be a two-hour delay but the kids went to school on time. That evening there was a screening of films made by students at Noah’s school and another local high school at a local art space. We got there about a half hour before the films started so we had some pizza and then went upstairs to look at the art on display. There was an exhibit of poems printed over each other, some abstract black and white architectural photographs, and a room in which visitors were encouraged to add a line to a collective poem written on the wall in marker.

The films started late, but comparing it to the coffeehouse the week before, it was remarkable how much less impatient I felt when I’d been fed and given something interesting to look at. The films were excellent. One of them we’d seen at the Montgomery County Youth Media Festival last spring, but most of them were new. Noah’s was about the White Oak duckpin bowling alley and the community of bowlers there. (One of Noah’s favorite parts of making the film was getting to go behind the lanes and seeing the pin -setting machinery.)

You can watch it here if you like. It’s about six minutes long:

We also really liked the film about a local tattoo artist who will cover gang and white supremacist tattoos for free. The students from Bethesda-Chevy Chase mostly showed footage from their weekly news show. In addition to screening the films, it was a chance for the students from the two schools to network and discuss possible collaboration. It was a fun event.

So, how to wrap this up? The election results were encouraging, but there’s still a lot of work to do, and we are all chasing stars in our own way, whether political or artistic.

Spooked, Part 3

Posted on November 5, 2018 by Steph

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Two Sundays ago I woke thinking of the synagogue shooting the day before. I was full of sadness for the world and the little spark of hope I usually feel after voting was almost extinguished. I muddled through the next couple days and on Monday evening I was idly checking my phone to see if there were any new Postcards for Voters campaigns; I was thinking I was probably finished because the deadline was the very next day and I was out of postcard stamps. When Senator Heidi Heitkamp’s name came up as one of the options I think I may have yelped with excitement. I know I went around the house telling everyone in my mildly amused family. A Senate campaign for an endangered Democrat who risked her seat by voting no on Kavanaugh was definitely worth a trip to the post office.

I initially started writing postcards with the goal of flipping the House and improving the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the Senate. But some days the only campaigns on offer were ones I’d already written for and down ballot races. It was tempting to learn about a lot of different campaigns and I started thinking about the importance of party building and getting people (especially women) in the pipeline for higher office so I ended up writing for all kinds of campaigns, for Governors, state legislators, even a county commissioner and a school board candidate. I also wrote for a ballot initiative in Florida to restore the voting rights of people with felony convictions who’d served their time. All in all, I wrote 231 postcards, from mid-September to the first day of November. Forty of them were in the last four days of that span.

I tracked down postcard stamps at the second post office I visited—they’ve been hard to find so I think my neighbors had been doing the same thing I was. I’d committed to write twenty-five postcards for Heitkamp and I thought it would be nice to have some on hand for upcoming special elections so I bought forty. But they kept extending the deadlines so I wrote five more for Andrew Gillum in Florida and then ten for Tedra Cobb in New York on short deadlines. I would have kept going but I ran out of stamps again.

On more than one night, I camped out in Noah’s room writing postcards while he worked on homework or his first college application. He’s applying early action to the University of Maryland Baltimore College and the Honors College there. There were four essays for the Honors College, separate from the main essay he’s using for all his college applications, so he had a lot to write, too.

It was a shame it was such a busy week for him, because I would have liked him to come to the vigil in downtown Takoma for the victims of the shootings in Kentucky and Pittsburgh Monday night. North had rehearsal so they couldn’t come either. Beth and I could only stay for part of it because we needed to go pick them up, but it was nice, the speeches, and songs and the candles in the darkness while we gathered with our neighbors to honor the lives lost. My friend Becky, who’s active in gun control groups, was one of the organizers. Thanks for everything you do, Becky.

Noah didn’t skip trick-or-treating on Wednesday, though he was working before and after. He also took some time before dinner to get the battery-operated decorations and the fog machines up and running. I fed everyone a quick supper of grilled cheese sandwiches and canned soup and the kids were off around seven. I stayed home giving out candy to about forty kids dressed as everything from Astronaut to Zombie. Several people asked to take pictures of our yard. Our around-the-corner neighbor came by with her daughter and posted a picture of our porch on Facebook with the caption “Best House in the Hood.”

When the kids got home at eight-thirty, I was tempted to tell them they should trade candy later because North needed to wash off their bloody makeup in the shower and go to bed and Noah’s application was stuck. He’d tried to submit it before dinner and the Common App site wouldn’t recognize the PDF. But it wasn’t really a crisis because it wasn’t due until the next evening and I realized it was probably the last time the kids would ever trick-or-treat together, so I didn’t rush either of them along. It all ended well. Noah tweeted to the Common App before he and North left and they responded quickly with a workaround and before he went to bed on Halloween, his first application was in the bag.

The next weekend, Beth and Noah went on their annual fall camping trip. They’d had to cancel a few weeks earlier because of Noah’s workload so I was glad they got it in before the cold weather sets in—it did get down into the thirties at night. This year they went to Catoctin Mountain Park and stayed in a charming but drafty cabin built by the Civilian Conservation Corp during the Depression. Noah worked on overdue logic homework that fell by the wayside while he was working on a presentation for his senior seminar and the UMBC application, but they also hiked and made S’mores and relaxed.

Meanwhile back at home, North and I watched The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride, and I took them to therapy and to get their hair cut and to the pool and the library. It was Noah’s half-birthday on Saturday so we all had cupcakes, which we ate separately. That was a little strange, but it was nice when the campers came home and we were all re-united over a dinner of breaded tofu and baked Parmesan-squash rings Beth made for us. They’d also brought home a pecan pie from an orchard they’d visited on the way home.

Today North’s acting class had its last meeting and they performed the scenes they’ve been working on since September. Mondays have been a tight squeeze for North all fall. They generally got off the school bus and I thrust a packed dinner at them, they grabbed their scripts and got on second bus to acting class, which they had to leave fifteen minutes early to catch a third bus to rehearsal at the theater.

So we did the first part of that except I didn’t have their dinner ready because I was going to bring it to the performance. I finished making the curried lentil-vegetable stew, put a thermos full of it into a lunchbox along with a Reese’s peanut butter cup and a couple lollipops from their Halloween stash and got on a bus to the Rec Center.

The kids performed scenes from The Parent Trap, Peter and the Starcatcher, one of the Harry Potter books, and The Hunger Games. In a was a strange coincidence, North ended up in a scene from the same play in which they’re performing at Highwood next month. They’d hoped to be in a scene from Dear Evan Hansen but couldn’t convince any other students to do it with them. So I got a preview of that scene with North in the role of Peter. (In the Highwood version they’re playing four small parts, but more on that in a later post.) The play is a prequel to Peter Pan, and in the featured scene Peter is shyly approaching a girl who kissed him in an earlier scene and who now seems to regret having done it or at least has mixed feelings. North did a good job conveying Peter’s embarrassment and hopefulness. I also liked seeing Grace (the teacher’s daughter who’s been in acting classes with North since they were both three) in the Hunger Games scene. She made an excellent Katniss. The scene was the one in which Katniss and Rue pair up. It made me wonder if I could entice North to read that series with me.

After the scenes, Gretchen had the kids discuss their scenes and explain what acting techniques they’d been using. North had left for rehearsal by that point and I was sorry not to hear what they would have said. Right when the improv exercises—with audience participation—were about to start I slipped out of the auditorium. When I got to my bus stop North was still at theirs (directly across the street) sitting on a bench, illuminated by the streetlight, eating lentil stew out of their thermos. We waved at each other. My bus actually came first, even though I’d stayed inside ten minutes longer.

Even though it was cut a little short, it was nice to see North up on stage. I always enjoy seeing them in their element. And it also kept me busy on a day when I was full of nervous energy about the election tomorrow. We’re all a bit spooked now, but soon we’ll know a little more about what the future holds, for better or for worse.

Spooked, Part 2

Posted on November 4, 2018 by Steph

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Most years Noah is working on his Halloween costume right up until the Halloween parade and usually we’re sliding it into the hatch of the car hoping the tacky paint won’t smear. (And almost as often he’s still applying the finishing touches he didn’t complete in time for the contest right before he leaves for trick-or-treating.) I thought we might avoid that rush because he made his costume so far in advance this year for the film he was making for school. But last Saturday morning found him on the porch, painting details he didn’t have time to include when he was filming. (He did finish the costume Saturday, though. No new work was needed on Halloween.)

Beth, North, and I had a busy morning. We had an initial meeting with a new therapist for North, then we went to Silver Spring to vote early. There was a moderately long line, but it moved quickly. When someone saw it and left, Beth said under her breath, “Get your ass back here and vote!” As I went through the stations, I made sure to thank every poll worker I encountered. It seems a more vital job than ever these days. From the polls, we went to Michael’s for more green spray paint for Noah, who needed it for his back panel, and then to Starbucks for coffee for the adults and a Witches’ Brew frappuccino for North.

We didn’t know it at the time but the shooting at the synagogue in Squirrel Hill took place while we were driving to vote. I read about it later in the day on my phone. Remember how I said in my last post we’d have a new political horror within the week? I didn’t have anything that horrible in mind. I just don’t know what to say about it, the loss of life, the President’s refusal to stop using the same inflammatory rhetoric about the migrant caravan that lead to it. Words fail.

So I had a heavy heart as we set out for the rec center Halloween party at 1:40. It was a party this year rather than a parade because the day was cold and predicted to be rainy. It never did much more than sprinkle and the parade probably could have gone on, but they have to make the call a few days ahead of time.

The party was at a local elementary school but not the same one where it used to be years ago when the parade terminated at a school. (The route has changed quite a few times in the many years we’ve been going.) I think I liked the old school better because it had a bigger gathering space in the gym. It felt crowded in the cafeteria where the line-up for the contest was. There was less mingling and I didn’t see as many people’s costumes. We did see Keira, an eighth grader from North’s school dressed as a mailbox. Over the years, Keira has been as serious about her Halloween costumes as my kids, maybe even more so. The details on the mailbox, from the rivets to the labels with the USPS logo and collection hours were just spot on. She could have been in the group category because her mom was dressed as a postcard, but she sized up the room and decided to enter Teen to Adult instead, which put her in competition with Noah. (Most years she’s in North’s age group.)

I could see why she did it, though. There were some good groups, one of people dressed as objects representing Takoma Park businesses, two men in prison jumpsuits marked “Cohen” and “Manafort” with a baby in a suit with a briefcase representing Mueller. Creatively used babies seemed to be a theme this year. There was a Frankenstein’s Monster and Bride of Frankenstein with a baby Dr. Frankenstein complete with a white coat and goggles, and a woman dressed as Professor Sprout from the Harry Potter books with a baby dressed as a mandrake in a fabric pot attached to her.

North assessed the nine-to-twelve year old line and decided their main competition was either the girl in Harlequin tights with bleeding eyes or Beetlejuice. North was going for Scariest. (They later told me they’d rather not win anything than win Cutest, but when you’re dressed as Lizzie Borden, there’s really not much risk of winning Cutest.)

The contestants went outside one category at a time for the judges to get a better look at them and take names. Noah and Keira were the only two people who came outside for Teen to Adult, which struck me as strange. There should have been more than that. Group costumes came close on their heels, though, so maybe people in those two categories got mixed up.

The parade took place in an abbreviated form through the halls of the school and we ended up in the gym for a concert and the contest results, which were announced in between songs. The band wasn’t the Grandsons for the first time I can remember and while the new band played a lot of crowd favorites—“Monster Mash,” “Ghostbusters,” and “This is Halloween”—they weren’t as good as the Grandsons in our collective (but admittedly change-resistant) opinion.

We watched the winners of the Four and Under and Five to Eight categories. North was not expecting to win because when they were outside, no judge took their name. This wasn’t a good sign but it’s not a perfect predictor. While the judges usually take more names than there are winners, occasionally they don’t get a winner’s name and the winner is announced by costume, so I thought there was a chance. Most Original went to Medusa. Noah immediately protested that Medusa is not original–“The Greeks thought of her thousands of years ago!”—but it was a very nice execution. The girl’s headdress was a tangle of snakes almost as big as she was. Scariest went to Beetlejuice and none of us remember who won Cutest because we are, as a whole, uninterested in that category.

We waited through another song to hear the Teen to Adult results. Most Original was Keira’s mailbox and it was impossible to begrudge her that win. She’s a worthy opponent. Then someone—again no one remembers who—won for Cutest. I had thought it was likely they’d find more teens or adults during the parade part of the festivities and I guess that’s what happened. There was no announcement for Scariest, which was disappointing. Even though Noah was going for Most Original, hackers are plenty scary so that would have worked, too.

I am always sad for the kids when they don’t win the contest because they put so much work into their costumes and it means a lot to them. But losing is part of competing. They both know that and they are generally good sports about it. That said, Noah seemed to take it harder than usual this year, either because it was probably his last year in the contest or because no winner was announced in a category he could have won. Rather than shrugging it off, he spent some time afterward fretting about whether the judges even understood his costume. He wondered if the news story on which it was based was too obscure. Anyway, we hung around to see the winners in the group category—the Takoma businesses group won first prize—and then North went through the inflatable corn maze and we went home.

We were in Halloween mode, so we launched into carving our pumpkins. Beth’s is the sugar skull, mine is the zombie hand rising from the ground, Noah’s is the cat superimposed over a ghost, and North’s is the cannibal pumpkin—yes, that’s a tiny carved pumpkin in the mouth of the big one. We ate candy corn while we carved and listened to our Halloween playlist and set aside the seeds to roast, all long-standing traditions. These are the things that hold us together and even in our sadness for our country, let us hold tight to each other.

Which Side Are You On?

Posted on September 22, 2018 by Steph

They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there.
You’ll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair

From “Which Side Are You On,” by Florence Reece

We’re a few weeks into the school year, which means North’s activities are starting. They’re taking an acting class at the rec center, they have rehearsals for Peter and the Starcatcher starting next week and they’re going to try out for glee club at school. Rainbow Alliance should start meeting soon as well. They’re also involved in a program at the rec center for middle and high school students to write TED talks and they get weekly coaching on their speech, which is on the theme of assumptions.

September also means a lot of meetings. We’ve been to North’s school twice, once for a meeting about the seventh and eighth-grade Spanish immersion trip to Columbia next spring and once for Back to School Night. We’ve also been to Noah’s school twice, once for a twelfth-grade CAP meeting and once for its Back to School Night. It was my very last Back to School Night for Noah. I might have been sad about that, but they keep you busy running from one classroom to another at those things, so there wasn’t really time.

Tuesday we went to Children’s National Medical Center for a meeting of their trans kids’ support group. We went for the first time in July and it was our first time back since then. (We were out of town during the August meeting.) The kids and parents meet separately. The middle school group is pretty small, consisting right now of North and two trans boys who are both in eighth grade. North seems to like it and it’s interesting to hear other parents talk about their experiences, although ours are often a little different because being non-binary presents different issues.

When it was over North asked what we talked about and Beth said, “Our kids. Did you talk about your parents?” North said yes, among other things. The group meets from five to six-thirty and I didn’t have anything started for dinner at home so we ate at the hospital cafeteria and then we went out for gelato, as it wasn’t a school night. (It was the night Yom Kippur began.)

Meanwhile, Noah’s working on getting materials together for his first college application. UMBC has a non-binding early action application deadline in a little over a month. It’s the only early application he’ll do as the others on his list only have binding early decision deadlines and he doesn’t have a clear front-runner. We went to tour the campus about two weeks ago. (The kids had the day off for Rosh Hashanah.) We’d been to their open house in August, but we couldn’t stay for the tour because North had a chorus camp concert that day. Nothing we saw on this tour really changed Noah’s mind about the school one way or the other, but I was glad we went so we wouldn’t wonder what we’d missed.

Last weekend we went to the Takoma Park Folk Festival. A few weeks ago when I mentioned that unless he goes to school close to home, it might be the last folk festival Noah attends with us, Beth told me I couldn’t get sentimental at every event all year because it’s the last one before Noah leaves for college. But still… we’ve gone almost every year since Noah was a toddler. When he was in preschool and elementary school he loved this festival and he always wanted a t-shirt so for a while we had quite a collection of them. (And I’m going to mention that as we left the festival, Beth and North were bemoaning the fact that Noah probably wouldn’t be there next year. So I’m not the only sentimental one.)

It was the same as it always is. We listened to a few bands and shopped at the craft booths, where North bought some bath salts and a bundle of sage for Xavier’s birthday (as well as some to keep) and we ate festival food (tofu burgers and plantains for the adults, fried rice or lo mein for the kids and ice cream for everyone). We visited Lesley at the booth for the kids’ preschool and she praised Noah’s work on the podcast and told us one of my former students from George Washington University (now in her thirties with a husband and a toddler) visited the booth and is considering the school because after she graduated from college she babysat for us for a long time and she remembered hearing us say good things about it. I had this student in two classes in the 2001-2002 school year and we still exchange Christmas cards. How’s that for a long-term recruitment plan?

The first band we saw was singing Hazel Dickens union songs. The audience skewed older and when we walked in, I wondered if the kids were going to find this boring. I remembered how when we’d seen Magpie perform (perhaps in the very same middle school gym) for a crowd of mostly middle-aged and elderly Takoma Park lefties seven years ago, North actually fell asleep in my lap. One reason I wanted to go to this session is that we know the lead singer. He’s the dad of a girl who has acted at Highwood and the rec center drama camp with North in quite a few shows. (She also attended the kids’ preschool in the year ahead of North. Why, yes, everything always does come back to that preschool.) I always appreciate it when people we know turn out for North’s performances and I like to pay it forward, and not just for kids.

I enjoyed the set and I even found myself unexpectedly moved when the whole room was enthusiastically singing “Which Side Are You On?” It made me want to make a difference and reminded me that I’d been meaning to get set up as a writer for Postcards to Voters, which is just what it sounds like, a campaign to get people to write get-out-the-vote messages on postcards to Democratic voters in districts with close races. My friend Megan (a mom from preschool, naturally) had posted about it on Facebook a few days earlier and it struck me as something I could easily do. Other than writing modest checks, I haven’t been very politically active recently and there is an election around the corner. But I’m not a natural organizer. The idea of calling people up on the phone or knocking on doors gives me hives, but writing postcards…Sure, I can do that.

So a few days later, I wrote a sample postcard, photographed it, submitted it, and committed to write fifteen postcards in three days. (You choose how many you want to do, from four to fifty at a shot.) Within forty minutes, I’d been approved as a postcard writer and I was sent fifteen addresses from the Cincinnati metro area. I went to the post office, bought some postcard stamps, came home and started writing postcards. While I was writing postcards North was (coincidentally) burning their bundle of sage in the fireplace in the same room. It felt as if we were both purging demons. The whole experience was very satisfying and I did another batch to people in the Anaheim area last night. If you’d like to do this, too, check out the Postcards for Voters web site.

The midterms are in less than seven weeks and they could make a real difference in the direction our country takes. I’m going to be writing postcards as often as I can between now and then because I know which side I’m on.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Elections

Back at the Hospital: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 21

Report from the Fourth Quarantine: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 19

Green Light for the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 16

Until (40 More Things): Coronavirus Chronicle, Part 10

Vault Year

Seize the Day

Chasing Stars

Spooked, Part 3

Spooked, Part 2

Which Side Are You On?