Protests and Dentists

Posted on March 9, 2025 by Steph

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I recently sent my sister an email with the subject line “my life is all protests and dentists.” It’s true. A little over a month ago, I wrote here that there were fewer protests to attend than in the first Trump administration. This is no longer true. It took a little while to ramp up, but now there are many more than last time. I can’t go to all that I’d like to and hold down even my part-time, flexible job. In the email above, I was giving Sara a heads-up about which days I’d be unavailable to work because I’d be trying to save democracy or my teeth. After the root canal in late February, I lost a crown, and between those two issues, I’ve had five visits to a dentist or endodontist this year so far. I haven’t kept track of Beth’s dentist visits this year, but she’s on her own dental journey, which is eventually going to lead to a bridge. She has an appointment for that next week.

Dentist Visits #3-4

I had the root canal on President’s Day, after two consultations (one with my regular dentist and one with the endodontist who performed the procedure). That same day Beth went to one of the Not My President rallies that took place all over the country. Maybe some of you, did, too. I know my West coast family members were at the one in Sacramento.

Because the endodontist drilled through a crown to do the root canal, I needed to go to my regular dentist to get a permanent filling in the crown four days later. The most notable thing about the actual procedure was that because all the nerves had been removed from that tooth, she didn’t use any anesthesia when she drilled into it to remove the temporary filling. And it was fine. Just as she assured me, I didn’t feel anything. But it was kind of terrifying anyway, to let someone drill into your tooth with no painkiller. So, I’m telling you this in case you ever need to do it. It’s fine, really.

J6 Rally

Here’s something that’s not fine. My dentist is on Capitol Hill, and you may remember the last time I went, the day after the inauguration (for dentist visit #1), the neighborhood was swarming with people in MAGA gear. This time, as I walked by the Supreme Court, I could see a group of people on the Capitol lawn. They were chanting something, but it was across the street, and they were too far away for me to hear them. They didn’t seem to have any signs either. I didn’t have time to stop to investigate, but I decided I would on the way back if they were still there in case it was a protest I’d like to join. But once I returned, they were gone. I didn’t find out until two days later that it was the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, celebrating the pardons of the J6 insurrectionists. It made me feel a little sick I’d been so close to them.

Post Office and Health and Human Services Rallies

The last Monday in February, Beth and I went to a rally in support of the post office with a few of her colleagues. It seems incredible we need to protest for the post office, but that’s where we are. This protest was held in a little park just across from the Capitol, in front of the Robert A. Taft Memorial. In case you’re wondering—who was Robert A. Taft?—I didn’t know either. Turns out, he was the Majority Leader of the Senate in the fifties and before that, as a Senator, was part of coalition that blocked a lot of New Deal legislation, so maybe not the most inspiring place for a labor-related action. It’s a pretty little park, though. Anyway, it was mostly people from various postal unions there, and the President of Beth’s union spoke. The sound system was terrible, so I didn’t hear most of the speeches, but President Cummings projected well, so I could hear him speak about the importance of the post office continuing to exist and remaining unionized.

The next day, Beth went to a rally for Health and Human Services. In the words of a family friend who attended and posted pictures to Facebook, this one featured “Scientists, researchers, educators and union leaders speaking out against illegal cuts to life-saving research and healthcare.”

Trans Passport Webinar

Two days later, Beth and I watched a webinar run by Lambda Legal about passports for trans people. To make a long story short, we missed our window of opportunity to get North’s passport renewed with an X gender marker last summer. That is not possible now, even though current passports with the X marker are still valid (for now). There’s an ACLU lawsuit in progress which could restore the X marker option. So, it seems like the best thing is to wait and see how it shakes out since North doesn’t have any imminent international travel. They are hoping to study abroad at some point in college, though—possibly in Italy, possibly in Ireland—so it will be relevant sometime in the next few years.

Trans Unity Rally and March

The first Saturday in March, Beth, Noah, and I all went to a rally in support of trans people. We weren’t sure what to expect, as it was kind of hastily put together, but there was a decent turnout (big enough so we never saw two lesbian moms with a trans kid we know who were there). And the sound system worked, so we could hear the speeches. It was a long event, five hours, and we didn’t think we needed to be there that long, so we arrived what we thought would be a couple hours into it, but I heard from someone in line for the porta-potty that it had started an hour late because of problems with…the sound system. Resistance problems…

Even though they had to compress their schedule, the speeches were longer than they generally are at this kind of event, but most of them were heartfelt, moving, and to the point. There were many rainbow and trans flags. Someone was carrying the Virginia state flag, I guess to represent their home state, and I also saw the Ukrainian flag (it was the day after that shameful meeting with Zelensky at the White House). There were a lot of hand-lettered signs. I re-used my “Defend Trans Futures” sign from the trans youth rally and Beth had made one that read “Defend Trans Rights.” I liked “Freedom Has No Gender” and “Fight Like a Mother for Trans Rights,” held presumably by the mother of a trans person. Someone was dressed like the Statue of Liberty, complete with a torch she kept having to re-light because the wind kept blowing it out. A lot of people were in rainbow or pastel blue-and-pink garb and several people had hair dyed in the colors of the trans flag. I must report, sadly, that the two trans rallies we’ve attended have also been the only two without any Democratic elected officials at them.

Eventually, we marched down Constitution Avenue to a field within (distant) view of the roof of the White House. I liked marching because it was good to be in movement after standing so long and we encountered a lot more pedestrians, some of whom looked curious, and some of whom cheered us on. I didn’t see any negative reactions. I think there might have been more speeches, but we were tired and hungry, so we left and went to Union Station for a late lunch of crepes and ice cream.

Trans Parents and Allies Zoom Meeting

The next Monday there was a Zoom meeting for parents and allies of trans people in the DC area. The group was small, just over a dozen people, mostly mothers of trans teens and young adults. Several had been at the rally and march. It wasn’t clear what the focus of the group will be—it was more of a introductions and brainstorming session, but we’ll see what comes of it. There’s another meeting in a couple weeks.

NLRB Rally/Dentist Visit #5

On Wednesday, Beth went to a rally outside a courthouse in support of Gynne Wilcox, a senior member of the National Labor Relations Board who was fired and was suing for her job back. She won. You can see Beth several times in this local news footage of the rally. She’s in a red hoodie standing in the second row back.

That same day, I went to the dentist to have my crown re-attached. I was worried beforehand that they would not be able to get it back on because the gum around it had gotten swollen in the five days since it popped off. (I lost the crown to some pecan toffee brownies Noah made. My mom asked me if it was worth it and I said, maybe, if it was about to come off anyway. They were really good brownies.)

It was a pleasantly uneventful visit, other than getting soaking wet from my mid-thighs down on my walk from the Metro and back due to driving rain—my umbrella and rain jacket could do only so much. But more importantly, the dentist got the crown back on with no problem and I did not encounter anyone in MAGA gear or any identifiable Proud Boys or Oath Keepers. Even so, walking through the streets of Capitol Hill doesn’t feel the same. I look at all the federal buildings I used to think of as a pretty backdrop and think about what’s going on inside. I see all the professionally dressed people coming in and out of them and wonder what they’re up to, whether they are tearing down the government or desperately trying to shore it up.

Standup for Science/NIH Rally

Because I write about nutrition and health for a living, Stand Up for Science rally was very tempting. I regularly use sources from the CDC, EPA, NIH, and other government websites. Some of you may also remember that from the spring of 2019 until the winter of 2021, I had a side gig working for a small organization that subcontracted to write reports and made infographics for the EPA. I was working on documents about water quality in the Great Lakes.

On Tuesday I learned that the group lost its contract with the EPA, after twelve years. Mike, my former boss (and North’s former basketball coach), was given just hours notice to turn over all his and his employees’ work in progress. The EPA was his main client, his wife is a public middle school teacher, and they have a kid at DePaul. The human cost—both to the public losing the benefit of accurate and accessible information about the environment, and to the skilled and dedicated people doing the work—is enormous and infuriating.

However, despite all this, Stand Up for Science was four hours long, on a workday, and being held at the Lincoln Memorial, which is not very close to a Metro stop. So, with some regret, we decided to go to the NIH rally the following day instead as our way to stand up for science. NIH is important to me because, aside from the lifesaving research it funds, it publishes PubMed, a research database without which my work would be much more difficult. I worry about studies being censored from the site.

So, I stayed home Friday, worked, looked at my friends’ Facebook pictures of probably thousands of people at the Lincoln Memorial, and wrote get-out-the-vote postcards for Josh Weil. That night Beth, Noah, and I went out for pizza and then to see a local ska band play at the community center because life can’t be all protests and dentists. We need a little fun.

Saturday morning Beth and I drove to the Metro Stop right before Medical Center (because there’s no parking there) and then took the Metro to NIH. This stop lets you out just steps from one of NIH’s many buildings. Because there was a narrow space between the Metro escalator and the building and because there were hundreds of people there, we were really packed in there, with some people standing to the sides of the Metro exit or sitting on top of the bike lockers. My favorite sign was one I didn’t photograph, “Girls Just Want Funding for Scientific Research,” held by an elementary school-aged girl. I wondered if she had an unusual familiarity with 80s pop music or her parents helped word the sign. She’d adorned it with anthropomorphic hearts. My sign said “Science Saves Lives. Save Science,” while Beth’s said, “Fund Healthcare, Not Billionaires.” I found the one with a Pete Buttigieg quote: “You Are Not Powerless And He is Not Unstoppable” bolstering.

The sound system wasn’t great. I didn’t hear much that our county or state-level representatives said, but the union leader was more audible. “Unions know how to yell,” Beth told me. Another person who knows how to project is our Congressional representative Jamie Raskin, and as usual when he shows up at this kind of thing—he said it was his eleventh rally of this administration—people lose their minds and chant his name. Our Senator Chris Van Hollen was there, too, and we heard from people who work at NIH and the wife of someone who participated in a clinical trial there. It lasted about an hour and a half, which is a good length for this sort of thing. We left the rally for a long series of errands and then a late lunch at MOM’s Organic Market.

I’m thinking of sitting out protests this week at least until next weekend because my sister and her family are going on a two-week trip to China to see the area where Lily-Mei was born, and I think it could be useful for me to be available at short notice to finish up projects before they leave.

I am going to give the last word to my friend Megan, whose husband works at the Department of Justice. She posted this on Facebook on Thursday:

Hi friends! Just checking in from Our Nation’s Capital, where every day a friend or neighbor of mine is watching their life’s work being destroyed, breaking down in sobs, being taunted and belittled at work to the point of needing sick leave, just being indiscriminately fired altogether, or feeling the stress and strain of trying to stay afloat amidst the chaos and void. It’s REALLY REALLY bad, and if you personally have not felt the ripple effects yet, well, it’s coming for you. Maybe you’ll even remember this post on the day you find yourself saying “Oh no… I didn’t realize THIS would happen…” (when your Social Security or tax refund check doesn’t arrive? When you visit a national park and find overflowing toilets and trash bins? When you are stunned to see how much your groceries cost?) I am asking you to please call your congressional representatives and tell them to grow a damn backbone. https://5calls.org is a good tool. Government reform is one thing. This is vandalism.

The Three Rs: Four Rallies, A Road Trip, and a Little Romance

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Steph

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The first half of February was crazy busy. In different combinations, the three of us went to four protests, all of us took a road trip to Oberlin to see North perform in a play, and we celebrated Valentine’s Day. Settle in, this is a long one.

Rallies 1 and 2: Treasury and Department of Labor

The first Tuesday in February, Beth, Noah, and I all went to a protest outside the Treasury Department. That was when Musk and his youthful minions were rummaging around your personal financial information at that department. It was a much bigger rally than the one outside the White House the week before. I’m no good at estimating crowd sizes, but it filled the street and sidewalks for a long block in front of the Treasury Building and we were packed in tightly. I later learned a lot of people I know were there, but I didn’t see them at the time.

A lot of members of Congress spoke, but I couldn’t always hear the introductions. You could tell when Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Elizabeth Warren were about to speak, though, because people chanted their names enthusiastically. I thought the best line was about the government being run by a “billionaire boy band,” but I’m not sure who said it, possibly Senator Chris Van Hollen, which was interesting because I don’t think of him as a wit.

There were a lot of American flags in the crowd. This has been true at nearly every protest so far. I like the idea of not ceding symbols of patriotism to the right. We could see workers inside the building, watching us from various windows. A woman near me gave them the finger emphatically and repeatedly, and I wished she hadn’t because there are still career civil servants who haven’t been fired yet working there and who knows what they were thinking? In fact, at one point, a woman in the window waved at the crowd.

The next day Beth went to another protest at the Department of Labor. I couldn’t make that one, as I had a work deadline, or I thought I couldn’t. The FAQs I was writing for a supplement company didn’t take as long as I thought they would, but by the time I knew that it was too late.

Where it Stands: A federal judge has blocked DOGE access at Treasury and then extended the block, but another judge allowed access at Labor, Health and Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Road Trip: Friday

Two days later, on the first Friday in February, Beth, Noah, and I drove to Oberlin for a quick weekend trip. The play North had been rehearsing all Winter Term was being performed that weekend—five shows from Friday night to Sunday afternoon. We had tickets for the Saturday evening performance. And because North would be also performing at a matinee that afternoon, they encouraged us to go see another play, one they’d auditioned for and could not attend because it had the exact same performance schedule as theirs. So, the plan was to drive up Friday, see the two plays Saturday, visit with North during the little slices of time they had between performances, and to drive back on Sunday.

It took us nine hours to drive to Oberlin, with frequent stops, including one for lunch at a very nice vegetarian-friendly restaurant in Bedford, Pennsylvania, which we hope to visit again. Early in the drive we listened to music, jazz I think, and talked about the sad state of our country, just long enough to get it out of our systems before we switched over to vacation mode. We listened to podcasts for the rest of the drive, alternating between Let’s Make A Sci Fi, which is about three writers collaborating on a science fiction television series pilot, and two different podcasts about Severance, which the three of us are watching together. These were good, diverting choices, if you have a road trip coming up and they sound up your alley.

There weren’t a lot of Trump signs in Western Maryland, even though that part of the state did go for him, or in Ohio, which also did, but Western Pennsylvania was awash in them, both billboards and yard signs. (Last week I ran into my friend Becky, who was about to take a trip to her hometown in North Carolina, and she and I talked about how it’s in some ways a relief to drive away from the D.C. area where the horrors are taking place and in some ways it’s not, because, depending on your route, you may see ample evidence that people voted for those horrors, whereas in D.C. and its suburbs, few people did.)

We arrived in Oberlin about six-thirty, which was after North’s call time, so we didn’t see them that night. We got pizza from Lorenzo’s, the only restaurant in Oberlin from Beth’s and my era that’s still open, and we ate in our rental house and watched Severance. It was the fourth episode, the very dramatic one that takes place at the company’s outdoor retreat.

Road Trip: Saturday

We met North for breakfast at the Feve, which is famous for its pancakes. I’d eaten an egg and some vegetarian sausage at the house, so I took a risk on a chocolate-strawberry pancake. It was huge and my blood sugar went a bit higher than I would have liked, but we were on vacation.

At the table, we presented North with two tote bags, full of gifts—dried mango, white chocolate-strawberry truffles (an early Valentine’s present), and Valentines from all of us and the cats—plus several boxes of tea we were donating to Keep after a cabinet re-organization Noah recently undertook. I think they were most excited about the mango. They ate nearly the whole bag over the course of the day. We also had two slices of anniversary cake we’d frozen for them, but we didn’t give them those until later.

We stopped at the mail room to get some medications that had arrived and then took them back to the house to hang out until their call-time. They ate leftover cheesy garlic bread and some apple. After we dropped them off at the student union, where the play was being performed, Beth and I went to find a bouquet for them. There was a gift shop downtown that sold flowers, and we got them six purple roses.

We had leftover pizza for lunch, and we read (me and Noah) and worked (Beth), and I took a walk down a bike path in the neighborhood where Beth had walked before breakfast and recommended. There were woods, a park, and houses’ back yards on either side, and it was a pleasant place to walk.

Later that afternoon we went to see Wolf Play, which won a prize (confusingly called an Obie) for off-Broadway performances in 2023. It’s about a lesbian couple who informally adopt a six-year-old Korean boy whose first set of adoptive parents relinquish him and then there’s a custody battle when the first adoptive couple splits, and the father decides he wants the boy back. The boy believes he is a wolf (or maybe just pretends to be) and is played by an adult actor who is manipulating a child-sized puppet and who speaks both his thoughts and his words. It was very well done.

We re-united with North after their performance. Beth picked them up and they got a noodle bowl at the student union, which they ate at the house, along with more mango. After we dropped them off at the student union, we got takeout Middle Eastern food for dinner and ate it before going to see North’s play.

Deficiency was student written and this was its debut. It’s about three brothers (two in high school and one in college) who are at their alcoholic father’s house for spring break. Unbeknownst to each other, all the brothers are all taking testosterone for different reasons and there is confusion and conflict when a package containing some arrives from their mother’s house. North was playing the middle brother, a trans boy, and their performance was comic, serious, and tender in turn. It was wonderful to see them on stage and in a more substantial role than they’ve had for a long time.

Road Trip: Sunday

There was snow and an ice storm overnight and Sunday morning freezing rain was falling and it was extremely slippery outside. We had breakfast, packed up the house, and then I went for a rather treacherous and much shorter walk down the same path where I’d walked the day before. We picked North up at Keep and dropped off the cake. The Christmas tree was still up in the lounge. I was charmed by paper snowflakes in the windows surrounding a “Free Palestine” sign, I think because it made me think about what it’s like to be in college, close enough to your childhood to make paper snowflakes, but old enough to be politically engaged.

We went to Slow Train, which is North’s favorite place to get coffee in Oberlin, to get coffee, hot chocolate, and pastries (I got a spinach-cheese croissant). We lingered because it was hard to leave after such a short and fragmented visit, but eventually we said our goodbyes and dropped North off at Keep just in time for a lunch cooking shift before their last show, and hit the road.

The trip back was a little faster partly because we had lunch at a Noodles & Company, with a stop at The Milkshake Factory, instead of a sit-down restaurant. We listened to the same podcasts as on the way out, and got home around dinner time, so we picked up Indian to take home.

Rallies 3 and 4: Capitol and D.C. Attorney General’s Office

Two days after we got back, there was a rally in front of the Capitol, organized by the American Federation of Government Employees, which was holding its annual conference in D.C., so the focus of this one was to support federal employees. I met Beth at her office and walked down to the Capitol with about a dozen of her co-workers. As at Treasury, there were a lot of speeches by members of Congress (including both our senators) and a lot of American flags. I was given a small one, which I put in the buttonhole of my coat, along with a button that said, “Public Workers Work for Me!”

Where it Stands: Mass layoffs are in progress.

That week I was writing a one-thousand-word article on arnica, due Thursday afternoon, so I thought the AFGE rally would be my only outing into the city, but on Thursday morning around 9:20, Beth texted me to say there was a rally in support of trans youth at noon. Sara had already told me that if I really needed more time, I could send the article to her Friday morning and just I couldn’t skip that one, so I decided to go.

The rally was to urge the D.C. Attorney General to direct hospitals in the city not to deny gender-affirming care to trans youth. States attorneys general and hospitals across the country that provide this kind of care have had different interpretations of the executive order and different responses. In short, it’s not clear if it’s binding or even legal.

Disappointingly, Children’s National Medical Center, where North has received care, decided to stop prescribing puberty blockers and hormones (they never did surgeries on minors) but to continue with psychological and psychiatric care. Since appointments with a psychiatrist are the only kind of gender-related care North currently receives there, they are not directly affected, but it hits close to home anyway. (For a while, they were taking birth control to suppress their period, partly for dysphoria reasons, but there were other medical reasons, so it’s unclear if they still had the prescription if it would have been cut off, but it’s possible it would have been if the words “gender” or “dysphoria” were anywhere in the paperwork.)

I met Beth at her office, and we walked to the A.G.’s office. This was a smaller protest, because it’s a niche issue, compared to some of the others, but it was quite spirited. There were speakers (the mother of a trans girl, someone from an organization that works with trans youth, a doctor from George Washington Hospital who provides trans health care and who threw some shade at Children’s, etc.). Between speeches, we marched in a picket-style oval in front of the building and chanted. “A.G. Schwalb, do your job!” was the most common one. A reporter from the Washington Post talked to Beth and me, but I didn’t get the impression she was going to quote us because we don’t have a kid who is currently being denied care. Anyway, she didn’t take our names.

The rally got started late and Beth had to leave about a half hour after it did, but I stuck around for another forty minutes or so. Someone else who had to leave gave me her hand-painted “Protect Trans Futures” sign, which I decided to keep, as I may need it again. As always, a lot of people had homemade signs. I thought “Trans Kids Deserve to Be Trans Adults” was the most moving. I also liked the one that said, “Trans Rights. Trans Joy. All Day. Every Day” with what looked like blue and pink conversation hearts in the background. I thought that was a nice, seasonal touch.

Where It Stands: A federal judge has temporarily blocked the order restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth. And then another one did the same thing.

It’s important to note, there are losses in this round-up, but there are also wins. If you are going to protests or calling your representatives or giving money to organizations fighting for our democracy, please keep it up. It can feel overwhelming and hopeless at times, but I am trying hard to believe that it’s not.

Romance

Life does go on, outside politics. Our Valentine’s Day was low-key, but we did celebrate. Noah made a chocolate banana bread, with vertical slices of banana baked into the top. The banana strips were pleasingly sweet and chewy. Meanwhile, I fashioned our regular Friday night pizza into a rough heart shape, and we exchanged small gifts, all food. Beth got me a very thoughtful little bag of diabetes-friendly treats—some single-serve nut butters (walnut and pecan), an unsweetened raspberry-cashew dark chocolate bar, and some tiny paleo pies (lemon and key lime with coconut-nut crusts). Noah got dark chocolate caramel hearts, and Beth got dark chocolate hearts and dark chocolate-covered orange peel sticks.

I picked up that last item at a fancy chocolate store in Union Station on the way home from the AFSGE rally. Even as we are focused on justice, we can’t forget to take time for our little joys along the way.

Enough to Start

Posted on February 3, 2025 by Steph

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Where did we leave off? It was nine days before the inauguration, and I was wondering if there was any chance that my marriage could be legally undone during the next four years. Well, about a week ago, the Idaho state House petitioned the Supreme Court to reconsider Obergefell v. Hodges, so that’s on the table now. This doesn’t seem to be where the administration’s immediate attention lies, however. It’s more interested in firing as many federal employees as possible, giving Elon Musk access to your personal financial information, persecuting trans people and immigrants, and starting trade wars. (Sorry, Canadian friends!). This isn’t to say it won’t get around to it eventually. After all, it’s only been two weeks.

Meanwhile, as of several days ago, you can’t get a passport with an X (non-binary) gender marker anymore. This directly affects North because they need to renew their passport. It may be complicated to get a passport at all now because their Maryland state identification and their reissued birth certificate both have an X marker, and according to what North’s heard, it might be necessary to change one or both back to F to proceed with the passport. We are all upset about this.

Despite the gravity of the political situation, I have not been as active in protesting as I was this time eight years ago. By early February 2017, I’d been to about a half dozen protests. This year I’ve been to one (more about that later). There have been fewer to attend, but I didn’t go to the ACLU’s People’s March two days before the inauguration, didn’t even think seriously about going, even though I donate to the ACLU. It’s hard not to feel discouraged and like your actions don’t matter.

Sometimes I feel guilty about this. But sometimes I think I’m just pacing myself. We protested all through the first Trump administration, but never at the rate that we did between November 2016 and February 2017. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I know that. Being more selective doesn’t have to mean we’re giving up.

Inauguration/MLK Weekend

Speaking of slogs, the weekend of the inauguration already feels like a very long time ago, but I feel the need to mention how we spent it, in case I wonder later. This nicest thing about it was that Beth and I spent time together each of the three days. Saturday, we had a mini date and got coffee, hot chocolate, and chocolate chip cookies at Koma. Sunday, we hung around the house together while Noah was at his weekly game event, talking a lot, and Monday we went to see the Dylan biopic. I’d hoped to time it so that we were in the theater during the exact moment of transfer of power, but there was no convenient showing for that. Still, it was surprising how successfully I managed to block what was happening from my thoughts. (Mind you, this was temporary. It’s never far from my mind now.)

That was also MLK weekend, as I’m sure you remember. We’d been thinking of doing a service project, but more than one local creek cleanup (our default MLK day project) was cancelled because of cold and icy conditions. (January was unusually cold this year. It took until the very end of the month for the snow that fell the first week to mostly melt.) On Monday, when it became clear we weren’t doing the creek clean-up, I looked into a multi-organization service event at the Silver Spring Civic Center where we gave blood one year but discovered it had already happened the two days previous. Next, I went to the website of a food bank where we’d volunteered many years ago, but it was closed for the holiday, and I don’t think you can’t show up without registering ahead of time anyway. So, we did not volunteer that day. I still consider the weekend well spent and a kind of self-care.

(Does baking count as self-care? In addition to our anniversary cake, in the past few weeks I’ve made almond flour-banana walnut muffins and a poppyseed loaf. Plus, Noah and I collaborated on rye muffins and he’s planning to make a chocolate sour cream Bundt cake today.)

The Day After

I had a dentist appointment the day after the inauguration. It wasn’t a routine visit; I was having pain in one of my molars. My dentist’s office is on Capitol Hill, and I hadn’t fully considered what it would be like to be down there on that particular Tuesday morning.

The first thing I noticed on exiting the Metro at Union Station was that the flags were back at half-mast for President Carter after Trump’s tantrum led them to be raised the day before. The second thing I noticed was fencing and barriers everywhere. It turned my normally straightforward route to the dentist into a frustrating series of detours and retracing of steps. The third thing I noticed was the presence of swarms of people in MAGA and commemorative inauguration gear. Of course, it made sense out-of-towners would stick around for a few days and do some sightseeing. But the first few times I saw them, I felt a visceral recoiling, like someone had kicked me in the gut. It was as if they were signaling with their stupid hats, scarves, and sweatshirts that they did not mean my family, and especially my youngest child, well. That’s not a good feeling.

Anyway, turns out I need a root canal.

Demonstration

Last Tuesday, Beth and I went to the White House to protest the freeze on federal grants. The protest was very last minute—the call went out only a few hours before five p.m. when the freeze was scheduled to take effect. We left the house around 4:15, drove to the Metro, and we were at the meeting stop, about a block from the White House, in front of the Eisenhower Building just before five. It was a small but spirited group, probably about fifty people when we got there, but it grew to about a hundred over the course of an hour or so. I am in this photo on the PBS website. I’m in the red hoodie. You can’t read it, but I was holding a sign about clean air someone from an environmental group gave me.

Other people had hand-lettered signs reading: “The Felon is Stealing Our Science Grants,” “Release Federal Funds. Keep America Safe and Healthy,” “Unfreeze the Federal Funds Now,” and a good general purpose one: “Stand Up. Fight Back.” At least a dozen people had American flags. There were two speakers who talked about the impact of the federal freeze on the environment, health and science, education, poverty, and more issues than I can remember because that’s the point. Federal grants are far-reaching. They affect nearly everything.

We moved about a half block closer the White House, as close as you can get with the barriers. The same two speakers spoke again. One told us not to be discouraged by the modest size of the crowd because it was impressive for a hasty effort and he said, “This is enough to start.”

There was a lot of chanting. Beth said that was why she wanted to go—she thought it might be cathartic. There was my old favorite, the call and response “Tell me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like.” (It has a nice rhythm.) But apparently now at these kinds of events we now also yell, “No kings!” and “Rule of law!” This is the current baseline. There were also a few rounds of “F—- Trump!” I said later I would have preferred a more policy-based chant, but Beth said she found it satisfying.

While most of the Secret Service agents who were standing by the barriers looked stoic, I noticed a couple were smiling. I could not tell if they were genuine smiles of support or smirks. I suppose it could have been either (or one of each). They are government employees, too, after all.

When it was over, we took Metro home. The Red Line was single-tracking and we had to wait so long for a train that I had time to read one of Allison’s very comprehensive Year in Review book review posts (4-star horror) on the train platform. When we got home, Noah had made the kidney bean, cheese, apple, and tomato casserole I’d been planning to make. It was good to come home to hot food.

We found out later that night that a federal judge had blocked the freeze. After a second one did the same thing, the White House rescinded the order. They may try it again later, with a less scattershot approach, but for now we will take the win.

The next day and rest of the week, we were back at work. I’ve been working on a long-term project about household toxins and I was starting to write the chapter on water pollution. I used a lot of government sources for this—the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey. It occurred to me to wonder if these sources will still be available online when I finish, at the rate information is already disappearing from government websites. Like gay marriage, environmental reports don’t seem to be a first-priority target, but it’s going to be a long four years. We need to be prepared for anything.

And Tuesday afternoon, Beth and I will be back in D.C., protesting outside the Treasury building.

Eight for October

Posted on October 14, 2024 by Steph

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I long wondered what I would blog about once North left for college. After all, it’s “a chronicle of suburban lesbian family life,” according to my home page. Noah’s here, of course, but between work and his lengthy bus-to-train-to-bus commute, he’s gone for twelve hours at a stretch on weekdays, and occasionally he works on the weekends, too, as he did two weekends ago, when he needed to work on an ad to convince people not to vote for Jill Stein. (Please don’t any of you do that, especially if you live in a swing state.)

But at the end of September, I thought I was doing reasonably well coming up with topics. I blogged twice that month, which is within the range of normal for me. But then I got stuck. It’s not that we haven’t been doing things, but nothing by itself seemed worthy of a blog post, so here’s a potpourri of our recent doings. (Some of them happened in September, but we won’t be picky about the blog post title.)

On the day before the fall equinox, the three of us went to the Bon Air Memorial Rose Garden in Arlington, to walk among the roses and zinnias and other late summer flowers. It was very pretty, Noah took a lot of pictures, and afterward we got ice cream at one of the places on the Post’s list of best ice cream in the DC metro area (though that was kind of an accident—it just happened to be nearby, and we didn’t confirm it was on the list until we got home). Noah and I both got the coconut chocolate crunch. I thought it was good, but not chocolaty enough, which was exactly what the Post said, as I learned after the fact.
There was a street festival the first Sunday in October and we went to see Anna Grace, a preschool/drama camp/Highwood Theater compatriot of North’s perform covers of Hazel Dickens, Iris DeMent, Kris Kristofferson, and Jerry Garcia. She has a lovely voice, and I thought she did particularly good job with the Iris DeMent song, “Working on a World,” even though it’s from the perspective of an older person. Then we got lunch from the food trucks. I got vegetable dumplings and a Thai vegetable-tofu curry and I split a large cup of pumpkin cheesecake ice cream with Noah.
We always have pizza for dinner on Fridays, alternating between takeout and homemade. The past two homemade nights I made it with pesto in a desperate effort to use up the abundant basil from our garden before it gets too cold for it to survive. The past two takeout nights Beth and I opted to go out rather than order in, once at Koma and once at Red Hound. (Noah gets home after our normal dinner time, so we brought pizza home for him both times.) This has been nice, like a built-in date night. At Red Hound, we had the whole back patio and its fairy lights to ourselves while we waited for our food.
The kids’ schools used to have a parents’ visitation day on Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day/Día de la Raza. It was that day because many parents have the federal holiday off and the kids don’t. Beth and I used to take advantage of the kid-free middle of the day to go out to lunch between visiting one school and then the other. This year Beth and I had no school to visit, but she suggested we go out to lunch anyway. We ended up changing it to dinner at the Olive Lounge because I had a mammogram late that morning and because I decided I’d rather have a night off cooking dinner rather than lunch out anyway.
In less fun news, around three weeks ago, I was taking my morning walk on a rainy day during a long stretch of rainy days, and I slipped and fell partway down a wooden staircase that leads down to a footbridge that spans Long Branch creek. I hurt the lower right quadrant of my back badly. It’s almost but not quite completely healed now, but at the beginning I had trouble bending over far enough to put on and take off my own socks, and I had to skip swimming for a week and then do a shortened version of my routine the second week. (The third week I was back to my full routine.) I also had to postpone the aforementioned mammogram until Monday because I didn’t think I could twist into the required positions. (Then to make matters worse, I tripped on another walk a few days after I hurt my back because I was looking at my phone while walking and I bloodied my left knee and shin. This was a minor injury, though, just a couple scrapes.)
The kittens will be seven months old on Thursday. They are growing and looking more like small cats and less like the tiny fuzzballs we used to be able to hold in the palms of our hands. They are plenty mischievous, though. Willow is an expert climber, finding a path to a shelf in Noah’s closet that’s near the ceiling; Walter is focusing his explorations on the great outdoors. He is always dashing out the front door and occasionally he slips past our notice and gets to stay out on the porch until he cries to be let back in. They both enjoy the laser pointer Noah recently remembered he owned. Here’s a video Noah took of Willow pursuing the red dot. Doesn’t she have an impressive vertical leap?
I’ve been keeping busy with book club and writing postcards to voters. We read Wind in the Willows in September and started Fathers and Children in October—we will continue that one through November. My last few batches of postcards went out to Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
We got off to late start decorating for Halloween because North is often the one who gets that ball rolling, but I had Noah bring everything he could find up from the basement on Saturday and then I brought up the rest and put a few things out. I’m expecting some help from North with this project, though, because they are coming home for fall break and will be home late Friday night (or in the wee hours of Saturday morning). We can’t wait to see them.

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…

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.

Ups and Downs

Posted on February 13, 2024 by Steph

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So, what’s been going on since Beth came home a little over three weeks ago? Let’s see. The snow gradually melted, late winter flowers (crocuses and snowdrops) appeared in our yard and the woods by the creek, first semester ended, and North is now a second semester senior. On the last day of first semester, they brought home a cookie jar they made in ceramics class and then made a new batch of chocolate chip-almond butter cookies to fill it. (This is a new favorite recipe.) Rehearsals for Beauty and the Beast are underway and North reviewed Cabaret at another high school.

Most recently, I got shingles, we got a new mattress.

Downer

I don’t know why I never got the shingles vaccine. I guess I just never got around to it. If you’ve never gotten one either and you’re over fifty, I recommend you make that appointment, because shingles is no fun, even if you have a mild to moderate case like I did. It started with an itchy rash on the left half of my chest that eventually wrapped around to my left side. For around a week and a half, it only caused nuisance-level discomfort, so I put off finding out what it was. I should not have done that.

By Thursday it had started to get more uncomfortable, so I got it checked out and received a prescription for an antiviral medication. It was too late to help the more established part of the rash, but it did stop the newest part in its tracks. That section faded before it progressed from itch to pain. The oldest part of the rash did get quite painful, though. I told Beth it felt like I’d been kicked in the ribs and then left to lie in the sun until I got a sunburn over the bruise.

“Why are you topless in this scenario?” she asked.

“I’m wearing a bikini,” I said.

“You don’t have a bikini,” she said.

On the very worst night (Sunday) as I was lying in bed I was trying to breathe as shallowly as I could because the movement of my chest rising and falling hurt. After that, the rash started to hurt less every day and now it’s back to mildly itchy with very little pain.

On the Upside

We have a new mattress. We’d been sleeping on the old one, which we got when I was pregnant with Noah and we decided to part with our futon, for twenty-three years. We tried to get a new mattress in 2013 but for reasons you can read about here, we didn’t go through with it. (Read that post before the next paragraph if you don’t want spoilers.)

Fun fact, I’m pretty sure we never even had bedbugs. When we got it inspected by an independent company the result was inconclusive (!) and they wanted to bring in an expensive bug-sniffing dog, which we declined, and by then we were so puzzled we didn’t know what to do so we waited more than a decade. No one ever had any bites.

Last weekend, Beth, Noah, and I went to mattress store in Silver Spring and bought a new mattress for our bed and one for his room, too. I was half-afraid when the delivery people came, they would tell us they us we had bedbugs, but they took away the old mattresses and left us with new ones and it seemed like a small miracle.

Our new mattress is adjustable, and Beth has been having fun raising and lowering the ends of it. Most of the time we’ve had it I’ve been too miserable with shingles to feel comfortable in any position, so I didn’t care much, but that will probably change soon.

As a bonus, when we were preparing to move the old mattress and box spring out of the bedroom, we did some decluttering and deep cleaning (and by “we” I mean mostly Beth) so now the bedroom is less dusty and we have divested ourselves of a breast pump I knew was on the lower shelf of my bedside table and a pacifier we didn’t know was behind Beth’s bookshelf.

There are some good things on the horizon, too. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and we will finally get to try the raspberry-white chocolate cheesecake bars with Oreo crust that North made over the weekend. Noah has a job interview, tomorrow, too. Fingers crossed for that, and more info to follow if it works out. Thursday we leave for a three-day road trip to attend Admitted Students Day at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, and the following weekend, Beth and I are having our first weekend getaway (to Ocean City) since 2012 when my mom took the kids for a weekend so we could spend the weekend in Philadelphia.

I hope you are experiencing more ups than downs these days.

Senior Sunrise

Posted on September 2, 2023 by Steph

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My youngest child is now a senior in high school. How did this happen, people? The night before school started, I was indulging in some nostalgia, looking at old back-to-school blog post pictures and showing them to North. They thought I was gathering them to make a Facebook post and while that wasn’t my intention, once they said it, it seemed like a good idea. So, the next morning after I took the traditional photo by the front gate, I posted sixteen of them, starting with my tiny two year old about to start nursery school and ending with the one I just took. (The only photo not by the gate was ninth grade, the year school was mostly online. That picture is of them in their pajamas, sitting at a card table with a laptop in the dining room.)

But I am getting a little ahead of myself. On Saturday Beth and North went to the optometrist to pick out frames. We found out right before North left for camp that they need glasses and we were hoping to get them before school started, but there was an unanticipated hurdle with the insurance, so there was a delay. We’re hoping that if eyestrain has been contributing to North’s increased migraines, wearing glasses might help. Both Beth and North picked out frames and apparently while they did so, North made comments like, “These are too much like Mommy’s” or “These are too much like Grandmom’s.”

On Sunday morning North completed the last half hour of the agreed-upon time for working on the summer math homework. In a little over three hours, they got about a third of the way through it. Their reward was Sweet Frog. Actually, it was unrelated– we always have ice cream or frozen yogurt on the last day of summer break. We went mid-afternoon, in case of a headache, but they didn’t get one, so we all had dinner together (a tofu-tomato-basil stew Beth made) and watched a couple episodes of Blackish. Over the weekend North had been cleaning out their binder from last year, getting school supplies together, and preparing their breakfast and lunch for the first day, so there was no rush to get things together that night.

North has an abbreviated schedule this year, five classes instead of seven, and their counselor arranged it so that they don’t have a first or second period class. This is partly a mental health accommodation and partly a migraine one, because in tenth grade and the first quarter of eleventh, they were getting a lot of morning migraines, and these ended when they stopped getting up early to go to school and were better rested.

They’re taking AP Lit, Myth and Modern Culture, IB Applications of Math, computer science, and Ceramics III. They are a little nervous about that last one because they never took Ceramics II and had Ceramics I during the pandemic when it became more of a sculpture-with-found-materials class, but there was no way to fit Ceramics II into their schedule. Otherwise, they got all the classes they asked for, which is not bad considering the counselor had only five slots to manipulate.

On Monday morning, a little before eight, North was ready to go the Ride-On bus stop in front of our house in order to arrive at school at nine-thirty. Last semester when North only had afternoon classes, Beth drove them to and from school, but she’s not able to do that this year, so North will be getting there themselves on public transportation. Their route involves two buses and the Metro. They are still fine-tuning exactly when they need to leave.

I took the picture at the gate and while I was doing it, Noah came out on the porch to wish North a good day. Beth was out on her walk, but she got home before the bus arrived, so she was able to say goodbye, too. North got to school in plenty of time and then because of a suspected gas leak and evacuation which happened before they arrived, classes were shortened, and they had an even longer wait for third period than anticipated.

They took the school bus home, arriving around three-thirty. They gave a brief report about their classes. In case you were wondering, the math teacher made no mention of the summer homework, so North thinks it was voluntary. Speaking of homework, they didn’t have any that night and they went to bed with a headache around 4:50. They tried one of the new rescue medications for the first time. They say it’s not as good as the really effective one, but better than the least effective one. They were able to come to the dinner table, though they didn’t want to eat much, and to stay awake until 9:15.

The second day of school was strangely similar to the first. There was a shelter in place, again before they arrived, because of a “disturbance” in the neighborhood. North said it was a false report of a shooting. They had a little homework in their Lit class, creating a get-to-know-you infographic, and they got a headache again, at the same time, and again came to the table, but didn’t eat much. This was kind of a shame because I’d let them choose dinners for the first three days of the week. It was broccoli-cheddar soup on Monday and black bean soup on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, Noah had a little work with Mike, a family friend and local filmmaker who often employs him for short-term jobs. They were filming a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a solar panel installation at a warehouse in Baltimore and getting drone footage of the panels. Mike took him out to lunch afterward, so he was gone from early morning until early afternoon. Mike might end up needing him to edit the footage, but that’s up in the air (no pun intended). Noah hasn’t heard back from any of the jobs he’s applied for, so it’s good he has an occasional side hustle.

Soon after Noah got home, Beth and I left to pick North up at school and go to family therapy. On the way home, North got another migraine and tried the second new medication they’d been prescribed and found it did nothing, so they went back to the mildly effective one they’d used Monday and Tuesday—they are allowed to mix them– and went to bed. They got up for dinner and I was glad they were able to eat some carrots and most of the broccoli-cheddar-quinoa patties I’d served them, but they went back to bed afterward, only emerging briefly to make their breakfast and lunch for the next day after I’d finished the dishes.

Thursday after school there was a kickoff meeting for the theater program, with information about the fall play, Cappies, and improv. We had a psychiatrist appointment late that same afternoon and as we weren’t sure how long the theater meeting would last, we rescheduled it, unnecessarily as it turned out, but North wanted to be able to stay for the whole thing if it ran long.

Friday was Senior Sunrise. There’s a tradition at North’s school (and some other area high schools) of the seniors having a sunrise picnic at the beginning of the school year and a sunset one at the end. The event started at six a.m., so Beth and North were up before the sun. North wanted coffee and Starbucks isn’t open before six, so they stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts. North said the sunrise itself was “underwhelming” but the spread of fruit salad, doughnuts, and muffins was nice. They said they kind of wished they’d brought a blanket because the AstroTurf of the football field was damp with dew, but then when they didn’t have to lug a blanket to all their classes, they were kind of glad they hadn’t brought one. Since they were at school for first and second period, they sat at the picnic tables outside the school and did English homework.

North’s got one week of senior year under their belt, but there’s one more back-to-school festivity to come. There’s a long retaining wall along the parking lot of North’s school and every year it’s painted white, and during the second week of school, the seniors paint their names on it in red or blue. The names stay there for the duration of the year and the next summer. The painting will take place next Friday during lunch. It’s a nice tradition and a reminder that all the students who pass through the school leave their marks. It’s time to find out what North’s mark will be.

Three Days at the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 81

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Steph

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I: Home, with Covid

Friday Evening through Wednesday Morning

Beth and North got back from camp on Friday evening around dinnertime. North was one of two campers sent home that day. The camp reported that three more tested positive at home after camp was over. Over the next few days, North was sick, but not too sick, with a sore throat and some congestion and fatigue. While we were waiting for Beth and North to get home, Noah prepared for their return by consulting the FDA web site that has revised expiration dates for covid tests and he separated our stockpile of tests into expired (4) and non-expired (6) boxes.

We didn’t make North isolate, as that’s just not good for them. We masked when we were in the same room with them and on the first night they ate dinner in the living room, one room over from the rest of us. There’s no door between those two rooms, so conversation was possible. On Sunday North had a headache and didn’t want dinner, then on Monday we all ate dinner on the porch together and Tuesday they had a headache again. For the first couple days we had the A/C off and all the windows of the house open, for air circulation, until both kids requested that we turn in on Monday morning when the weather got hotter and stickier.

Beth, who had the closest contact with North (on the ride home) tested on Saturday and again on Monday and Tuesday, each time negative. Even so, she decided not to go into the office Monday or Tuesday, although partly that was because she had a lot of work to do before our upcoming beach trip and she didn’t want to waste time commuting. Beth and I started masking again when inside stores and places of business, which we had only stopped doing last month. (Ironically, North never stopped.) North didn’t leave the house until Wednesday.

By Monday, North was well enough to work on their online summer math homework packet. I had only stumbled across the packet on their school’s website while they were at camp, and it was surprisingly long, over two hundred problems. It was unclear if it was mandatory or voluntary—outside of magnet programs our experience has been that summer assignments are voluntary, but I’ve always made the kids do them. Also surprisingly, it said it was due five days before school started, which has never happened.

So, on Sunday we discussed what to do about this lengthy assignment due in three days, using brainstorming and decision-making techniques we learned in family therapy. Finishing it by the due date seemed impossible. We landed on having North work on it for about three hours and then deciding whether or when to finish based on what the teacher said on the first day of school. Once North started, they discovered it was dynamic. When you get a problem wrong it explains why and then gives you another similar problem, so unless you get them all right, there are even more problems than we thought. I was kind of glad to hear that, though, because it sounded like an educational design.

I wish I had found the packet earlier, because North had a lot of downtime from mid-July to mid-August and this would have been a productive activity for that time, but I didn’t think to look because there was no summer math homework last year. The fact that it was so poorly publicized was one of North’s reasons to believe it couldn’t be mandatory. However, the fact that it had a due date made me think it might be.

On Wednesday morning North was feeling better and covid test they took was inconclusive. Beth couldn’t see a second line and the rest of us weren’t sure if there was the faintest second line or not. In any case, it was a marked improvement.

North had an appointment with the migraine doctor that morning. We didn’t want to cancel so we requested a switch to virtual. This particular doctor habitually runs late, but even so I was impatient when we had to wait forty minutes for him to open the meeting. The reason for my irritation was that we were leaving for the beach right after the meeting. Anyway, he eventually arrived, and we discussed the path forward. He’s going to increase the dose of North’s preventative and prescribe two more rescue meds for them to try. If none of that works in three or four months, the next step is probably Botox.

II. At the Beach

Wednesday Afternoon and Evening: Happiness

We left the house shortly before noon and arrived at our lunch spot, the Taco Bell just past the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, an hour later. It was good timing because Beth had a Zoom call that she had to take in the parking lot. I brought her lunch to the car, and the kids and I ate at picnic tables outside. She was still on the call when we got ice cream from Dairy Queen, so I brought her a mini blizzard, too.

We listened to podcasts all the way there. My contribution was an episode of This American Life I’d saved because it was all stories about the beach. It was called “A Day at the Beach.” Noah’s podcast was a discussion of climate change and North’s was a role-playing murder mystery.

We got to the house about 4:30. After we’d unpacked, North and I made an early dinner. North made a tomato-mozzarella-cucumber salad with pesto while I shucked and boiled corn and cooked vegetarian hot dogs. There was a picnic table on the second-floor deck, so we ate outside. The deck was shaded by big maple and oak trees, so it was like being in treehouse.

After the dishes were done, we headed out to the boardwalk. When we were about a half block away, I said, “I can smell it” and someone said, “The ocean?” and I said, “Happiness,” because for me, it’s pretty much the same thing.

We all got our second frozen treat of the day. This was quite the indulgence for me, but it was going to be a short trip, so there wasn’t a lot of time to pace ourselves. Anyway, I got frozen custard and everyone else got ice cream. The kids and I went down to the beach as the setting sun was painting orange streaks across the sky. Noah and I waded in the water, but North didn’t want to deal with taking their boots off and putting them back on, so they stayed on the sand. I took pictures of both kids in fake pensive poses.

North seemed very happy, laughing harder at my jokes that they merited. I think we were all glad covid had not derailed the trip. Though it should be noted, we don’t easily give up beach trips. We went to the beach the last time North had covid nine months ago. We went when they were semi-paralyzed, three years ago. By the time we arrived at this one, North was feeling better and so far, none of the rest of us felt sick.

I didn’t want to leave when everyone else did so I stayed behind sitting on the sand, breathing in the smell of the ocean, and watching the waves in the gathering darkness until they were illuminated by the lights from the boardwalk and the occasional flashes of people’s cell phone lights. Then I walked the mile or so back to the house.

Thursday: Drinking in Life

Our first morning at the beach we had a late breakfast on the patio of Egg, a favorite restaurant of ours that’s steps from the rental house. (The house is in a cul-de-sac, right behind the restaurant.) Noah and I both got lemon-blueberry crepes and I gave him a quarter of mine. The paper tag on my tea bag string said, “Drink in Life.” Coincidentally, that was my plan for the day.

After breakfast, I biked to the beach on a bike that came with the house. It was a men’s bike and I found it hard to get on and off because of the bar. In fact, I tumbled off it at the bike rack on Rehoboth Avenue near the boardwalk. It was more embarrassing than painful.

I stayed at the beach and boardwalk most of the day. Beth, who spent much of the day working, ferrying people around, and cooking dinner for us, drove North to join me and we swam together. The waves were big, which I like, but a little too rough. North and I both wiped out. Neither of us was hurt, but I lost a ponytail holder I liked, and we both got a lot of sand in our suits. The water had a lot more sand in it than usual. I heard people complaining about it all day, including parents offering helpful suggestions about sand removal techniques and finally one frustrated mom who said, “If you’re going to keep crying about this, can you go stand ten feet away?” Kind of harsh, but to be fair, the kid didn’t try any of her suggestions.

At eleven-thirty, Beth picked North up so they could pick up a lunch order from Grandpa Mac and to visit an Italian bakery. I stayed at the beach. I saw dolphins and pelicans. I got clams for lunch on the boardwalk, read a few sections of the newspaper I found in my bag because I’d accidentally left my book at the house. Then I took a walk, lay on my towel with my eyes closed and listened to the waves, and swam again, not long though because the water was still rough. By this time, it was three and I was missing my family. I texted North and asked if they’d like to meet up at Funland, giving fair warning that it looked like it might rain.

By the time we did meet, around 3:45, it was raining, so we started out under the roof, with the carousel. We both rode it. I haven’t been on one in a while so that was fun. The rain slowed to a drizzle and most of the outside rides were still operating, so North went on the Free Spin, the Paratrooper, and the Sea Dragon. I enjoyed watching their pink platform boots dangling off the seat of the Paratrooper.

Then we went to sit on the boardwalk where it was quieter because they’d gotten a migraine, taken the good meds, and were waiting for them to take effect. We watched the ocean and a rabbit nibbling dune grass. We went back into Funland shortly before five, thinking to get in line for the Haunted Mansion, which opened at five, but the line was crazy long and after we’d waited in it for fifteen minutes or so it was clear we wouldn’t make it through before Beth was coming to fetch North at 5:30. Beth had to record the President of the union making a speech on Zoom that evening and then edit it, so pickup had to be at a precise time. I wondered if North had wasted their meds.

I couldn’t get in the car with them because I had the bike, so I did a little shopping at the tea and spice shop and Candy Kitchen, then biked home, where Beth and Noah had made a delicious dinner of gazpacho, salt-crusted potatoes with cilantro-garlic sauce, and a spread of fancy cheeses for dinner. I did the dishes and then while Beth was working, the kids and I watched an episode of Shadow and Bone. One of the reasons Beth had to work so much on this vacation is that she’s the Communications Director of her union and her senior writer, who would have covered for her, resigned unexpectedly the week before we left. Also, there’s a new President and he needs to consult with her often about speeches and it was an eventful week for the union.

Later in the evening, we had Italian pastries Beth bought and chocolate-raspberry fudge I’d picked up for dessert. I bought the fudge because I know garlicky meals always make Beth crave chocolate and I didn’t think she’d have time to go out and get herself any. I’d had a nice day, but I was sad she wasn’t getting much of a vacation. I stayed up longer than I probably should have, waiting for her to finish editing the speech and come to bed.

Friday: End of Contagion

North wanted to try a coffeeshop that was just a few doors down and we’d never tried because we don’t usually stay in this part of town. I’d said I’d take them but I was up a couple hours before they were so I had breakfast at home and just got a latte there, while they had a lavender latte, tater tots and an açai bowl on the patio.

We came home and Beth had returned from her morning walk, and she said she could drive us to BrowseAbout where Noah wanted to get a book. I was planning to go to the beach from there so Beth and North watched an episode of Heartstopper—she did manage to carve out time to watch tv with each kid during the trip– while I was packing up my beach things and having a little gazpacho for a lunch appetizer, since I didn’t think it would be easy to take that to the beach and I wanted to have some. North took a covid test and it was negative, which was cause for celebration. Meanwhile, Noah, who had seemed sluggish all day, decided he’d better take a covid test before we left, just in case. Also, negative. Beth, Noah, and I immediately shed our masks for the remainder of the trip, though North still wore theirs in public most of the time.

At the bookstore, I bought The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires for North and Silver Nitrate for Noah. Then Beth swung by to take both kids back to the house and I walked to the beach. It was 12:30 and sunny (the day before had been overcast) so I thought I should probably start out under a boardwalk pavilion, where I’d have a view of the ocean and protection from the sun. I ate my lunch and read a few chapters of Robinson Crusoe. I went down to the water a little before two and swam. The water was still rough, but not as sandy as the day before and the waves were fun. Twice I was swept up the underside of one and propelled into the air above it. This is my very favorite thing to experience when swimming in the ocean.

The waves had carved a little cliff into the beach, and I was sitting there with my feet in the water when Beth turned up at my side. I was pleasantly surprised to see her. We sat there watching the water for a while and then lay on our towels. We took a walk to Funland to find out what time the Haunted Mansion opened that day (it varies), and the answer was five o’clock every day for the rest of the season, which meant if we wanted to do it, we needed to do it that day because we were leaving the next day before five. I texted North to see if they wanted to come to Funland and they did. Noah did, too. So, Beth got on her bike and went back to the house to fetch our offspring and drive them to the boardwalk. (Being further from the beach and boardwalk than North can easily walk was kind of inconvenient.)

North and I stood in line for the Haunted Mansion for a half hour. I amused myself taking pictures of its kitschy exterior, which I love. Meanwhile Noah rode the Paratrooper and then when we got out of the Mansion, North rode the Graviton and the kids rode the Paratrooper together. We still had tickets left but it was time to meet Beth for pizza at Grotto. (One of the great things about Funland is that the tickets never expire. We arrived in Rehoboth with seventy-four tickets purchased in years past—some of the iconic green tickets were faded almost to yellow—and left with twenty-nine, so it felt like all the rides were free.)

We ate mozzarella sticks, deep-fried Brussels sprouts, pizza, and spinach stromboli out on the patio. It was a lovely evening and afterward we migrated to the boardwalk where we got ice cream and frozen custard. I got Nutella ice cream, and it was very good. I was loath to leave the beach because it was the golden hour before sunset, but we’d planned to watch Red, White, and Royal Blue at home, so I tore myself away.

Saturday: Saying Goodbye

The next day we packed up the house, returned the keys, and split up for our last few hours in Rehoboth. Beth went kayaking in the Rehoboth Bay, Noah wandered around downtown, and North and I hit the beach. I had my longest swim of the trip with them. We were in the water almost an hour. This wouldn’t be unusual for me, but I’d been taking shorter swims because of the roughness of the surf. But it was the last day, so we had to seize the day. We had a nice talk in the water, in between diving under waves and I lost another ponytail holder. This time it wasn’t even a scrunchie but a plain hair elastic, which tend to be more secure. I told North that of everyone in the family, they were the one I worry least about in rough water. They are a very good swimmer.

We all met up at our traditional last-day lunch stop, a crepe stall in a little alley off Rehoboth Avenue, where had a feast of crepes, fries, a bagel sandwich (for North who doesn’t care for crepes) and orangeade. We had a few more stops on the agenda. I got a scrunchie to get my wet, tangled hair out of my face, we went to BrowseAbout so North could get stickers to decorate their crutches, Beth got a Rehoboth t-shirt with a drawing of a kayak, and we picked up sea salt caramels, saltwater taffy, and an assortment of gummy candy at Candy Kitchen. The kids and I went down to the beach get our feet wet one last time and just before 2:30, seventy hours after we arrived, we left the beach.

I didn’t want to leave. I never do. But there were compensations. We had to stop for an hour in the middle of the drive at a Starbucks so Beth could work, and it was surprisingly pleasant for me to have a little oasis of time I could read your blog posts and do other things on my laptop without feeling guilty that I wasn’t putting away perishable food, doing post-trip laundry, or sorting the mail.

When we got home, I checked the garden and found new sunflower and zinnia blooms, and we ate takeout Indian we’d picked up on the way home and then I did the aforementioned chores and we watched the last half hour of Red, White, and Royal Blue, which is cheesy but fun. I was grateful to have had this last-hurray-of-summer getaway with my wife and both kids and that we all came home well.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

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Three Days at the Beach: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 81