Three Weekends

Posted on September 15, 2024 by Steph

Three weeks have gone by since we took North to Oberlin and then came home without them. It feels odd to be a household of three, none of whom attends a Montgomery County public school, needs to go to a Back to School Night anywhere, or is starting any new extracurricular activities. But September has not been completely unrecognizable. Each of its first three weekends we did something familiar in the form of a picnic, a music festival, or a pie contest. And we tried something new, too.

First Weekend: Labor Day Picnic

I had gotten used to the rhythm of North coming home from camp on Friday evenings and staying until Sunday morning, so I guess it wasn’t surprising that when on the Friday before Labor Day weekend they didn’t come home, it felt strange and hard.

The weekend itself was low-key. Beth went kayaking Saturday morning, and I went swimming. Noah mowed the lawn, he and I made zucchini fritters for dinner, and we all watched a movie. The day before we’d all conducted a round of movie nominations and vetoes, which netted us six movies to watch in September and October. Saturday night we watched King of Hearts, a movie which North had vetoed in a previous round, and I threw back into the pool, suspecting it might survive the process this time. I loved this French 1960s anti-war movie as a teen and hadn’t seen it since then. It doesn’t completely hold up, but it has its charms.

Also over the weekend Noah and I finally finished reading Maskerade, which we’d been reading since mid-July and started a new book, which despite its title seems to be more fantasy than romance. Sunday night we went to Koma for soft serve. The flavor names there are kind of fanciful. Beth and I got Brigadeiro, which the menu described as “sort of like a Brazilian Fudge.” Without this helpful note, I would have thought it was chocolate. Noah got caramelized coconut (and a salad because he hadn’t eaten much at dinner).

Labor Day was barely a holiday, as two out of three of us worked. Noah went into the office for a shortened day and Beth was at her computer most of the day as well. AT&T was on strike and strikes and political campaigns don’t take holidays. Noah’s been working on ads for Democratic political candidates, but also issue ads, on topics such as abortion and redistricting. A lot of them are airing in Ohio.

While they were thus engaged, I made a plum torte (your recipe, Suzanne) and assembled a picnic dinner of vegetarian hot dogs, devilled eggs, tomato slices, corn on the cob, and cole slaw to eat in the back yard. The torte was slightly burned on top, but independently of each other, Beth and Noah both declared it “pretty” and it was tasty, too.

Noah wasn’t initially sure he’d be home by dinner time. He has a long commute—two buses and a train—and generally gets home at seven-thirty or eight and eats a plate of whatever Beth and I have already eaten. But he got off early enough to eat dinner with us. I was glad about that because our three summer picnics (Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day) are long-standing traditions and Beth and North had both been out of town this Fourth of July, and of course, I was missing North. It wasn’t like being all together, but it was still nice. The weather was pleasant, warm but not hot or humid, and it’s always relaxing to eat outside.

While we were eating Noah spotted a huge wasps’ nest high the branches of the silver maple in the back yard. We decided to leave it there, as it’s obviously been there a long time, and they haven’t bothered us yet. When I say we decided, I mean mostly me, as Beth and Noah initially assumed we’d be getting it professionally removed. But I offered to take over mowing the back yard for the rest of the mowing season (probably a month or so) since Noah is hesitant to do it now. It seems to me if we’re going to plant sunflowers and zinnias in the garden at least partly to attract pollinators to the cucumbers and tomatoes we shouldn’t object if they set up housekeeping near the garden.

Second Weekend: Takoma Folk Festival

On Saturday I went swimming, but Beth couldn’t go kayaking because of a small craft advisory so she did the grocery shopping a day early in hopes the warning would be lifted by Sunday, but it wasn’t. The silver lining was that we had more time for the Takoma Park folk festival that day.

We’ve been going to this music festival since Noah was a toddler, and we’ve been almost every year it’s been held since then, rain or shine. In fact, it was rainy the past two years (and cancelled for covid the two years before that) so we all appreciated that the weather was perfect—sunny, in the mid-seventies, and not a trace of humidity. We spent the whole afternoon there, arriving a little after noon and staying until it ended at six-thirty.

I enjoyed every act we picked—a mix of country, singer-songwriter, and rock– but later I wished we’d seen some music from another country, as I often like to do that. Most of the international music was on one of the three indoor stages, though, and the day was too beautiful to go inside. Here’s who we saw and what the program had to say about them.

Karen Collins and the Backroads Band: Classic country with vintage sounds and rockabilly flair
Amoreena: Blending baroque pop and piano folk with introspective lyrics
Acacia Sears: Poetic indie rock with metaphor-rich lyrics and unique melodies
Ammonite: Songs of queer joy and heartache, wrapped in a fusion of country, punk, folk, rock, blues, and roots music
Blank Page: Vibrant Americana rising stars sharing joyful original songs
iylAIMY: The most welcome jolt in folk, featuring rapid-fire lyricism, lush harmonies, and even beatboxing
Samiah: Enchanting and powerful female-fronted original modern rock songwriting

The two country acts had the greatest diversity of age. If I had to guess I’d say Karen Collins is in her seventies and the two youngsters that make up Blank Page are still in high school, though I learned from their Instagram that they have a busy performance schedule, with about a half dozen gigs a month. Overall, it was a fun day listening to music from young and old.

When we got home, we watched our second movie of the half dozen we’d picked— Whisper of the Heart. This was one of Noah’s picks. He wants to watch the whole oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki and by now we’ve watched so many of his films it feels familiar and comforting to enter these bizarre but recognizable worlds.

Third Weekend: Long Branch Festival and Takoma Park Farmers’ Market Pie Contest

On Saturday, Beth went kayaking and I went swimming, which as you are by now gathering, are our normal weekend routines. But we did do something a little out of the ordinary. We’ve never been to the Long Branch festival before, and we decided to try it out.

There was one stage and when we arrived around five-twenty, the Cuban band Beth had most wanted to see was just finishing up. We listened to their last song and then walked around the playground where the festival was held, looking at vendors and food booths. Dinner options were less extensive than we anticipated— quesadillas and pizza were the only vegetarian choices. After mulling over our options, we decided to eat at El Golfo, which is right across the street. I got my usual—spinach enchiladas and Noah and I spilt an order of flan and a slice of tres leches cake. (I thought the almost an hour round trip of walking to the festival and back would prevent a blood sugar spike and it did.) We ate outside and while we were eating the band came back from a break, so we got to hear them after all.

When we got home, we watched movie number three—Las Niñas, so between the Cuban music, Mexican food, and Spanish film it ended up being quite the Hispanic evening.

The pie contest was the next day. Long-time readers probably remember that North entered this contest every year it was held from the age of seven or eight and they won twice—with a cantaloupe pie when they were ten and a mushroom pie when they were thirteen.. They also entered several apple pies (it was originally an apple pie contest), a lavender-mint pie, a corn custard pie with an Earl Grey-infused crust, and most recently a Dutch pear pie, all delicious.

Unlike the Labor Day picnic and the folk festival, this wasn’t just something we did with North, it was something we did because of North. It was their thing. In fact, if they gone to school at Saint Mary’s, which is a two-hour drive away, they may have even come home for it. (We talked about that when they were still deciding.) So… I wavered a little about whether I wanted to go, but it’s a fun event and you get to eat pie, so in the end I did. I went alone because Noah had plans (he goes to a board game event at a Panera in Rockville most Sunday afternoons) and Beth had to work because the strike at AT&T finally ended that day, after a month, and she had to write a statement.

I got there about a half hour after pie slices had gone on sale, swinging by the farmers’ market first for tomatoes and a raspberry-yogurt smoothie. The line was long, so it took me twenty minutes to get to the tent. I perused the list of winners at the entrance. I decided if there were any slices left of the winner for Kid’s Pie (raspberry) or Other Sweet Pie—this means non-apple, non-peach– honey-fig was the winner, I would get one of those. The raspberry pie had sold out. There was one slice of fig pie left and I wasn’t sure it was the winning fig pie as there are often a couple fig pies and I’d forgotten the number associated with the winner, but I bought it anyway. It was quite good—the crust was crispy and tasted of molasses. I picked up one of the slices of apple pie for Noah. It was very pretty, with intricate leaves in the crust.

I sent North a picture of the pie slices and gave them the lowdown on the winners in various categories. I figured they’d be interested in Most Unusual because that’s a category they’ve won in the past. It was called ABC Medley, which we both assumed meant it had ingredients that start with those letters. I did see a pie with cucumber in it and I thought that would certainly be unusual (more unusual than cherries for instance) so that could have been the ABC pie, but I don’t know what else was in it or if it was even the winner for sure.

Meanwhile, in Oberlin

We’ve been texting a lot with North, and we’ve had three all-family calls. They’ve been busy. Classes have been in session for two and a half weeks. They say Spanish is their most challenging class. They were elected one of the food buyers for their dining co-op, they’ve been to interest meetings for a couple different theater groups, they auditioned for a part in a play (which they didn’t get), they’re volunteering at a cat rescue, and they attended a Quaker meeting in town to see what it was like. They’ve been to the movies in town (seeing Reagan) and went to a party at which people pretended to be rushing a non-existent sorority (Kappa Epsilon Epsilon Rho, which spells KEEP, the name of their co-op).

We sent them their first care package. I made almond butter chocolate chip cookies, Beth bought Jolly Ranchers for North’s candy bowl, and then I filled up the box with things I found in the pantry I thought they’d like to have (a box of Annie’s mac-n-cheese, Pop Tarts, Honey Vanilla chamomile tea). Beth said the theme was “random things North likes.” I had no idea where the Pop Tarts had come from, but it turned out Noah bought them for himself, so I replaced them.

Things seem to be going well. We miss North, but we’re all settling into our grooves, running on separate tracks until they cross briefly when they come home for fall break in a little over a month.

Between Camp and College

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Steph

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North had eleven days at home between camp and college. It took them three days to do all their laundry from camp and I took advantage of having another person home to give them some more chores, like cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming, weeding and cooking dinner. And of course, there was list-making and packing, tending to pre-college administrative tasks, and chatting with their recently assigned roommate.

But there was plenty of time for other pursuits.

Caffeinated Outings

North and I went out for coffee or other beverages four out of the first five days they were home. We didn’t plan it that way, but on the first Monday they were home I needed to get yard waste bags from the hardware store, and I invited them to come with me and stop at Takoma Beverage Company and they did. We got coffee and split a chocolate-cherry scone. Then two days later I was going to the Langley Park farmers’ market in search of peaches, and I invited them to come with me and stop at Starbucks and they did.

The peaches we found at the market were hard and greenish. I was skeptical they’d ripen but we’d walked a mile or so to get them, so I bought them and hoped for the best. (Two days in a paper bag with a chunk of apple did the trick.) We got pupusas, too, and these were good as always. We ate them at a table in front of Starbucks, where we got refreshers and a cake pop. I arranged the peaches, pupusas, Paradise and Pink drinks, and the pop for a photo and posted it to Facebook with the caption that “Today’s outing was brought to you by the letter P.”

The next day, after North’s psychiatrist appointment, we stopped at Lost Sock for coffee and alfajor cookies (dulce de leche and coconut). While we were there I said since we’d been to three out of four of our habitual spots for mother-child coffee runs, we should be completists and go to Koma sometime before they left. They laughed and agreed. And then on Friday morning, when Valerie cancelled on them at the last minute, they texted me and asked if I could meet them there, so I did, and we got tea and a strawberry Danish.

Outings with Friends

Having been gone most of the summer, North had a lot of friends they wanted to see. The first Monday evening they were home they went to Ranvita’s birthday party, which was held at a Chinese restaurant. The next day a big group of friends went to the Montgomery County Fair and then swimming. They were gone most of the day. On Friday evening they went to a drive-in movie with El and saw a double feature (the newest Deadpool and Alien movies). They said neither movie was one they would have chosen to watch without the drive-in part of the experience, but they had fun. The following Monday, they spent most of the day at Miles and Maddie’s house. The twins brought North home as I was cooking dinner and came inside to see the kittens and exclaim about how big they’ve gotten. (The kittens have each tripled in size since we got them three months ago.)

Medical Appointments

North had several routine visits with healthcare providers, but the most notable one was with the neurologist who manages their migraine care. What was notable was that it was the first time in the almost two years they’ve been seeing him that he didn’t need to brainstorm about new medications or treatments because the new preventative they’ve been on since mid-May is working remarkably well. It’s a once-monthly injection they give themselves and the first couple weeks it didn’t seem to be helping much. Luckily, the doctor warned us it might take up to three months to show results. In June they had thirteen migraines (down from an average of twenty or more) and in July it was ten. When we had the meeting, almost halfway through August, North had only had four. (They’re up to eight now for the month.)

And because they have effective rescue medicine that can be used twice a week, plus another semi-effective one that can be used five times a month, this means they hardly ever need to go to bed with a headache or power through one anymore. The doctor also mentioned that for people for whom this medication works, it often keeps getting more effective with time. I can’t tell you how happy we all are about this turn of events. Beth commented how easy it’s been to get used to being able to make evening plans without considering how many meds North has already used this week. We can just assume now either they won’t get a headache or if they do, there will be enough meds. It is downright liberating.

Montgomery County Fair

We took advantage of this freedom to go to the Montgomery County Fair late Saturday afternoon instead of earlier in the day, which is a more migraine-friendly time for North. We all, but especially Beth, like to ride the Ferris wheel after dark, but between the kids’ bedtimes when they were younger and not wanting to risk a late afternoon migraine, many years we couldn’t stay that late. There was another potential problem, though. Rain was forecast on and off all day. It had not rained yet when we left, but the sky was threatening.

We arrived a little before five and walked around the rides to see how many tickets we’d need to ride our favorites. Then we loaded up a card with the requisite number plus a little extra and the kids and I got in line for the swings, which then closed with no explanation. As we walked to other rides and they closed one by one, we gathered it was because it was about to rain. And rain it did, a real gully washer.

I was afraid we’d just wasted a lot of money on non-refundable ride tickets on the last night of the fair, but determined to make the best of it, we headed for the animal barns. This was something that North’s friends hadn’t done when they went earlier in the week, and they do like to see the animals. Even with an umbrella, I got kind of wet on the way there and to top it off I slipped and fell into a puddle at the entrance to the rabbit barn and got the whole back of my pants soaking wet.

Everyone else at the fair had the same idea about what to do in the rain so the animal barns were crowded, but we there was enough room to walk around and see the goats and sheep and rabbits and poultry and oxen, plus a llama and an alpaca. North’s favorite is the rabbit barn, so we stayed there the longest. There were a bunch of white rabbits there with black rings around their eyes. They looked as if they were wearing eyeliner. According to the sign, this kind of rabbit has been bred since the nineteenth century, starting in France. North and I got to pet one. It was very soft.

The rain was letting up, so we got some food while we waited for the rides to dry out. North said “the interesting food” is at the end of the midway, which their friends had not visited. Between us we got pupusas, a spinach crepe, and cheese and grapes from the dairy shed. Dessert round one consisted root beer floats, ice cream, and a red velvet funnel cake, which we threw out after eating only half of it because no one liked it enough to make it their primary dessert.

While we were eating, I’d seen a woman walking on stilts and blowing bubbles and that reminded me of the Halloween parade because there is always someone on stilts there and we talked about how North might enter this year because they will be home for fall break and how I may someday volunteer to serve as a judge.

There was an announcement that the rides were open, so the kids and I rode the swings, and then North did the Genesis, a ride with a long row of seats that goes up and down and side to side. All the lines were long because it was a Saturday night and the last night of the fair and everyone had to take a break at the same time because of the rain. Beth got in line for the Ferris wheel while Noah and I were watching North ride the Genesis. I was also watching the changing colors of the lights on the Ferris wheel, which were lovely in the gathering darkness.

When we joined Beth in line, I told her that being at the carnival rides put the lines from John Prine’s “When I Get to Heaven” in my head: “I’m gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl” and she kissed me before I could finish the lyric. The fair sometimes reminds us of going to the Lorain County Fair in Ohio when we were in college and puts us in a nostalgic mood. When we got up in the air, we could see the whole fair lit up, which is always fun.

My last ride, with both kids, was the Mousetrap, a very strange little ride. It’s a tiny roller coaster inside a building that’s almost completely dark. The painting on the outside depicts mice pursued by cats, so I guess you are supposed to be a mouse darting this way and that in the dark.

By this point, we’d finished all our must-dos, but we had some tickets left, so North rode the Sizzler, one of those innocent-looking little carnival rides with clusters of cars that spin in one direction while the whole ride is going in another direction. I got quite sick on one of those as a teenager (like throwing up sick), so I contented myself with watching and singing along with Beth to the music playing—“Summer Nights” from Grease. Beth said I could call the blog post “Summer Loving,” but I explained it was about more than the fair. Noah went off in search of fried Oreos for dessert round two (North got a pretzel).

As we left the fair, we saw a big ad for Corktoberfest on the side of a trailer. We see it every year and every year North says they read it as Cocktoberfest, which would probably be another kind of event altogether. Then everyone said I should call this blog post Cocktoberfest, even though we did not attend the wine festival, which as you may have guessed does not even happen until October. We did see roosters, someone pointed out, quite innocently. What can I say? We were tired and happy and a little punchy from our night at the fair, which could have been a disaster, but wasn’t.

Creek Walk

The next morning the kids and I went wading in the creek. We do this almost every summer, generally near the end. The most common route is to start with a trip to Starbucks and then enter the creek near the Jackson Avenue bridge and that’s what we did. We walked through the creek to the Carroll Avenue bridge, opting not to continue all the way to the playground, because we all had afternoon plans and time was running short.

We found the spine of an animal in the water and couldn’t determine was it was—too big for a squirrel or rabbit, too small for a deer (unless it was partial), maybe a fox? It will remain a mystery.

It was pleasant to walk in the cool water with sunlight filtering through green leaves all around us, even if the morning was not that hot, and even if the walk was on the short side. No one fell and got hurt. No one was stung by bees. This activity is not without peril, but we keep doing it anyway.

Cobbler

That afternoon North and I made a peach-blackberry cobbler with the blackberries we picked and froze last month. They made the filling, I made the dough, and then they rolled it out to cover the fruit. There are four fruit-based desserts I make every summer. It starts with strawberry shortcake on Memorial Day, progressing through sour cherry sauce for ice cream on the Fourth of July, blueberry kuchen whenever we pick blueberries, and then this one, usually toward the end of the summer. Making it on the same day we took a creek walk really did make it seem like summer was truly almost over. And it was Beth’s last night cooking before North left, so she made one of her classic summer dinners—barbequed tofu, corn on the cob, and fried okra.

DNC

The following night we watched the first night of the DNC for two reasons. The president of Beth’s union was speaking briefly and there was going to be a 90-second video Noah helped edit at work. The CWA president spoke with a group of other union officials a little after eight and Beth texted him to say he did a good job. By this point, we’d been waiting for more than an hour and a half for the ad, with everyone running out the room every now and then for snacks and bathroom breaks. The video was originally supposed to be the first thing played in the program, but the order of events got switched around and Noah didn’t know when it was going to play, just that it wasn’t first anymore.

By nine, North was thinking of bailing and taking a shower so I ducked into the bathroom to start get ready for bed so I wouldn’t need to wait a half hour to get in there if the ad came on soon. Sure enough, I was washing my face when I heard shouting from the living room and I ran in, face sudsy, washcloth in hand, to watch this. Turns out it was the walk-in video for Kamala’s cameo.

Beth, North, and I were all in bed by ten, but Noah stayed up to watch more of the convention and the next morning he told us there was another ad about abortion he’d worked on that he didn’t realize was going to play. Here it is.

Television and Ice Cream (and More Coffee)

And then the eleven days came to an end. On Tuesday we finished the second season of Grownish as a family. The next day, North and Noah watched a couple episodes of Good Omens because he had the day off, and North and I got to the midpoint of the third season of Emily in Paris, which was our goal since finishing the season wasn’t in the cards.

On Wednesday, two nights before we left for Oberlin, I made breaded tofu sticks because they are a family favorite. North requested applesauce to go with them, so I made blackberry-applesauce with our stash of frozen berries from the berry farm and served it with carrot sticks and slices of garden cucumber.

Thursday morning North wanted to go to Starbucks yet again because it was the first day the fall menu items were available, and they wanted a pumpkin-cream cheese muffin and some kind of apple-flavored coffee. I prefer to wait until it’s autumn, or at least September, for these kinds of treats, so I got a plain latte and a croissant.

Speaking of treats, we have a long-standing tradition of ice cream (or frozen yogurt) on the last night of summer break. About a week before we left, North and discussed the question of whether it should be the night before we began the journey or the night before we parted ways in Oberlin. The first would include Noah; the second was closer to the first day of school. Finally, I said, “Why not both?” and that’s what we decided to do. (Before that even happened, though, we went to Sweet Frog the first Thursday North was home because they were having an as-much-yogurt-as-you-can-fit-in-a-cup sale for six dollars, but it turned out you needed to give the cashier a code, which we neglected to do. Live and learn.)

The following Thursday, North’s last night at home, we met up with Noah (who came straight from work) at Mount Dessert Island Ice Cream in Mount Pleasant. Remember how we were working our way through Post’s list of best places to get ice cream in the D.C. metro area earlier this summer? Well, we hadn’t been to one since the end of June, but North suggested we do one last one. We’d been to the top three, so we picked this one because it was number four.

We found a parking space right nearby, which was a stroke of luck in that neighborhood. (A side note: Beth and I lived in a group house in Mount Pleasant for three months during the summer of 1991 when we first arrived in D.C.) The store is very small, located on the first floor of a rowhouse, with benches out front. Beth got white Russian, North got a float with blueberry soda, Noah got something with chocolate chips and caramel, and I got fig. Have you ever had fig ice cream? It was excellent, tasting of the fruit and brown sugar all the way through. It wasn’t just vanilla with fig chunks. I highly recommend it if you’re local.

The next afternoon after a morning of work and packing and whatnot, Beth, North, and I hit the road for Oberlin, via Wheeling. More about that trip in the next installment…

Interlude

Posted on August 4, 2024 by Steph

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We had a two-week interlude between our trip to the beach and the next trip, to Wheeling for a family reunion, where we are now.

The last weekend in July, a week after we got back from the beach, North came home from camp on Friday evening and stayed until Sunday morning, as per usual. Saturday was a busy day. North and El had breakfast in the city and then El came over and they watched a movie. After lunch, Beth, North and I went berry picking. Noah opted to stay home and participate in an online gaming event.

We intended to get blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, but though all these berries were listed as available on the website and again when we checked in at the farm entrance, once we’d picked blackberries, we learned the blueberry fields were closed. I don’t know if they ran out while we were picking blackberries or if the staff at the gate didn’t have up-to-date information. We knew we were cutting it close, as blueberry season, which used to last until August when the kids were small, seems to end in late July now, if it lasts that long. I’m guessing it’s climate change.

But it might have been just as well there were only two kinds of berries to pick because we were kind of rushed for time. On arrival, we visited the snack bar and got a blueberry hand pie with ice cream to share and then we picked two quarts of blackberries and two pints of raspberries. In the blackberries, North and I were sharing a container, so we stuck together, and they told me amusing stories from camp. The berries were kind of sparse and we sometimes wished we had Noah with us to reach the high ones. I told North I was getting my stretching in for the day. It was easier picking in the raspberry field, and we were in and out of there quickly. We dashed into the farm market afterward and got blueberry jam, cheese, pretzels, a slice of blueberry cake for me, and a mixed berry slushy for North.

The reason we were on a schedule was because Beth was going on an evening kayak tour of the monuments on the Potomac, and she had to get there by six, which meant getting home by four-thirty. She said it was a lot of fun and she got some beautiful pictures. While she was gone, Noah and I made a soba noodle salad with shiitake, tofu, and broccoli, which North praised with unusual enthusiasm. I think they were getting tired of the food at camp after six weeks of eating it. After dinner, we watched Teen Beach Movie. They showed it at camp and North had to miss it to stay with a kid who was afraid to watch it (if you’ve seen it, you will find this as puzzling as we did—it’s a rated G Disney movie aimed at tweens). North had FOMO about it, so we indulged them.

The next morning, we said goodbye to North again until the following Friday. I had a nice, low-key summer Sunday. I took my daily walk in weather that was hot but not miserably humid, read, and napped. Beth made gumbo for dinner and then we watched the Olympics.

Another work week rolled by. Beth and I continued to watch swimming and diving and gymnastics every night through Thursday, and the kittens often watched with us, sitting on the coffee table in front of the television. When the U.S. women’s gymnastics team won gold and were all high fiving each other, Willow jumped up and put her paw on the tv screen right over their hands, then she chased the flag they were carrying around.

It only took us five days to eat up all the raspberries and half the blackberries (the other half I’d frozen for future baking plans). Not satisfied with our higher-than-average berry consumption, I made a blueberry kuchen with grocery store blueberries on Wednesday, freezing a quarter of that for North, who came home again on Friday evening.

That night, we watched a little track and field and talked about camp. North always needs to vent a little when they get home. They always enjoyed sleep-away camp as a camper, both at Scout camp and elsewhere, so they’ve been surprised at how many kids are homesick or don’t want to be there for other reasons. Those kids are a small minority, but they take up a lot of the counselors’ time and North had one in their group who’d been a handful. They did say all the others were “angel children.” Then they took a shower—something they sometimes only manage once in a week at camp because they are so busy—and emerged from the bathroom, exclaiming, “I feel so clean!”

Saturday morning Beth and I left a little after ten a.m. for our next adventure, leaving North to do laundry, play with the kittens, write goodbye notes to be distributed to other camp staff members at the end of the last week of camp, attend a belated graduation party for El Saturday night, and then to take a Lyft to the camp bus stop Sunday morning. I’d drawn up a page-long to-do list for Noah, divided into categories such as “Kitten maintenance: #1 priority—Don’t let the cats die” and “Garden Maintenance: #2 priority—Don’t let the garden die.”

It seemed very strange to drive away, leaving the kids and the kittens behind. It wasn’t a couple’s trip—we’d be in a group of several dozen people– but we haven’t taken a trip longer than a weekend getaway without the kids since before Noah was born. We really are entering a new phase of life, one in which the times when the four of us are together are more interludes than the stuff of everyday life. I am having trouble getting my head around that.

Comings and Goings

Posted on July 9, 2024 by Steph

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North Comes Home

After that first weekend, North managed to come home the next two as well, by volunteering to be a bus counselor. Saturday of their second weekend home it was very hot, the first hundred-degree day of the summer. We spent it thusly: Beth was up shortly after dawn to go kayaking, I went swimming at Piney Branch pool, the kids watched the last two episodes of Dr. Who, Beth and North had lunch at Cava, everyone went to see Inside Out 2, Noah and I roasted zucchini, tomatoes, and feta for dinner and everyone went out for ice cream at Everyday Sundae in the District. It was on that list of twelve best places to get ice cream in the D.C. metro area that has been guiding our ice cream choices this summer. I got blueberry cheesecake. It was good, but not exceptional.

The next Friday, North came home with a sprained ankle and without their phone because they dropped it into a latrine at camp. Because they weren’t up for much walking, we decided not to go to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which we’d been considering, and Beth and North spent a lot of time while they were home setting up their new phone. For the record, this was the second phone they lost in a month, so they volunteered to pay for half of it and we took them up on it.

That Saturday North also hung out with Maddie, Noah and I roasted radishes and fried tofu for dinner, and we went to Dairy Godmother in Alexandria, Virginia. This was the longest trek we’d made for ice cream so far. This place is famous for its custard (though it also sells sorbet and vegan ice cream), so we thought that’s what we should order. There are only three custard flavors every day—vanilla, chocolate, and whatever the flavor of the day is. My blood sugar was on the low side when we arrived, so I splurged on a sundae—chocolate custard with marshmallow sauce and sour cherries. It was an excellent combination of flavors. I was quite pleased with it. We have now visited all the top-rated ice cream venues—it was a three-way tie—one each in Maryland, the District, and Virginia. This has been a fun project.

The next morning, Beth drove North to the camp bus on her way out of town, because she was off on her own trip…

Beth Goes to Wheeling

Beth spent another week with her mom. She worked, visited with relatives, road-tripped with her friend Michelle to Morgantown, and spent a lot of time in her mom’s condo’s pool. I sent her off with a pint of homemade sour cherry sauce and I got a lot of compliments about it from Beth’s mom and Michelle.

Noah and I were on our own for six days. We worked and watched a few episodes of Angel and Scrapper. I started writing postcards again after a long hiatus. I did a batch reminding Florida voters to renew their enrollment in the vote-by-mail program and another for a school board candidate (also in Florida) who is running against a Moms for Liberty candidate. It soothes my election-related anxiety a little to be doing something, even if it’s for a down ballot race. Because if the unspeakable does happen, who’s in office at the state and municipal level is going to matter. (Well, it always does, but you know what I mean.)

Noah and I Go to a Parade

Noah and I went to Takoma’s Fourth of July parade. We used to go almost every year, but between covid cancellations (2020 and 2021) and travels (2022 and 2023) we haven’t been since 2019. I enjoyed it. I always do—the painted rooster statue on wheels (the rooster is the symbol of Takoma), the papier mâché shark representing a swim team, the UFO and aliens just because, drummers from various cultures (Scottish, Japanese, and Caribbean), and seeing Jamie Raskin, our congressional representative. If you’re not a Marylander and you’ve heard of him, it’s probably because he was the impeachment manager during Trump’s second impeachment. He was one of many local politicians walking the route or riding in classic cars, and all the rest of them got polite applause, but people went wild for Raskin, shouting out “Thank you!” and similar things. He’s a local hero.

One notable event in the parade was that toward the end, a horse who had been in the parade, got loose and ran through the parade, against the flow of the procession. One person was knocked down, but thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.

When it was over I considered the fact that we don’t see as many people we know as we used to at this event. The crowd skews toward families with kids of elementary school age or younger and we don’t know many people like that anymore. In fact, the only people I saw whom I knew were my city council member and her family, who were in the parade. Her son went to preschool with North. The lack of familiar faces among the spectators made me feel a little sad and unconnected, even though a few people I know were there and posted pictures on Facebook. I just didn’t see them at the time.

My melancholy might have stemmed from the fact that I was already missing Beth and North. It just felt odd to be apart on this holiday we’ve spent together so many times, even though we were split up last Fourth of July, too. I guess being in a new place with extended family made it easier last time. But it’s the kind of thing that will happen more and more often, I expect, as the kids move out into the world.

Noah and I had a picnic dinner (on the porch because the evening was rainy). I scaled it back a little, skipping the potato salad and baked beans, because Noah doesn’t like them and they’re not great for me in a meal with plenty of other carbs. We had vegetarian hot dogs, devilled eggs, corn on the cob, watermelon, and ice cream with blueberries and another batch of sour cherry sauce. He helped by shucking the corn and slicing the watermelon while I was out running errands.

Beth Comes Home and North Does Not

Two days later, Beth came home. North did not because there were fewer campers due to the Fourth of July holiday and not enough to fill a bus. (The campers and counselors who were there went on a field trip to see fireworks in a nearby town—so North was the only one in our family who saw any this year.)

I made a blueberry crumble to welcome Beth home. Noah and I made soba noodles with a peanut sauce, cucumbers, green peppers, and radishes and we all ate the noodles and crumble and watched The Death of Stalin, which Noah’s been wanting to watch for a long time. We weren’t all together, but it was still very good to have Beth home.

Willow and Walter Go to the Vet

On Monday, Willow and Walter got the last vaccine they’ll need for a while, for rabies. Beth reports they were not at all freaked out by the car ride or the dogs in the vet’s waiting room. I wasn’t surprised. They were pretty chill at their three-month visit a few weeks ago. They continue to grow. Walter’s just over five and a quarter pounds and Willow is just over four pounds.

They also continue to be very energetic and mischievous. They spend a high percentage of their waking hours wrestling, chasing each other, or finding things to knock off other things. Willow likes to get up on high things and pounce on her brother from above. Every day I find them in funny places—in the dishwasher, the recycling bin, batting each other through the holes in a laundry basket, drinking from the toilet. Walter is particularly fond of sitting on the printer. Sometimes they sit on the coffee table in front of the television and watch along with us, Walter occasionally batting at the screen if there’s something enticing like race cars. They love ice cubes and come running whenever they hear the dispenser on the freezer door. Then we must give them one and let them bat it across the kitchen floor.

So that covers our comings and goings from the past few weeks. I hope yours have been festive, relaxing, or whatever you want out of these mid-summer days.

Summer’s Coming Around Again

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Steph

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Here now summer’s coming around again
Every year it seems to come in this way

From “Summer’s Coming Around Again,” by Carly Simon, James E. Ryan, and Paul Glanz

North finished a week of staff training at camp. They got certified for CPR and passed the swim test. Sunday, they welcomed the first group of campers and escorted them to camp on the bus. They were home for a day and two nights before that. They didn’t expect to come home so soon, but the camp asked volunteers to be bus counselors and a ride home two days prior was part of the deal, so they took it.

Here’s what we were up to while they were gone and while they were home and then after they left:

Takoma Pride

Takoma Pride was a week ago Sunday. Beth and I dropped by in between a visit to the farmers’ market, where we got strawberries, cherries, and a dill plant, and the Fulfillery, where we got some small cloth bags. We looked at the booths, watched the family parade go by, chatted with a friend, and got our picture taken by the flowery Love sign. Takoma Pride is small but spirited, and I always enjoy it.

Adventures with Bees

The next day a beekeeper came to the house. Why would we need this service? A couple weeks earlier Noah was moving one of our outdoor chairs so he could mow the lawn and he got stung on the face by a bee that emerged from the stuffing of the chair. It turned out there was a whole nest of bumblebees living in there. We were all puzzled because we were under the impression bumblebees don’t sting. As there was also a tiny wasp nest in the eaves, we considered the possibility that Noah was coincidentally stung by a wasp as he moved the chair, but soon after North was walking by the same chair which was inconveniently located right outside the back door and they got stung, too. And they saw the stinging insect and insisted it was a bumblebee.

We consulted with our pest control company agent who told us bumblebees don’t sting and recommended getting a beekeeper to come remove the nest. We did just that because we didn’t want to kill them (though we did have the pest company take care of the wasp nest). It took a while to get the beekeeper to come, but he does it for free, so we can’t really complain. He told us bumblebees do sting on rare occasions when their nest is threatened. Then he got into his suit, enclosed the chair cushion in a garbage bag and took it away to release the bees into the wild. A few must have been outside the nest when he did it because we saw them flying around the area looking for their home for several days afterward.

The irony of this whole adventure was that when Noah set out to mow the lawn it hadn’t been mowed in almost two months because in April and May it’s covered in buttercups and asters and I like to leave it as a little meadow until they’re done, partly because it’s pretty and partly for the pollinators. And then they go and sting my kids. No good deed goes unpunished.

Mini-Kitchen Renovation

We’ve been doing a partial kitchen renovation, little by little. We had it painted in January 2023 and then we got a new induction stove this April. Last week we had a new back door and kitchen flooring installed. The old door didn’t fit quite right in the doorframe, and it used to blow open on windy days if it wasn’t bolted shut and the pest control company cited it as a possible entry point for mice. We had mice for years and we’ve only been mouse-free for several months, so we did not want to extend an invitation for them to return.

I’m not sure how old the floor was, but it was there when we moved into the house in 2002 and it was badly chipped. The old pattern was white with little black diamonds. I liked it a lot and wanted something similar, at least something black and white and geometrical. This was surprisingly hard to find. Almost all the options for the kind of interlocking tiles the contractor suggested had a wood, granite, or marble pattern and I didn’t want flooring pretending to be something it wasn’t. I had to look at eight hundred patterns—really, no exaggeration—to find the big black and white checkers we ended up choosing, but I really like them. I didn’t even remember this until Beth mentioned it, but it looks just like the floor in our D.C. apartment where we lived from 1991 to 2002. Maybe that’s why it speaks to me. North is not pleased that the floor looks “different.” I get it. Change can be hard, maybe especially in your childhood home.

Weekend Visit

Speaking of North, they came home Friday evening and stayed until Sunday morning. When they got home, they hugged the kittens first, then Beth and me, and then Noah, who said on seeing them, “I have a job.”

“I do, too,” they replied.

North’s first night home we had homemade pizza with vegetarian pepperoni and olives for dinner and watched All of Us Strangers, which was moving and well-acted. Saturday morning, they had brunch with El in the city.

That afternoon we drove all the way to Rockville for ice cream. We did this because the weekend section of the Post had a feature about the twelve best places to get ice cream in the DC Metro area and we all thought it was incumbent on us to save the article and sample ice cream from at least four places, with each of us getting to choose one. North thought we should start right away and since they won’t be home every weekend this summer, we let them choose first. They noted there was a three-way tie for first place and went with Sarah’s Handmade Ice Cream and Treats because it had some tea-based and floral flavors and they found that intriguing. It was also ranked the best ice cream in Maryland, the other two winners being in the District and Virginia.

On the drive there, I was wondering if it was silly to drive so far for ice cream, when ice cream is widely available closer to home, and I’m not an ice cream connoisseur. It’s not like I’ve ever gone out for ice cream and thought “Yuck!” but I have to say it was a fun outing. When we got there, we recognized the shopping plaza as somewhere we’d once stopped to use the restrooms on a road trip, though none of us was sure exactly when. The flavors were indeed interesting. North got lavender-honey and Thai iced tea. I got apricot-pistachio. If you’re local, we give it four thumbs up.

North got a migraine after we got home and used the new nasal spray for the first time. It didn’t eliminate the headache, but it quickly took the pain down to a manageable level. However, they said it stung and then it dripped down their throat and tasted bad. “But it’s better than a migraine, right?” I said.

“I guess so,” they said, but it wasn’t a ringing endorsement. They went to lie down for a little while but then they got up and were able to carry on with the evening, so I count it as a win. When I wrote about this earlier, I didn’t realize that as with their most effective med, there’s a limit on how many times they can take it, five times a month. So that gives them meds for roughly three days a week, up from two, which still falls short of what they need, but it’s an improvement. They took the spray to camp with them when they went back.

That night Noah and I made enchiladas using cilantro I’d grown from seeds harvested from a previous year’s cilantro plants. This isn’t the first time I’ve managed this feat, but I was fishing for compliments on my gardening prowess when Noah said it practically qualified me to be a tradwife, which wasn’t exactly what I was going for. We did also make the sauce from scratch, but not from our own tomatoes or poblanos, so we’re not quite suburban homesteaders yet.

That night we watched a couple episodes of Grownish and the next morning the kids watched an episode of Dr. Who before North left for camp. Noah agreed to get up at 7:30 to do so, which was unusual for him any day of the week and it was a Sunday. He did note he needed to shift his sleep schedule when he started work on Tuesday, but on Saturday he was still asleep when I left the house at eleven to go swim, so I was kind of surprised he managed it.

North said goodbye to everyone (except Beth who’d gone kayaking and said her goodbyes the night before) and called a Lyft. They said before they left that they were nervous but excited to meet the kids. Their group this week is in a theater-based program, and they were happy about that. They will probably be back home next weekend.

Kitten Update

So, I promised a kitten update in the comments section of my last post. They turned three months old on Monday. No surprise, they continue to be very cute. When we first got them, they did everything together. If one of them went to the water bowl, the other would drink, too. They would use the litterbox at the same time. They slept together and played together whenever they weren’t sleeping. It’s been almost four weeks since we got them and they still do all these things, but they are spending a little time apart now. One evening Willow slept on Beth’s stomach as she lay on our bed, while Walter was camped out on me on the living room couch, and this went on for at least an hour. Willow has the habit of trying to suckle on Walter’s belly, which apparently kittens sometimes do with their siblings after they’ve been separated from their mother. He is very patient with this behavior, though sometimes he looks a bit puzzled by it.

I didn’t expect personality differences to emerge this early because Matthew and Xander were very similar as kittens and quite different as adult cats, but it does seem as if Walter is going to be the more laid-back, easy-going one and Willow is more daring and adventurous. She will climb a window screen in pursuit of a fly and is a little more intense in their wrestling matches and chasing games. She also likes to play “monster under the covers,” which is what we called it when our first cat, Emily, used to chase our feet under the covers. (Emily enjoyed this game her whole life.) Walter will sometimes join in if he sees her doing it.

We took the cats for their three-month checkup and vaccines on Monday, and they are healthy. As we suspected, Walter is growing a little faster than Willow. Willow has gained a pound since we got her and now weighs in at three pounds. Walter has gained a pound and a half and now tips the scale at four pounds. The vet says they’re both in a normal range for their age. The vet put their picture on the office Instagram. Check out Takoma Park Animal Clinic if you want to see it.

Working Man

Noah started his job on Tuesday. For now, he’ll be in the office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and either working from home or off on Mondays and Fridays. Based on the total number of hours he’s supposed to work between now and November, I suspect the work will ramp up over the course of the next several months and will be more than full-time by the end. Another hint that hours may get long: he was told that closer to the election, the company will provide lunch.

He seems to like the office. There’s another seasonal employee he says is about his age. He spent his first two days sorting through stock photos and trying to find out which ones were shot in the United States, because candidates want images made in America in their ads. (It’s always interesting to me to learn the things people do at different jobs that you’d never realize have to be done.)

So, another summer is coming around. It will be a summer unlike any other we’ve had thus far, with all four of us working. I was all alone in the house Tuesday and much of Wednesday because Beth had to go into the office and then to a Juneteenth event. This is pretty rare since Beth’s office is still hybrid and she usually works at home, and even when she does go to work, for the last year or so, one or both of the kids was usually home. It’s a change, but despite North’s reaction to the floor, not all change is bad.

Life is a Highway

Posted on June 9, 2024 by Steph

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Life’s like a road that you travel onWhen there’s one day here and the next day gone

“Life is a Highway,” Rascal Flats

Hey, guess what? North graduated from high school and Noah has news, too.

In the almost two weeks between the last day of school and graduation, North kept busy. This is what they were up to:

1. Baking

We went strawberry-picking the day before Memorial Day and North volunteered to make the strawberry-blueberry shortcake I usually make for our Memorial Day picnic. It was one of many baking projects. They also made chocolate cupcakes with strawberry-whipped cream frosting for their friend Grey’s birthday, and two batches of almond butter-chocolate chip cookies, one of which was for a picnic with friends, and one for us. They made enough of the cupcakes for us to sample them, too.

2. Socializing

Speaking of friends, they were quite social in their time off school. They had a gathering in a playground with friends from middle school (this was the one with cookies) and another gathering at Ranvita’s house with friends from high school, at which everyone made a different pasta or potato dish to share.

The first Saturday in June, roughly the same group of friends also met in downtown Silver Spring for lunch and then went to Ranvita’s house to prepare for Pride Prom, which North attended with El. North says it was more fun than regular prom because it wasn’t as loud, the music was better, and they knew more people. (Beth and I discussed how it was very lesbian to get ready for prom at your ex-girlfriend’s house and go with someone else and everyone is fine with it.)

In addition to all these group social engagements, their new friend Valerie came over and had dinner here one day, and they went to El’s house the afternoon after graduation practice to watch Fear Street 3, having previously watched the first two installments together, and then they went to Maddie’s house the day before graduation to drop off tickets—we had extra and North gave them to several of their junior friends—and they hung out there for a while.

3. Cleaning

The kids and I gave the porch its annual big clean the same day as Pride Prom. This chore involves carrying all the porch furniture onto the lawn, scrubbing the walls and floors with soapy water to remove pollen, grime, and dust, and then lugging the furniture back onto the porch. It also involves water play, usually in the form of Noah spraying North with the hose (with their consent). Because it was a sunny day, the spray made rainbows and that seemed appropriate because it was the first day of Pride month. It also reminded me to find the little Pride flags we stick in our front porch planters in June. (I often leave the flags there all summer and into the fall, taking them down after National Coming Out Day in October.)

4. Dealing with Medical Issues

We also had to squeeze in a lot of appointments before North’s departure for camp. On the day after Memorial Day alone, they had three. One of these meetings, a virtual one, was with the Office of Disability and Access at Oberlin to discuss accommodations. North wants a room on the first floor or in a building with an elevator and access to early registration so they can try to avoid late afternoon classes, as that’s when they get their migraines. The staff person they spoke to was encouraging, but their case hasn’t progressed through all the official channels yet.

Speaking of their migraines, they recently got two new prescriptions, a monthly injectable preventative that you have to be eighteen to take and a rescue nasal spray they just happened to have not tried yet. They’ve only had one injection so far, about three weeks ago, and we can’t tell if it’s making a difference yet, but it can take a while to work (sometimes up to three months), so we’re still hopeful about it. It took so long to get through the red tape that was necessary to obtain the nasal spray that it just arrived on Tuesday and they haven’t tried it yet. We really just need one medication or the other to work because North already has a rescue medicine that works for them, but it can only be taken twice a week, and they get four to five migraines a week. If either of the new medicines works well enough to reduce the number of migraines they get to two a week or fewer or effectively halt them once they start, it will greatly improve their quality of life. So, keep your fingers crossed for that.

5. Watching Television

The Sunday before graduation, North and I were talking about how they were leaving for camp in less than a week and we drew up a list of the six television shows they are watching with various members of the family to see if there was a chance of finishing either all available episodes or a season in any of those shows. It only looked possible for Dr. Who (the kids watched the most recent episode on Monday morning) and maybe Emily in Paris, which they’re watching with me. We had six episodes left in season 2, and we watched three of them on Sunday night, one on Tuesday night, and two on Wednesday night. The four of us also hit the midpoint of season 2 of Grownish.

6. Riding the Rails

In other activities, North enjoys trains, so they amused themselves by taking the Metro to stops they’ve never been just for the ride. One day soon after school let out, they rode the Red Line from one end to the other and were in process of doing the same on the Yellow Line on the Monday before graduation when they exited a train car, not noticing their phone had slipped out of their pocket onto their seat or the floor. They realized what had happened when their podcast cut out as they watched the train the phone was on pull away with it. Metro Lost and Found didn’t respond to inquiries, so we had to get North a new phone. I told them it was an extra graduation present.

7. Being Promoted to Honor Thespian

The same day they lost their phone, Beth, North, and I attended the induction ceremony for the International Thespian Society in the courtyard of their school. There was music playing from various shows that have been put on over the past three years and cake and then we watched all the new and returning thespians each light a votive candle and set it afloat in a metal tub of water. When the candles bump up against each other in the water the melting wax causes some of them fuse. The theater director, Mr. S, explained that each time it creates a different collective pattern from everyone’s individual contribution, just like live theater performance does. It’s a very simple but beautiful ceremony.

Mr. S introduced each student and announced how much credit each had earned for acting, crew work, writing Cappies reviews, participating theater outside school, or taking a theater class. You need at least ten points total in two categories to be inducted and then there are a few levels above that. North was inducted last spring with twenty points, earned thirty more this year, and was awarded ten more from taking an acting class in tenth grade (due to a recent rule change). This meant they will graduate at the Honors Thespian level. The next day at graduation rehearsal, they came home with thespian cords and a Cappies medal (plus a certificate for earning a GPA of 3.75 or higher).

8. Graduating

Graduation was at ten a.m. Thursday at DAR Constitution Hall in the District, and the students were supposed to arrive at 8:30, so we left the house at 7:20. We dropped North off and headed for Peet’s Coffee, where I got a latte and Noah and I split an apple Danish. Beth and I took off on separate walks while Noah waited for us there. The doors were supposed to open for guests at nine, so we were surprised to see the graduates still milling around outside when we arrived.

Instead of letting the kids in first, the doors opened, and everyone was let in at 9:15. North was annoyed at having to wait so long, but that’s how these things go sometimes. We found our seats and waited. We picked a spot where Noah thought would be good for photos, and we noticed Talia’s family on the other side of the hall almost directly across from us. Talia and North went to preschool together and reconnected in high school when they worked on some of the same shows together. Talia’s mom and I have been good friends since our kids were two. Because North went to high school out of boundary and most of their friends this year were juniors, I knew many fewer of the kids graduating than I did at Noah’s graduation, so it was nice to be able to see Talia’s folks experiencing the same thing, if from a distance.

So, you’ve been to a graduation before, right? They are all very similar. There are speeches. The graduates cross the stage and collect their diplomas. People are told at the beginning to hold their applause until all the names have been called and no one does that. (There was an especially fervent fan club of a girl named Sophia sitting near us.)

Beth predicted ahead of time that covid would feature prominently in the speeches since this class had their first year of high school almost completely online. The principal spoke about that and about how their first year was his first year as principal of the school, and how it took a while for him to get to know their class. The student speaker quoted the song “Life is a Highway” and used it as a metaphor for their trip through their high school years, from the online ninth grade year through the masks, distancing, and limited extracurriculars of their sophomore year to the more open last two years.

I always pay attention to names, and while I didn’t go so far as to count to see what was most popular, it seems there were quite a lot of Zoës and Sophias in North’s class. The most interesting names belonged to a boy whose two middle names were John Coltrane and a girl who was named Love Lee Angel plus one more middle name and a last name.

After we’d gone from Abrahams to Zuniga, all the names had been called. Caps flew into the air. North only tossed theirs a few inches because they’d bejeweled it with the Oberlin logo and they wanted to keep it for pictures. That was what we did next. We met El and several of North’s junior friends who’d come to perform in the choir or watch the ceremony—for pictures.

The rest of the day had been planned by North. We went to Sunflower for a late lunch. It’s our favorite vegetarian Chinese restaurant but we don’t go often because it’s in Vienna, Virginia, which is kind of a hike from where we live. We most often go in October, as it’s near our traditional pumpkin patch. We were all very hungry by the time we got there, and the food was delicious. We are especially fond of the fake shrimp.

Back in Maryland, frozen yogurt was our next stop, but I had to abstain because it was too close to lunch and my blood sugar was in what I consider the special occasion range and still rising. Next, we went to downtown Silver Spring and watched Challengers, which was fun. Miles and Maddie met us there after the movie was over for more pictures because they hadn’t managed to meet up with us in the city.

We got home and had a late dinner of frozen entrees. We figured ahead of time there would be no time to cook dinner that night, so we’d stocked up. While we ate, North opened their graduation gifts. They’d previously opened checks from both grandmothers; Noah got them an earring rack; I got them two t-shirts from Takoma businesses (a Takoma Beverage Company shirt with rainbow letters and a tie-dyed shirt from People’s Book where North’s queer poetry book club met); and Beth got them a stuffed white squirrel wearing an Oberlin College t-shirt. North had requested a stuffed white squirrel that was “less scary” than the angry-looking mascot they’d found on the campus store’s website. Beth made the t-shirt herself with an iron-on Oberlin logo. I told them my gift and Beth’s were to remind them of where they’d come from and where they were going.

And then North had to finish up their packing because the very next day they were…

Going to Camp

The next day Beth, North, and I drove to the Girl Scout camp in western Virginia where they are going to spend most of the summer as a counselor. It’s in the George Washington National Forest, near the West Virginia border. Beth had a meeting that went until one and we left soon after. The drive was supposed to take two and a half to three hours, but with traffic it took almost four, with a few brief pit stops for coffee, gas, and restrooms. We listened to podcasts (Handsome, Normal Gossip, and The Moth) and watched the scenery get less suburban and more mountainous. We arrived at camp at five, a half hour late for counselor orientation, but the staff person who met us said the tour had just started and North hadn’t missed much. We dropped their stuff off in their cabin and said a hasty goodbye.

I would have liked to get a better look at the camp, but from what I saw it was much more rustic than the Girl Scout camp they attended the summers they were nine, ten, and eleven. There are no flush toilets, and the cabins have no electricity. I know there’s a charging station counselors can use, plus washing machines, driers, and refrigerators somewhere, and a row of sinks with running water in a shelter outside the latrines, so there are some modern conveniences.

It felt strange to drive away so soon after arriving, but North gets weekends off—the campers rotate in and out every week and the sessions run from Sundays to Fridays, with Saturdays off for counselors—and there’s a bus that runs between Silver Spring and camp that both campers and counselors can take, so they intend to come home sometimes, maybe as soon as in two weeks.

Meanwhile, in News of the Other Kid….

After leaving camp, we found an Italian restaurant nearby where we had pizza before hitting the road back to our own summer as a trio. A summer, which will involve employment for Noah, as it turns out. As we approached the restaurant I got a text from him. Do any of you remember the job he interviewed for in February with a media company that took forever to get back to him? Well, he got that job. It’s a full-time video editing position that will start in about a week and last until early November. The company makes video content for businesses, organizations, and Democratic political campaigns. They’re hiring extra help for the election season.

Noah’s been working only sporadically since last summer (most often for this very office) so it’s a relief for him to have something steady for the next several months. It looks like both kids are embarking on summer adventures, expected and unexpected, as they travel life’s highway. I’m very happy for them both.

Serial Celebrations

Posted on May 15, 2024 by Steph

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Celebration #1: Birthday

“It’s a good thing you’re coming,” I said to North as we walked out the door Saturday morning. “Because I love you and I enjoy your company, but also because I might need your help.” The point of the outing was to claim my birthday reward at Starbucks, and I sometimes have trouble figuring out how to redeem stars and rewards on the app and one kid or the other has to help me.

This time it was clear what I needed to do, however, so I didn’t need help and soon North and I were enjoying our drinks and pastries. I got a latte and a cake pop. I would have gotten the birthday cake pop because I can be literal like that, but they had a new flavor I wanted to try (orange) so I went with that. North had a nibble and said they liked it better than the pineapple cake they got. I tried North’s berry-flavored bubble tea, and I thought it tasted like cotton candy.

I left North sitting outside Starbucks while I walked several blocks to the library to return The Scarlet Letter, which I had just read for book club, and then I returned. On our way home we dropped off some children’s books at a Little Free Library. I am still distributing the books the kids culled from their rooms back in March. The supply in the cardboard box in the living room is slowly dwindling. It felt like a very productive morning walk.

After lunch, Noah and I read The Interestings, and then we all enjoyed the strawberry cake with lemon frosting Beth made at my request. (I remembered the lemon frosting on North’s birthday cake and how good it was.) It was excellent as Beth’s cakes always are.

I opened a couple presents—two kinds of nut butter from my sister (pistachio and lemon-cashew-coconut) and an Oberlin hoodie from Beth. I’d been saying for about a year that when North chose a college, I would replace the rather worse-for-the-wear WVU hoodie I’d been wearing since North was in kindergarten with one from their new alma mater. (Many members of Beth’s family went to WVU, and it was a present from her mom.) Earlier in the week I’d opened a card from Beth’s mom informing me a tree was being planted in a national forrest in my name. The kids got me one big gift for my birthday and Mother’s Day combined, and I’d elected to open it the next day. My birthday is always near Mother’s Day and this year it was the day before, so my birthday was just the first act of the weekend festivities.

After presents Noah and I watched an episode of Angel and then we surrendered the television to North who needed to watch Thor Ragnarok for their mythology class. They’d missed movies in two classes while taking the AP English exam the week before and they had to complete assignments on both, so we’d all watched The Judge with them the night before. That one was for their law class. You know it’s almost the end of the year when the teachers start showing a lot of movies.

I talked to my mom on the phone, and she told me I had two gifts coming. She didn’t tell me what the first one was because she thought it would come soon, but the second one wasn’t going to arrive until late May. I had a pretty good idea she had pre-ordered the latest Stephen King because I’d asked for it. She confirmed my suspicion.

We went out to dinner at El Golfo. I had the spinach enchiladas, which is what I always get there, and Beth and I split a dish of chocolate mousse. They had a nice set up for people to take Mother’s Day photos. When Noah asked who would be in the picture, I said just Beth and me.

“Are you a mother? No, you are not,” I said, but North pointed out that without the kids we would not be mothers, so we took one without the offspring and one with them.

At home, we watched Grownish and then my sister called shortly before Beth and I went to bed. And the first celebration was a wrap.

Celebration #2: Mother’s Day

North asked us ahead of time if we’d like breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day and we decided to eat it at the table instead, but they did make us both breakfast to order. I had fried eggs, vegetarian sausage patties, strawberries, and Red Zinger tea. It was luxurious to have a meal cooked just for me.

North was going to spend the afternoon and evening at Maddie’s, so they asked if I’d like to watch Emily in Paris in the morning. It seemed a good idea since Noah and I had watched our show the day before. When Beth got back from grocery shopping, we opened our Mother’s Day presents from the kids. Beth got six dark chocolate bars in different flavors from the kids, and I got a new purple backpack. My old backpack, which I think I’ve had since I stopped carrying a diaper bag, is developing a hole in the bottom, so I’d asked for one. (The surprise was the color—I gave the kids several options.) I haven’t actually started using it because I have to clean out the old one and transfer all the things that I carry in it to the new one. It’s kind of a rat’s nest in there, so that will be a project.

The kids’ next project was to start prepping for dinner. I’d asked Noah if he could cook dinner, since Saturday is his night, but we’d gone out to dinner, so he had not cooked, and Sunday is Beth’s night, and it didn’t seem right for her to have to cook. He agreed and asked her what she’d like, as I had chosen the restaurant the night before. She requested the vegetarian crab cakes he’d made once before. (The main ingredients are chickpeas, artichokes, and hearts of palm blended and fried). North volunteered to help even though they wouldn’t be home to eat them, which was just as well because they don’t like them. As it turned out, both kids had evening plans, so Beth would fry the cakes herself and roast asparagus to go with them.

Once the dough was made and stowed in the fridge, and Noah and I had read a half a chapter of The Interestings, Beth and I left to take North to Maddie’s and Noah headed off to his weekly game night at a Panera in Rockville. I went with Beth and North because Beth and I were taking a walk in Brookside Gardens. While we were there, we saw a wedding party, many families on Mother’s Day outings, and group of geese with three adults and a half-dozen or so half-grown goslings.

We came home, relaxed a little, and then Beth finished preparing the not-crab cakes and we had what she deemed “a romantic dinner” for two, before snuggling on the couch to watch Abbott Elementary and The Big Door Prize. It was a nice end to a weekend in which I spent time with the whole family, and alone with my firstborn, my youngest, and with the woman who has been with me for every step of this motherhood journey.

Bittersweet

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Steph

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Last Field Trip

When I wrote to my sister to tell her I wouldn’t be working on Friday because I was going to chaperone a field trip, my last ever, she replied, “Last field trip…bittersweet!”

It’s just one last after another for kids and parents alike senior year. I hadn’t done this particular parenting duty for a while though. My heyday of chaperoning field trips for North was fourth, fifth, and sixth grade. (I never did one for Noah after preschool because when he was in elementary school, he had a younger sibling I was looking after and after that the schools didn’t ask very often. Plus, he never seemed to want me to do it as much as North did.)

After supervising a bunch of rowdy sixth-graders attending a chorus festival, I wasn’t in a hurry to do it again, but it had been six years and I had an inkling high school seniors in an AP English class would be better behaved.

It was also a draw that trip was to the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I’d been only once before, when Beth’s mom and aunt were visiting in 2017 and I remembered feeling rushed on that visit. I was the slowest to move through the displays and I had not finished the history section and never got to culture at all.

It’s an excellent museum, but it wasn’t completely clear why the AP Lit classes were visiting. They’ve read African American literature, of course, but the trip didn’t seem explicitly tied to what they’d read. According to North, there hadn’t been any discussion ahead of time about how the visit would connect to Their Eyes Were Watching God or any other works of literature. I wondered why.

North and I left the house at 7:25 on Friday morning and caught a bus that would take us to the Takoma Metro. We had the choice to meet up either at school or at the Wheaton Metro, and the Metro stop is on North’s way to school, so we went there. We got there a little early and I ate the breakfast I’d packed from home. There was a young woman using the same low concrete wall I was using as a table to set out her breakfast from Dunkin’ Donuts and the makeup she was applying. I didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out she was on the trip, too.

Once the students, teachers, and chaperones had arrived at the Metro station I received a map of the museum and a list of the students in my group. A teacher took roll, and I was able to cross off three kids in my group who weren’t there or who had been switched to another group, but I did not have the remaining kids collected. Apparently, that would happen later. We all got on the Metro and went to Metro Center.

Here we were supposed to divide into groups, but it wasn’t clear how because I couldn’t put kids’ names to faces and they had not been told ahead of time their group numbers, which would have enabled them to find me. It was a big crowd, three sections of AP Lit, probably about seventy-five kids. North and the kids I did have with me tried to help locate the other kids on the list, but I don’t think I ever had all eight of them in one place at the same time.

I was moderately stressed about this, but whenever I let North’s teacher know I didn’t have all my group with me, she didn’t seem all that concerned, and she said she’d find the rest of them. It didn’t seem as if they were supposed to stay with me the whole time anyway, just to check in at certain points, though it also seemed all the chaperones were handling it differently. Instructions were never clear.

We walked from Metro Center to the museum and got in line. There was a group of high school students from Michigan in line next to us. Two of them were in Trump or MAGA gear, which caused North to raise their eyebrows at me. We had timed tickets for 10:15. We were given instructions to convene for lunch at the food trucks at 12:15. My group immediately dissolved and North and I were left alone to explore the museum for two hours. North said a little sadly that El was supposed to come on the trip but couldn’t because it conflicted with a coffeehouse the literary magazine was putting on at lunch that they were helping to organize, so they’d stayed at school. It was an odd echo of the fifth-grade trip to Mount Vernon, when I ended up chaperoning just North, who was using crutches and a wheelchair and couldn’t keep up with their classmates. I must say though, that just like at Mount Vernon, I enjoyed the unexpected one-on-one time with North.

We had a list of two things to try to see on each of the museum’s five levels, so we used that as our guide. We started on the first floor at the Afrofuturism exhibit, where we checked off the Janelle Monae video and Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther suit. (Throughout various parts of the museum, North was interested in actors’ and musicians’ costumes, which makes sense, as they spent a lot of time in high school on costumes crew or as costumes manager.) I found this exhibit very interesting. It took a broad view of Afrofuturism, including for instance the Abolitionist movement. Though I’d always heard of Afrofutrism as an artistic movement, the Abolitionists did imagine a different future for African Americans, so it makes sense. The exhibit also went beyond science fiction and speculative fiction, considering the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley as Afrofuturist. North and I had a good talk about the exhibit, and they were kind enough to let me go on and on about Octavia Butler.

This would not have been true if we’d made it to the history section of the museum, but we didn’t, so my most heart-rending moment came in Afrofuturism. There was a display case with three space-related uniforms. The first one belonged to a NASA astronaut. The second one was a costume worn by Nichelle Nichols, the first black woman crew member on Star Trek. The third one was from a kids’ space camp and had belonged to Trayvon Martin. His name was embroidered on it. Seeing that was a gut punch.

Next, we went all the way to the top of the museum and worked our way down from the fifth floor (Music, Art, Performance, Culture). North rested on a bench and watched a video while I made a quick scan of the floor to get a lay of the land and find the suggested items so we could visit them together first. It was easy to find Chuck Berry’s Cadillac, though probably not so impressive for North, as they’d never heard of Chuck Berry. They dutifully read the plaque about him. I tried to take a picture of the bright red car but there were too many people in the way, so I gave up. (I didn’t end up taking any pictures inside the museum.) The second destination was Neighborhood Record Store, which consisted of a faux record store where you could page through album covers, interlaced with informational placards about artists. After that, we wandered around the floor, taking in the displays, especially costumes. I think it might have been here I saw a purple cape worn by Prince that kind of surprised me with the awe and joy it made me feel. I’m not even a huge Prince fan, but still… It was one of the sweet moments, interspersed with the bitter.

We didn’t spend too much time on the main part of the fourth floor (Sports, Military, Education), but we made sure to find Kobe Bryant’s Lakers uniform and to stop at the Place Table. This was a table with a screen. Photos moved all over it and when you touched one it would stop and text about the place in the photo and what it meant to the person in the photo would appear. It was part of a larger exhibit about sense of place. I watched part of a video about an African American town on Martha’s Vineyard, while North lingered at the Place Table, reading people’s stories.

The third floor was devoted to Interactives. We watched an instructional video about how to dance in a step show. (Some people were in front of the screen dancing along.) Even though we were hurrying by this point because we needed to be out of the museum soon, North later said the Green Book display was their favorite feature in the museum. You sit in a car, with a screen for a windshield. It shows you where you are driving on a map and you have access to the Green Book, which helps you select restaurants and hotels where African Americans could stay along your route.

We were almost out of time and intended to quickly pop into the history galleries on the second floor to find the stools that came from North Carolina Woolworth’s that were used in a sit-in and to walk through the segregated train car, but these galleries were crowded, and you are funneled into the fifteenth century, so we didn’t think we could make it to the twentieth century in the time we had left without dashing through the galleries, which did not seem like a respectful thing to do. We did glimpse the train car from an atrium a floor above.

We reported back to the lobby where I could only find one member of my group. It turned out the meeting place was outside the museum and by the time North, the other kid, and I went outside all the kids were in line at the food trucks. North’s teacher let me know everyone was accounted for and we got our lunches, walked back to the Metro, and headed home.

Other Lasts

The field trip was not the only last of North’s high school career this week. Last weekend they attended their last two Cappies shows, The Adams Family on Friday night and The Prom on Saturday night, and they wrote a review for each one. I don’t think they’ve ever attended two plays in one weekend before, so they went out with a bang. Also, the Adams Family review will be published in The Alexandria Times. This was their first published review of the year, so that made them happy, partly for the validation, but also because it gave them the last point they needed to graduate as a five-star thespian. I asked if they were happy or sad to be done with Cappies (except for the meeting to vote on awards for plays) and they said both because it was fun but also a lot of work.

Tomorrow and Thursday North will take an IB math exam, Friday they will go to the prom with El, and the following week they have the AP Lit exam. Over the weekend, Noah was helping North with their math homework and I was at the dining room table, half-listening to them. My phone was showing me memories of my kids eighteen years ago and I showed North a picture of themselves as a one-month old. “I was little then,” they said. “I didn’t have to do calculus. When did the expectations change?” I wonder the same thing sometimes.

There are several weeks of school left, and one more dance in early June (Pride Prom) but after a busy spell, things should start winding down soon. And then high school will really be over. I can hardly wrap my head around that bittersweet reality.

Spring Fever: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 83

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Steph

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North’s birthday was also the first day of their spring break. Over break they studied for the IB math exam they’ll be taking in May, the two of us went to Koma for coffee on Tuesday, and on Thursday they went to the U.S. Botanical Gardens with El. That was their night to cook, and they felt ambitious enough to make sourdough bread (from a mix they got for Christmas) for the grilled cheese and homemade tomato soup they’d already been planning to make.

We often travel over spring break, but we’ve been making a lot of trips to colleges, with one more trip coming up in a couple days, and Beth has been to Wheeling to stay with her mom twice this year and she’ll be back for a third time soon, so we decided against it. But shortly before break I said in an offhand way that maybe we should take a day trip and North was all over it. They planned a very nice one, a morning browsing the historic bayside town of St. Michael’s, lunch at one of four vegetarian-friendly restaurants they identified for our consideration, and then a stroll in a nearby park. We decided to do it on Good Friday because Beth’s office is closed that day.

But we didn’t take this delightful-sounding outing. Remember how I said only two posts ago that I might not write about covid again? Silly me. Noah had started to feel mildly ill on Sunday, the day after North’s birthday, and I did, too, a day after that. I had a sore throat and some congestion. I might have had a slight fever on Tuesday—I don’t know because I didn’t take my temperature. The worst day was Wednesday, mainly because of intense fatigue. But I tested negative for covid Wednesday morning. We went ahead and went to family therapy, and when we mentioned both Noah and I had upper respiratory symptoms, the therapist immediately sent us home (per office policy, which we didn’t remember from our intake paperwork). I was already starting to feel better by Thursday.

On Friday morning, shortly before we were going to leave for St. Michael’s, North said if we were going to eat in an indoor restaurant, Noah should really test for covid, so he did… and he was positive. I followed suit and I was positive, too. Beth and North were negative. By this point, none of us was feeling very sick, but we decided to ditch the St. Michael’s trip and take our germs somewhere that was likely to be less crowded.

We got takeout from Busboys and Poets and had a picnic lunch at Fort Washington Park, which is on the Maryland side of the Potomac. It has nice river views, but it turned out the lighthouse was under construction and a lot of the places you can walk nearby were fenced off and inaccessible. We did learn about the interesting history of the fort. During the War of 1812, as British forces approached, the commander of the fort, outmanned and outgunned, decided to set fire to the fort and flee. Flaming ships were launched in the direction of the British forces. (That last tidbit seems right out of Our Flag Means Death.) The commander was court martialed for abandoning his post, btw.

Over the next several days, we didn’t strictly isolate, but we tried to stay away from each other more than usual. Well, not all of us. Noah and I hung out in his room reading and we cooked a stir-fry together on Saturday, since we couldn’t infect each other. Also, as Beth and I were sharing a bedroom and breathing the same air all night long, I wasn’t that careful around her either. But we opened windows for air circulation, and ate in separate rooms or outside. We masked on the occasions when all four of us came together to watch tv or to dye Easter eggs in the back yard.

The egg dyeing was on Saturday afternoon. As we waited for the eggs to dry and then decorated them with stickers and the little felt hats we use for this purpose every year, North read us a list of one hundred reasons they should attend Oberlin, sent to them in an email, and quizzed me on whether in my experience each one was true. (Beth had gone inside by this point.) This was fun and funny and happy and sad all at once, thinking how close North is to leaving, no matter where they go, and how precious it felt to do this kind of ridiculous activity (taping little hats to colored eggs—why do we do this?) one more time. I am not saying one last time, because who knows what the future holds? North’s college spring breaks may sometimes coincide with Easter and even if both kids move far away, who’s to say they won’t happen to visit us near Easter some year?

Later that night I said to North, “I have a question about the Easter Bunny. When there are no minors in the house any more…”

North interrupted, “I still expect him to bring me candy.”

I clarified the question was about whether the Bunny still hides the baskets and North was adamant that he still does, so the baskets were duly hidden.

North’s last day of break was Easter Monday. They made brownies in the afternoon, and I quit work a little early to watch Emily in Paris with them. I made egg salad with our Easter eggs for dinner. They went back at school today, having never gotten sick. It will be a short week for them, though, just two days, because on Thursday morning we are leaving for Oberlin’s admitted students’ day. Our last MCPS spring break is over. It’s time to think about what comes next.

Petals and Parties

Posted on March 27, 2024 by Steph

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Tuesday: Blossom Party

The National Park Service and the Washington Post Capital Weather Gang each make a prediction for the peak bloom of the cherry blossoms every year. This year, the only day of overlap between the two predictions was North’s birthday, so we thought there was a good chance their birthday, a Saturday, would fall during peak bloom. They wanted to go see them on their birthday, after their birthday party the night before. It seemed like a good plan. But then the second week in March it was remarkably warm, over seventy degrees most days, and the blossoms reached peak bloom on the Sunday six days before North’s birthday.

The peak lasts just four to five days on average and North had already convinced me to let them stay home from school Tuesday because the juniors were taking the SAT that day and not much instruction was going to happen. So, afraid we’d miss the blooms if we waited until Saturday, I asked the kids if they’d like to come down to the Tidal Basin with me on Tuesday and they both said yes. (I tried to talk Beth into it, too, but she couldn’t take the time away from work.)

The timing was a little tricky. North had a dentist appointment in the city at 8:30 a.m. and Noah had a concert at 6:00 p.m., also in the city, so North preferred a morning visit, and Noah would have liked an afternoon one, but North also had a virtual therapy appointment at 4:00 p.m. so they needed to be back home for that, and we settled on morning. Then North invited a friend to join us and set the time to meet them at 10:45 at the Smithsonian Metro station. From there they’d go to the MLK Memorial, where Noah and I would meet them.

Beth took North to the dentist and after the appointment left them at a coffeeshop at near the Friendship Heights Metro, as they had some time to kill. Noah and I left the house at 9:35 and arrived at the Smithsonian stop at 10:25. I was thinking we’d meet North and El there instead of the memorial, but once we got above ground it was cold, in the low forties and very windy, and the zipper on my jacket was broken, so suddenly getting warm drinks seemed like a better idea than waiting for twenty minutes, so we went to Starbucks and then walked to the MLK Memorial, where North and El were waiting on a bench, surrounded by puffy pale pink petals.

We walked to the FDR Memorial and then North and El decided to stay there while Noah and I walked the perimeter of the Tidal Basin. We haven’t done the whole loop in a long time, as there was a narrow window between when North was old enough to walk that far (maybe age five) and before they developed mobility issues (around eleven). It was a nice walk. There were a lot of people, but the path wasn’t jam-packed. We saw ducks and geese on the water and the sky was partly blue. It was warmer and less windy among the trees than it had been on the streets walking from the Metro. And the trees were just perfect.

We paid our respects to Stumpy, the famous little cherry tree with a mostly hollow trunk that doesn’t look like it should be able to bloom but does every year. There’s a lesson there, I think. Sadly, Stumpy is among the over 150 trees that are slated to be cut down after the bloom is over this year because the seawall around the Tidal Basin needs to be rebuilt to prevent the frequent floods that endanger all the trees. I understand why it’s necessary, but it’s still sad. A lot of people must feel the same way because there were a lot more people than usual taking Stumpy’s picture.

We met back up with North and El and decided to have lunch at Panera. As we walked, the 12th graders talked about their college plans and compared notes on the cliques in the theater program and the Visual Arts Center (a magnet art program within North’s school that El attends). North was navigating with their phone, and it turned out the Panera they’d found was in the Ronald Reagan Building basement. We had to go through security that was tighter than some airport security—Noah and I had to remove our watches—and then the restaurant, which I thought would be in the food court, was off down a long, empty corridor, and when we finally found it Noah discovered he’d ordered ahead to the wrong Panera, so he peeled off to go get his food. He spent the rest of the afternoon at museums, killing time until his concert. He said later it was a fun day.

Meanwhile, because there were no seats at Panera, North, El and I walked (for the second time) past a big cybersecurity event in the atrium flanked by two menacing, two-story-tall robot statues, and we returned to the food court where we joined the many middle and high school tour groups in matching hoodies or windbreakers. I was tired and hungry, and it was good to eat my grilled cheese and soup. Then we splurged on ice cream before we got on the Metro and headed home.

Friday: Bowling Party

Friday morning North left for school with a container of rainbow-sprinkle blondies. The treats weren’t for their birthday, they were for El, who shares a birthday with North. (They couldn’t come to North’s party because they were having a party of their own the same night.) Our kitchen was a busy place for a few days there because in addition to normal meals and North making blondies Thursday afternoon, Beth started making North’s three-layer lavender cake with lemon frosting on Wednesday (making lavender-infused milk and lavender syrup) and continued with the different steps through Thursday (making the cake and frosting) and Friday (assembly and decoration). North asked for a cake with a lavender plant and a bee in the frosting. Didn’t it come out well?

We met North’s friends at 5:30 at Roscoe’s, where we picked up a bunch of pizzas and other food. We ate at the public picnic tables on Laurel Avenue, with North and their friends at one table and Beth, Noah, and me at another. It was a chilly, windy afternoon and Beth and I were not dressed warmly enough, so once we’d finished eating, we walked around the empty tables under the tent, frequently looping back to ours. I caught bits of the party conversation, which centered on summer plans, jobs, mutual acquaintances, classes, and the theater program at North’s school and Miles and Maddie’s school. Five out of the six kids have just finished a show at one of those schools, either as cast or crew, so they had stories to share with each other. They also talked a bit about college, as all the guests are juniors just beginning their college search and North’s at the end of theirs.

We ate cake next—the lemon frosting was so good it rivals the fresh strawberry frosting Beth often makes and the cake was nice and moist. North opened cards, including a hand-drawn one with bees and flowers that Marisa had made that Miles and Maddie signed, too. Marisa illustrated her own wrapping paper as well. North’s presents included a pair of crocheted sunflower earrings, a journal, and some contributions to their tattoo fund. When all the presents were opened, and North had read all the affectionate messages in the cards aloud, and the cake was eaten, I observed that the bowling alley was probably heated, and everyone gathered up their things and we left.

We went duckpin bowling. This form of bowling is popular in Maryland, and I remember taking Noah to a few birthday parties at these lanes when he was in elementary school (the little balls are great for kids) and then in high school he filmed a short documentary about a bowling league there. However, we are not big bowlers, and we hadn’t been there as a family since the summer North was four, on an outing they do not recall. We got another pizza and pitcher of soda that came free with the lane, and we also ordered fried pickles and tater tots. The kids made short work of the fried treats and ate most of the pizza, too. Everyone seemed to be having a good time and conversation was lively. After our two hours were up, the guests’ parents came to pick them up—Anastasia, who is the only one with a drivers’ license, and who had helped ferry guests to the bowling alley, joked that she didn’t think she’d have to wait long for her ride.

Marisa came home with us because she was sleeping over. Her older brother goes to St. Mary’s, so she and North talked about its pros and cons in the car. Beth and I went to bed soon after we got home, so I don’t know much about what they did, but I heard them making popcorn in the kitchen around one a.m. and North says they watched Bottoms. In the morning after a breakfast of bagels and fruit salad, Marisa’s dad came to get her, and the party was over. I couldn’t help but think in a gently melancholy way of all the birthday parties both kids have had in this house over the years—starting with Noah’s first birthday party—and how this was probably the last one.

Saturday: Blossom After-Party

But I didn’t have much time for nostalgic thoughts on North’s actual birthday. It was a very busy day and it started with a bang. North found out that morning that they got into Oberlin and with more aid than we expected. So now Oberlin is in the mix, much to everyone’s surprise, honestly. We will be headed to Ohio for an admitted students’ day the first week of April. Now North has heard from all six schools where they applied, and they got into five. (Only Mount Holyoke turned them down.)

Later that morning Beth and I went to an appliance store to look at induction stoves and we bought one. We’re doing a mini-kitchen renovation—we’re getting a new stove, new flooring, and a new back door. More on that in a later post perhaps.

In the early afternoon we left for our main outing of the day. We were returning to the Tidal Basin because North wanted to go on their actual birthday and because Beth hadn’t been yet. North wanted to bookend this trip with visits to Starbucks and Baskin-Robbins to collect free coffee and ice cream.

After a warm week caused the blossoms to pop early, we had a rather chilly week and that prolonged the bloom, so the timing wasn’t bad after all. It wasn’t easy getting there, though. There was a lot of traffic and we got diverted away from the road we were intending to take and had to drive over the bridge to Virginia. It was hard to get turned around back in the right direction and then we needed a bathroom break, so we stopped at National Airport, so the detour was a lengthy one.

When we finally got back to the Tidal Basin, we actually found a parking spot in one of the lots not too far from the blossoms and we walked there. There were more blossoms in the air and on the ground than there had been on Tuesday, but there were still plenty on the trees. We walked to the Jefferson Memorial and walked up the stairs to the statue. After that North wanted to rest on a bench, so the rest of us went to the FDR Memorial and then to where the food trucks and stage was. We watched some flamenco dancers and Noah got churros. It was a bit of a rushed visit because it was getting late, but any time I get to go to the Tidal Basin twice in a bloom period, I consider it a bonus.

On the way home, we stopped at Baskin Robbins, where everyone but me got ice cream—it was already six and I thought if I had some my blood sugar would not come down in time for dinner, even if we ate late. North opened some family presents we’d brought with us, a check from Beth’s mom, a pair of cherry blossom earrings, three skeins of lavender yarn, and a brown-sugar cinnamon syrup for coffee. North was pleased with everything.

Back at home Noah and I made a tater tot casserole, which was the birthday dinner North requested. Noah menu plans on Saturdays and he agreed to this dish, even though he doesn’t like vegetarian chicken or peas and he’s not even a big fan of tater tots and he ended up eating leftover pizza for dinner. The rest of us ate the casserole, which is quite good if not low carb—we made one corner of it only half-covered with tots for me. After dinner we ate leftover cake and started to watch See How They Run, which North chose, but we only had time for about half of it.

After the After Party: Sunday to Tuesday

It was just a coincidence that Beth and I undertook this nostalgia-inducing project the day after North turned eighteen, but North is in the process of clearing unwanted possessions out of their room as well as removing things they left behind in Noah’s room the last time that they switched bedrooms (in 2019), and there’s been a steady stream of dolls, stuffed animals, and books exiting both rooms.

On Sunday Beth and I sorted through the toys, and I did the books on Tuesday. I resisted the urge to keep very many toys. Other than a couple that belonged to me as a child, I only kept a rag doll that Noah was devoted to as a toddler. North is keeping a few stuffed animals, so I didn’t save any of theirs. Beth, who is less of a pack rat than me, said she was proud of me. It was a little harder to part with books, but I filled a cardboard box with kids’ books to give away, and only kept about a quarter of what North didn’t want.

We have everything sorted to go to Value Village, the fairy tree (a hollow tree near the playground where people leave trinkets), Little Free Libraries, and the art materials library (think a Little Free Library for art supplies). It will take a while to get rid of everything—I can only carry so much on my walks—but we are freeing up space in both rooms. Noah has a new bookcase he can fit in his room now that the toy box and doll crib are gone, and he’s agreed to house the Harry Potter books and the Series of Unfortunate Events books there. When the question of ultimate ownership of these tomes came up, I said whoever produces grandchildren first gets them. I try not to give the kids the impression I expect them to have kids of their own or that I am owed grandchildren. I don’t want to be that kind of mom, but after the momentous week we’ve had, I must admit the thought of reading those books again to a beloved child, however far in the future, is comforting.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Excursions

Three Weekends

Between Camp and College

Interlude

Comings and Goings

Summer’s Coming Around Again

Life is a Highway

Serial Celebrations

Bittersweet

Spring Fever: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 83

Petals and Parties