We Went to the Animal Fair: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 80

Posted on August 18, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

We went to the animal fair
The birds and the beasts were there

From “Animal Fair,” traditional 19^th-century folk song

Noah flew home the first Saturday in August, after a busy week in Davis with my mom and my sister’s family. After they saw Barbie and went to a trivia night and swimming in a river, they went to Oppenheimer and a play, visited a botanical garden, went out for crepes, and cooked together. Noah and my brother-in-law Dave, who both like puzzles, put together a thousand-piece one. Everyone watched his senior project movie. Both mom and Sara said it was fun to have him there.

First Week Home: Television, Chores, Food, Movies

In the almost two weeks that he’s been home, we haven’t kept him quite as busy, as Beth and I are both working and North left for camp five days ago. Even so, he and I have been reading We Are Satellites, and in combination with different family members, he’s been watching Blackish, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Shadow and Bone, What We Do in the Shadows, and Only Murders in the Building. It’s been fun getting back to series that we’d stopped watching while he was gone. In addition to these shows, I often find him in the living room watching Scandinavian game shows of all things. It’s a new interest.

He’s been helping out around the house and yard, too, cleaning in the bathroom and kitchen, vacuuming, folding laundry, sweeping the porch, and mowing the lawn. It’s nice to have an extra hand with the chores—it’s allowed me to tackle some long-neglected weeding that always seems to be too low on my priority list to start.

On his first full day at home, I made a peach-blackberry cobbler with berries we’d picked at Butler’s Orchard in July and frozen, so even though he didn’t get to go on that expedition with us, he got to enjoy the harvest. Later that week I cooked some of his favorites—breaded tofu sticks with blackberry applesauce, a minestrone-like soup, and ravioli with pesto and broccoli. (Our basil is doing so well this year I’ve made two batches of pesto since he’s been home and there’s plenty left.)

On Thursday we went through our family movie night nomination-and-veto process, which netted us eight movies to watch on Friday nights for the next couple months or however long Noah’s home. But sadly, we couldn’t start any of them because North had a migraine the next night, so we watched one North had vetoed that the rest of us wanted to see—Nimona. The irony was that we all thought North would have liked it.

Second Weekend Home: Fair, Camp, Party

The big thing we did after Noah got home and before North left for camp was to go to the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair on Saturday afternoon. We used to go every year, but we haven’t been since 2019, first because of covid and then because of schedule conflicts, often with North’s camp.

But the fair is the same as always, full of memories, both of when the kids were small, and when Beth and I were impossibly young, newly in love, and went to the Lorain County Fair in Ohio, right before I left for a semester in Spain during my junior year of college.

We were all happy to be back at the fair, but it took some strategic planning. North had a therapy appointment in the morning and wanted to save their good migraine meds for camp, so we decided to go in the early afternoon to avoid the late afternoon headache danger zone. It meant we probably wouldn’t get to ride the Ferris wheel after dark, which we all, but especially Beth, like to do.

We arrived a little before 2:30 and headed for the rides first. We’d narrowed down everyone’s most important fair goals and were trying to figure out the quickest route that included all of them without much backtracking in case it was a migraine-abbreviated visit. All four of us rode the swings. I was surprised Beth tried them because she usually doesn’t, and she declared them “mildly unpleasant” after she got off. I think she just wanted to make sure she still doesn’t like them. That’s often a good thing to do, for informational purposes. Next, we all rode the Ferris wheel, and the kids and I rode the Mouse Trap, a tiny roller coaster-cum-haunted house.

Having finished with the high priority rides, we went to the rabbit barn, which North loves best of all the animal displays. As we entered, they asked, casually, “Can I have a rabbit?” because many of the bunnies on display are also for sale and we do not currently have a pet.

“No,” I said.

“I had to ask,” they said. Fair enough, I thought.

We admired all the varieties of rabbits, including very large ones and very fluffy ones and some that had coloring like calico cats. We skipped the rest of the animals and visited the Cheese pavilion where I got some cheese curds and the Chilly Mall, where we enjoyed the air-conditioning, North got some bee and honeycomb earrings, and everyone got some old-fashioned candies (sesame-honey bites and cream-filled caramels for me) to take home and then the ice cream parlor where we all got ice cream. I got peach, as I often do at the fair. It seems right to get a fruit flavor, as “agricultural” is right there in the fair’s name and peach seems like the most summery flavor possible.

By this point, everyone had done what they most wanted to do, so we went back to the rides for North’s second tier ride, Genesis. While we watched the row of seats rise and fall, Beth took my hand. She said the fair reminded her of being young and I said that night at the Lorain County Fair in 1987 I’d been tempted to cancel my semester abroad and stay with her. “But you didn’t,” she said.

“No, but I came back, and we got married and had kids and now we all come to the fair,” I said, “so it worked out.”

We had an early dinner of pupusas and watermelon (Beth), lo mein and a fruit cup with chocolate sauce (North) and spinach-tomato-humus crepes (me and Noah). Noah also got some churros and candied almonds. After dinner, we decided to go back and see some more animals. Some of the barns were already empty for the day, but we visited some cows and then we went to the barn that has goats, alpacas, and llamas. By that point, it was six-thirty and North hadn’t gotten a headache, but we were all ready to go home and the sun wouldn’t go down for more than an hour and a half, so we gave up on riding the Ferris wheel again after dark. There’s always next year.

On Sunday morning, Beth drove North to camp in south-central Pennsylvania. I stayed behind to attend a potluck for a family from North’s preschool who was visiting from abroad. Onika and Jeff’s daughter Merichel was in North’s preschool class for two years and the kids stayed friends into elementary school. Then about seven years ago Merichel’s family moved to Switzerland. We haven’t been in close touch, but we met a couple times when they were in the States. We found out in March that Onika has stage IV pancreatic cancer, and we’ve been in somewhat closer touch, mainly through her Caring Bridge account where people leave messages and encouragement.

Another preschool family was organizing a gathering so people could see Onika, Jeff, and their two oldest kids. It was attended mostly by preschool folks, families from Merichel’s class or her brother’s, and the teacher, but I also got the chance to meet Onika’s sister. It was nice to see people I don’t often see these days but who were important to me when North was little and really nice to get to talk a little with Onika. She was just the same as ever, warm, and quite direct about her illness. It was not a sad gathering at all while I was there, just the opposite, but I did feel sad when I left.

Second Week Home

Other than North’s absence, the next week was much like the last one. We watched Buffy most nights and passed the midpoint of season 6 (that’s the darkest one if you watched back in the aughts and remember). On Wednesday night we played Settlers of Catan with the Seafarers extension kit Noah got for Christmas. Beth won, as usual, but also as usual it was pretty close. She always seems to be able to pull out the win in the end, even though Noah was in the lead in the beginning. (I almost always come in last.) Also on Wednesday, I made a spinach-alfredo sauce to put on vegetarian chicken cutlets and fettucine. What Buffy, Catan, and spinach all have in common is that North’s not a fan.

On Sunday we’re all driving up to camp to fetch North and hear their stories about what they’ve been up to this week—so far, I’ve seen pictures of them at the opening night campfire and at goat yoga. Often on the way to camp or back we’ve passed this attraction and thought we should go someday. As North will age out of camp after this year, we decided this was the year. I’m looking forward to that—and a few days at the beach the following week—but also just to the four of us being together again. It’s not our normal arrangement anymore, so that makes me value it even more.

But Wait, There’s More…

That was how the post was going to end when I finished writing it on Thursday night, but before Beth had a chance to post it (yes, she posts my blog), on Friday morning we found out that North had tested positive for covid and had to come home, missing the last two days of camp and a field trip to Hershey Park. Beth got in a couple hours of work before she had to leave to spend most of the day driving up to camp and back. So, no Turkey Hill for us, and some family togetherness sooner than planned. Fingers crossed North doesn’t get very sick (so far, they just have a sore throat and some sniffles) and that we don’t all come down with it. I’m half-expecting we will, though so if anyone is unscathed, it will be a pleasant surprise.

Rock Around the Clock, Part 4

Posted on August 1, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Beth and I went to see Willie Nelson on Friday night, as an anniversary gift to each other. It’s actually called the Outlaw Music Festival, because there are several opening acts (different ones at each stop on the tour) and one of them went on as long as Nelson’s set. Beth and I had thought perhaps the concert started at 5:30 because Willie Nelson is ninety years old and wants to get to bed at a decent hour, but it was almost ten before he even went on, so apparently, we like to go to bed earlier than ninety-year-old musicians.

Even though it kept us up late, the concert was a lot of fun. I was familiar with two of the opening acts (Kathleen Edwards and Nathaniel Rateliff) but only a little, so I was interested to hear more of their music. We were on the lawn for the first two acts. It was a hot day—the car thermometer read 100 degrees as we drove out to Columbia to Merriweather Post Pavilion—and we couldn’t get a spot in the shade, but it quickly clouded over and cooled, and it wasn’t too uncomfortable as we sat in our chairs and ate the pizza that we’d bought at the concession stand.

We were eyeing the sky nervously though because thunderstorms were predicted. Sure enough, just as the third act was starting, lightning lit up the sky and a hard rain started to fall, and to our surprise, the pavilion was opened to everyone with lawn tickets. I don’t know what they do when it storms on nights with sold-out shows, but it was nice to be able to sit somewhere dry, well, mostly dry. We were in the second to last row and the rain was blowing in diagonal sheets, so we got misted with it. Shortly before eight, the rain let up and the food stands re-opened and we got frozen custard (me) and an ice cream sandwich in the shape of the pavilion (Beth). She said it looked like a coffin and it did.

Finally, Nelson came on. His band was small. He was seated next to his late-in-life son Micah (who was also the first act) and he had three musicians behind him. Beth especially liked the harmonica player. Nelson looks good for a man of his age, and he sounds good, too. He sang many hits: “Whiskey River,” “Bloody Mary Morning,” “I Never Cared for You” “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” and of course, “On the Road Again.” The audience often sang along. It was very nostalgic for both me and Beth because both of our fathers were Willie Nelson fans, though unlike him, neither of them made it out of his sixties. I told Beth later that along with Sinead O’Connor’s death at fifty-six (our exact age!) that same week, it really made me think about how you never know how much time you have left. We could die tomorrow, or we could live into our nineties.

So, that thought brings me to the real focus on this post—the ordinary moments of day-to-day life, however long it lasts. Every five years I do a day-in-the-life post. Up to now it’s always been in early July, but this year we were traveling in early July, and we weren’t in our usual routine, so I shifted it to the last day of July instead. I always think these entries are impossibly boring when I’m writing them, but when I go back and read them five, ten, or fifteen years later, I’m struck by how much of what’s ordinary shifts slowly over time. Consider that when I wrote the first one, Potty Training was one of the categories and when I wrote the last one, College Search was one of them. (If I’d written about today instead of yesterday, I would have touched on that, as North’s filling out the Common App today. And having said that, I guess I’ll use that tag on this one, too.)

Anyway, here’s what happened yesterday:

6 a.m.

This is when Beth’s alarm usually goes off, but I didn’t hear it so she must have woken and gotten up earlier than this. She was headed to the office. Since convention, she’s been in the office more often, at least two days a week and sometimes as many as four. Anyway, I was asleep and so was North…

7 a.m.

…as we both were an hour later. This isn’t unusual for North, but it is for me. Staying up late on Friday night seemed to have shifted my sleep schedule. I slept late Saturday and Sunday and then once I got caught up on the sleep I’d lost, I started having trouble getting to sleep at bedtime, thus perpetuating the cycle.

8 a.m.

I was awake, but still in bed, scrolling through Facebook, thinking I should get up but instead watching things like a video my friend Joyce posted—a parody documentary about a nineteenth-century revolt by the Teletubbies against their British colonial overlords (it was as delightfully weird as it sounds)—or a medley video of songs popular in 1993. I have no good excuse for this behavior.

9 a.m.

Finally up, I was making breakfast of Greek yogurt, peanut butter, blackberries, and a sprinkling of granola. North got up soon after and I took advantage of the fact that I was getting a late start on laundry to strip their bed. Because they sleep late in the summer and I like to get laundry going early in the day, it had been longer than I want to say since I’d washed their sheets.

10 a.m.

I was still at the dining room table, reading blogs, possibly yours. North was there, too, eating watermelon and an egg, cheese, and vegetarian Canadian bacon sandwich on a bagel for breakfast.

11 a.m.

Having (partially) weeded the Black-Eyed Susan patch in the front yard and hung up laundry in the back yard, I was getting ready to leave for my morning walk, more than an hour later than usual. North was starting to make chocolate cheesecake with a chocolate sandwich cookie crust and a cookie dough topping.

Noon

Recently back from my walk, I was in the kitchen making a glass of iced coffee to take to the porch with the Style section of the newspaper, and Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 for my daily half hour of reading. (Reading every day is close to a religious observance for me, as is the walk.) North was still working on their complicated dessert and complaining about the difficulty of getting lumps of flour out of the cookie dough. I sampled the chocolate cheesecake layer, which was very good.

1 p.m.

I’d just done a little sweeping, dusting, and straightening up in my bedroom and the hall outside it. North and I were both in the kitchen. They were putting the finishing touches on their desert, making room in the fridge for it to set, and then doing the dishes from this project, while I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher with breakfast dishes and fixed myself some lunch (leftover gumbo Beth made the night before with some extra vegetarian sausage added).

2 p.m.

Finally tackling some paid work, I was finishing a 500-word blog post about milk thistle for liver health I’d started writing the previous week. It was more technical and slow-going than I originally thought it would be but fortified with another glass of iced coffee and the Eurythmics, I managed to pound out the rest of it and I was pleased with the final product. I was too in the zone to notice what North was doing.

3 p.m.

After getting up to get some steps, I was about to switch over a 1,000-word blog post for the same company, this one an overview of how the liver works. I chose Beck to begin the outlining and research phase of this project. North was in the basement riding the exercise bike.

4 p.m.

I was taking a break to take the laundry off the line so North could fold it and wondering in a mildly despairing way if I could really come up with 1,000 words about the liver. North was at the dining room table eating a snack of vegetarian sausage and drinking raspberry seltzer.

5 p.m.

I was still working on the liver blog post and listening to Counting Crows. North had finished folding the laundry and was lying on my bed among the piles of clothes, looking at their phone.

6 p.m.

I was standing on a stool peering into a high shelf in a kitchen cabinet and moving boxes of food around when North came out of their room, and I asked if they thought we had any nori. I was glad to see them because they were out of the headache danger zone. If they don’t have one by early evening, they aren’t getting one. I wanted the nori to add to the miso soup I was making for dinner. I’d intended it to be a simple meal of frozen dumplings and miso soup with grated carrots and tofu, but I kept thinking of things to add to the soup—scallions, dried mushrooms, strips of nori. Beth called it a “loaded miso soup” when I served it. For a semi-improvised meal, I thought it came out well.

7 p.m.

Beth had come home, and we were all sitting around the table, nearly finished with dinner, discussing our evening entertainment options. We settled on one episode of The Gilmore Girls (for all of us) and one episode of Ginny and Georgia (for me and North). When we do this, North calls it a G and G and G and G.

8 p.m.

We were all watching the Gilmore Girls, season 5, episode 12. My goal of finishing season 5 before North goes back to school in less than four weeks is looking kind of iffy, especially with Noah coming home soon, which will shift our television dynamic, but that’s okay. I knew it was a stretch. I had just checked my blood sugar and was disappointed that I’d gone high enough on the dumplings that dessert was out of the question, and I’d have to wait until the next day to try the cheesecake. (When I did the next afternoon, it was worth the wait.)

9 p.m.

North and I were close to the end of Ginny and Georgia, season 2, episode 7.

10 p.m.

I was freshly showered and in bed with Beth, but not yet asleep. We talked a little about her day at work and office politics before sleeping. I fell asleep more easily than the night before and slept until a more normal time the next morning, when I got up and greeted August, a month which will include Noah’s return to the East coast, a possible visit to the Montgomery County fair, a week at sleepaway camp for North, a few days at the beach, and the beginning of North’s senior year of high school.

Obviously, spending the day with a rising high school senior is different than spending the day with a toddler and a rising second grader, or two school-age kids, or a tween and a teen. I’m much less busy taking kids to day camp or hosting play dates than I was then. Summer days without Noah still seem odd. I feel his absence every day, more so than during the school year, but I’m also happy he had the opportunity to do the work he loves for two months in Los Angeles and San Diego and that he’s visiting with extended family in Davis now. (My sister reports they’ve been to a swimming hole and a trivia night, they went to see Barbie, and are having a game night at her house tonight.)

We’ve been through a lot in the last five years: the Trump presidency, a global pandemic (which is why Beth still works from home more often than not), the deaths of two cats, a diabetes diagnosis for me, and multiple health issues for North. Although North’s had migraines since they were four years old, until this year they didn’t force us to make two plans for every evening in our heads (one in which North is down for the count and one in which they aren’t). I fervently hope this pattern changes, because a migraine two nights out of every three is quite disruptive to their life.

But there are some constants: we still watch television together and garden and I still carve time out of the day to read, I dry laundry on the line at least once a week, and Beth and I talk in bed most nights before we drop off to sleep.

It’s entirely possible when I do this next, it will be a record of an empty nest summer day. Or maybe like their brother, North will land at home for a bit the summer after college. Either way, if I’m still blogging, you’ll find out.

Summertime, Part 2

Posted on July 2, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

North had a busy first two weeks of summer break. They volunteered at an outdoor, nature-and-art-based day camp at their old preschool the first week. The camp is for five-to-ten-year olds (mostly alumni of the school) and North had attended it as a camper. On Thursday night they said a week at camp goes a lot more quickly than a week at school. They didn’t know it at the time, but the week was over for them. The next day the school experienced sewer issues and rather than cancel, the director decided to take the kids on a hike. The junior counselors were allowed to bow out if they wanted to, and North did.

The next week North travelled to North Carolina to attend a career exploration program at Johnson and Wales’s Charlotte campus. They spent two days and three nights there, baking in the mornings and going on field trips (to a bowling alley and an amusement park) in the afternoons. They flew there alone, finding their way to campus and back to the airport. It was a much higher degree of difficulty solo travel experience than I had when I flew alone for the first time the summer I was seventeen (and was dropped off and picked up at the airport). The whole week I kept thinking about how both kids were off in the world, doing what they want to do in their adult lives. It was a like a preview of the empty nest.

On Tuesday, the second night they were gone, Beth and I had a date night at MotorKat, a newish restaurant in Takoma we hadn’t tried yet. We ate out on the patio, which was strung with rainbow-stripped pennants for Pride. We got salads, a spring onion-tofu pancake with smoked mushrooms, and cauliflower skewers. If you’re local, the pancake is really good. As we were finishing our entrees, it started to drizzle, then rain harder. One by one, people abandoned their tables and moved inside. We did, too, but we were the last ones to give up on outdoor dining. When the second-to-last couple went inside, one of them said, “We salute you!” We got a new table inside because we wanted dessert. Beth got a trifle, and I got chocolate crème brule, and both were excellent.

We were back at home on the living room couch watching a module of an online parenting course we’re taking as part of family therapy when we heard a loud bang outside. A transformer had blown, which is not actually that unusual. What was unusual was that we still had power. Even more unusual, the transformer was on fire and raining sparks down on a couple of our trees and our fence. Beth said later it looked like fireworks.

If everything hadn’t been soaked from the rain, I think the trees in our side yard would have caught fire. Police and firefighters arrived and blocked off the street for a while. Apparently, they don’t put out electrical fires, though, so they just watched it until it started to taper off and then left. We would have felt better about it if they’d waited until it was completely out, but it did go out eventually and a couple days later the power company came, cleaned up the debris and repaired it. The only sign left is the melted gray plastic stuck to some of the leaves of the trees.

On Thursday afternoon, North came home happy and bearing two galettes (one mushroom-cream cheese and one almond cream-berry) and a bag of scones (chocolate chip and cheese). They were excellent. It was nice to sit around the table all together and sample them before they went to bed with a headache.

We went to pick up their orthotics the next day. They have a compression body suit, inserts for their shoes, and knee braces. Well, one brace. It turned out they got two left ones so they can only wear one. We’re all hoping these devices help them stand and walk with less pain, but it’s too soon to tell. And we can’t get the right knee brace for a couple weeks because all three of us are embarked on new travels–Beth to Wheeling and St. Louis and North and me to Davis, California and the Oregon coast. More on that later…

The Grad Who’s Going Places

Posted on May 28, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Friday: Senior Splash and Arrival

Okay, settle in. This is a long one.

We hit the road for Ithaca on Friday morning. It had been another busy week, with our first session with a new family therapist (on Tuesday) and an appointment to have North measured for orthotics for their feet, knee braces, and a compression suit for their torso (on Thursday). The most interesting part of that appointment for me was watching the technician scan North’s feet with a camera and create a 3-D image of them on his computer screen. Everything should be ready for North to try on for adjustments the last week in June.

At 1:30 p.m., a little after we passed Harrisburg, Noah and the rest of the class of ’23 waded into the Dillingham Fountains for Senior Splash, an Ithaca tradition. It was live streamed for about an hour, but when I tried to watch it on my phone, I couldn’t get the video to start. Asked about it later, Noah said 1) yes, the water was cold (the event had been postponed two days because on Wednesday the high was 50 degrees—on Friday it was in the low 70s); 2) no, you did not have to prove you were a senior to get in the water, it was on the honor system; and 3) yes, it was fun. He received a t-shirt and a towel as mementos.

At four p.m., as we were driving through the Tioga mountains near the Pennsylvania-New York border, I was concentrating on sending Noah good thoughts because he had another interview for a video editing internship for a production company. Or I thought he did. Turns out it was postponed until Tuesday.

We got to our Airbnb around six and were delighted to find a pair of geese and their five fuzzy goslings in a little pond behind it. (Later a heron would join them.) We ordered pizza, and then went to pick Noah up from his apartment and the pizza up from Franco’s. When Noah came out of his building, I launched myself at him and gave him such an enthusiastic hug that he laughed. We went upstairs briefly so I could see his place, which I knew looked almost exactly like his junior year apartment—it was in the same complex—but I wanted to see it anyway.

I have two strong memories of Franco’s that washed over me when we walked inside the pizzeria. We ate there in April of 2019 when we visited Ithaca for Admitted Students’ Day and Noah was trying to decide between Ithaca, RIT, and Boston University. North was in Colombia on foreign exchange trip, and I remember messaging with their host mom while we waited for the pizza. The second memory was in July 2020 when we came to collect Noah’s belongings from the dorm room he couldn’t return to after spring break, because covid cut that school year short. Back then, Franco’s was operating on a takeout-only basis, and there was a crowd on the sidewalk, waiting, trying to stay as distanced from each other as possible. As we waited, a passerby yelled to all those assembled, “Best pizza in Ithaca!”

I don’t know if it is, as I haven’t tried all the options (and Noah did not offer an opinion when asked), but it’s good, and we enjoyed it before settling in to watch a couple episodes of Blackish, having decided it was kind of late to start a movie (me) and the screen of the Airbnb’s television was too small to do justice to a movie (Noah).

Saturday: Iconic Ithaca

On Saturday we tried to hit as many of our favorite places in Ithaca as we could. We had breakfast at Ithaca Bakery (second breakfast for me and Beth as we were up hours before the kids). While we were there, we picked up Noah’s graduation cake, and I thought nostalgically about the fact that I’ve ordered cupcakes from this bakery every semester he’s been on campus for his half-birthdays and birthdays. Beth bought some of the rosemary-salt bagels she likes there. I got a latte and an almond croissant, and they were both very good.

Next, we went grocery shopping at Wegman’s, where we’ve often bought groceries to stock his apartment kitchens. This time we were getting supplies for his post-graduation picnic.

Lunch was at Moosewood, at Noah’s request. We ate outside, under the famous striped awning. We’ve eaten at Moosewood a couple times before, starting with his first prospective visit in August 2018, though the last time we tried to go (when we were dropping him off for his junior year) it closed suddenly due to a staff member getting covid and our reservations were cancelled. North hadn’t been with us on either of our previous visits, so it was their first time, and they were happy to finally visit the iconic restaurant associated with several cookbooks I’ve been cooking from their whole life. They got a black bean burger and said it was really good. We all shared a cheese board, and I had a bowl of cream of pea soup and an iced ginger tea. At lunch, Noah opened his graduation present from us, a new camera lens.

We walked partway down the Taughannock trail after lunch, but we didn’t make it all the way to the main falls. It was pleasant to walk in the woods and along the dry half of the pocked stone riverbed. Noah took the opportunity to try out his new lens. It was drizzling when we started the walk and raining a little harder by the end. We had two umbrellas between us and shared them.

We went to Purity Ice Cream (another favorite place) after our hike and then Beth left me and North at the house so she and Noah could take a chair from his apartment (the only furniture in the place that was his and which was too big to bring home) to drop it off for donation. North and I both went to bed, as they had a headache, and I was sleepy because I hadn’t slept well for two nights in a row. When Beth and Noah got home, he made baked ziti for dinner because he’d bought the ingredients and never got around to making it for himself. We were expecting Beth’s mom, her aunt Carole, and Carole’s granddaughter Holly to arrive late that evening and Noah said it was nice to make a full recipe and not have to scale it down for solo dining.

After dinner Beth, Noah, and I went to the Commencement Eve concert and fireworks show. It was in the arena where Commencement would be held the next day and where we’d seen presentations and eaten catered meals when Noah was a prospective and checked him in during orientation his freshman year. Everywhere we turned all weekend, we were awash in memories.

The concert featured a choir, a wind ensemble, a jazz ensemble, a trumpet troupe, and a dance group. The groups were on different parts of the stage and the lights would go on the left, center, or right, depending which band was playing, leaving the rest of the stage dark. This meant there was no moving on and off stage, which streamlined the event considerably. The musicians also performed the songs seamlessly, with no breaks. This gave the event a very propulsive feel. The audience was instructed to hold its applause until the end and for the first few songs it did, as there really was no time to applaud. But eventually people started applauding over the beginning of each new song, because that’s how people are. Anyway, the musicians (all music majors) were very talented. It was a great concert and I say this as someone who has been to a lot of band concerts. The fireworks display was fun, too, even though it was damp and chilly out.

We dropped Noah off at his apartment and when we got back to the house, YaYa, Carole, and Holly had just arrived, after a long drive from West Virginia. They tucked into the baked ziti and after some conversation, we went to bed.

Sunday: Commencement

Commencement was the next morning, or I should say the next morning and afternoon, because it lasted three and half hours. It was nice, but probably very much like any commencement you’ve been to before. Before it started, quotes from students and their photos flashed by on a screen. (We never saw Noah’s and found out later he had not submitted either.)

The keynote speaker, an alumnus from the class of 1980 who works as a theater producer, was reasonably entertaining and gave pretty good advice that boiled down to—take risks, be kind, and enjoy the ride. Another alum, a civil rights activist, received an honorary degree. The student speaker was bubbly. The last hour and a half consisted of the reading of the names, almost one thousand two hundred of them. The graduates were called to the stage in the order they had taken their seats, not alphabetically or by school, so there was no way to know when your kid’s name was going to come up unless you could see the graduates’ seating area and I could not. Noah was near the end and eventually he started texting Beth to let her know how far he was from going onstage.

And then it was over, the graduates moved their tassels from one side to the other, confetti came streaming down from the ceiling, and mortarboards flew into the air. (That was when I cried a little.) Noah kept his mortarboard, and I was glad he did because I wanted to get pictures of him in full regalia afterward. He had cords for graduating summa cum laude, for the Communications honor society, and for working for ICTV. We walked around campus and took pictures in front of the Park School of Communications and the fountain where just two days before, he’d taken a dip.

By the time we got back to the house and reconnected with Carole and Holly, who had been exploring Ithaca while the rest of us were at graduation, it was mid-afternoon. We had a picnic lunch at a little park by a pond nearby. North had made pasta salad, Beth made a tofu salad, and we had cheese and crackers and chips, berries, watermelon, and mango. It was a feast. There was also cake. I’d been torn between surprising Noah with it or letting him choose the flavors and I let him choose. It was chocolate with cream cheese frosting and chocolate ganache between the four layers and it was excellent. Holly, who works at a bakery, raved about it.

After the picnic, we all drove around to see Taughannock Falls from the upper overlook and Buttermilk Falls. Everyone but YaYa and Carole walked along a short bit of the wooded trail there.

People ate various leftovers for dinner and YaYa, Carole, and Holly gave Noah cards, money, and a class of ’23 mug. Then Beth, and Holly, and the kids went out for ice cream again. I stayed home and while they were gone, I started to feel ill with a stomachache and dizziness. I’m still not sure what was wrong but based on the graph on my glucose monitor app, I think I might have been having a blood sugar crash. I am not particularly sensitive to my spikes and drops—I usually have no idea they’re happening until I see them later on the graph—but if that’s what it was, I now know two pieces of cake in one day might not be a good idea, even if the second one is very small.

Even though I didn’t feel well, I stayed up because I knew we were all going to watch Noah’s senior project when everyone got back. It’s a film about suicide, called It’s Not Your Fault, based on the experiences of one of the other filmmakers. Julius was the co-director, editor, and screenwriter, and also acted in it. His close friend from high school killed himself during their sophomore year of college. Noah was the other director, lead editor, producer, and the software developer. It’s an interactive movie, sort of like a choose-your-own adventure book. There are two places where you decide what action the characters will take, so there are various paths through it, but they all lead to the same ending. When Noah and I were discussing this earlier in the semester and I said that sounded kind of nihilistic, but he said the point of that was to stress that the character who did not prevent his friend’s death was not to blame, and then I understood.

Monday: Departure #1

In the morning I packed up the rental house kitchen while Noah and Beth packed up his apartment. The house’s checkout time was an hour earlier than his apartment checkout time, so when we were ready to leave, the rest of us headed out to his building so the West Virginia contingent could say their goodbyes and Beth and I could help Noah carry things down from his third-floor apartment and pack them into the car. Despite the fact that Beth had been to Ithaca the previous weekend to take home some of his belongings, he still had a lot of stuff and when it was all spread out on the sidewalk behind the nearly full car it looked kind of hopeless. We considered our options: should buy some packing materials and mail things home, find a place to donate things, throw things away?

Beth and Noah set to work opening bins that weren’t completely full and packing things into them and into the little crevices between boxes, performing some minor miracles and nearly eliminating the pile. I filled up half the legroom in the passenger seat and Noah and I put things on our seats to carry in our laps. He took his wastebasket to the lobby of the building where other people were leaving abandoned items. In the end all we had to throw out was a pair of worn-out sneakers and food, a couple grocery bags worth. I felt acutely guilty for the waste, but there didn’t seem to be any other option.

Beth and I had packed lunches with food from the rental house and we got Chipotle for the kids. We picnicked at Buttermilk Falls. Noah took some final pictures of the falls, and we got in the stuffed car and left Ithaca. I remarked that considering I never lived in Ithaca, only visited a half dozen times over the course of five years, I was surprisingly sad not to have a reason to return. Beth said she was, too. The only one of us who has lived in Ithaca did not comment, but he did seem a little wistful at the falls. It’s a really fun place to visit, full of natural beauty and good food. But perhaps I will be falling in love with another college town soon.

It was nine-thirty when we got home, after another picnic meal of Indian takeout eaten near a lake in York, PA. We did only the most necessary unpacking (perishable food), glanced at the mail, and fell into bed.

Tuesday: Home

Noah had not quite two days at home, and the first one was busy. He had two interviews, one in the early afternoon and one in the evening. Beth, North, and I went to family therapy in the morning before he was up, and we returned right before the first one started.

After the first interview, Noah and I read Serpentine, a short story by Phillip Pullman that takes place in between the His Dark Materials trilogy and the Books of Dust trilogy. I bought it for his birthday, thinking it would be good for a couple days, which might be all the time we had if we didn’t have time to read in Ithaca (and we didn’t), but it was even shorter than I realized. It only took about a half hour to read. It was enjoyable, though.

Also that afternoon, the kids and I cleaned the porch. This is an annual tradition involving a hose, buckets of soapy water, a push broom, and rags. We do it in May or June around the time the pollen has stopped falling and mixing with a year’s worth of dirt into a grimy mess on the floors and walls of the porch. This activity tends to end in some kind of water play, so we all wear bathing suits to do it. Before North got home from school, Noah and I carried all the furniture and ladders and everything else we store on the porch to the front yard, and I started to wipe them down with damp rags.

When North got home Noah stationed himself next to the porch with a hose and buckets that he kept refilling with clean and soapy water, while North used the broom to push water over the floor and I scrubbed the porch walls with rags. The kids did a really good job. The porch looks great. When Noah sprayed North with the hose, I realized I didn’t have my phone to document this and I went back inside to get it and then had them recreate the scene, telling them, “Make it look spontaneous.”

That night we had tofu-vegetable bowls with chow mein noodles for dinner because it’s a family favorite. At dinner Noah thought to mention that he thought the internship from his first interview of the day was his if he wanted it. It’s unpaid, but he’s willing to do that for the experience, especially now with jobs in film so scarce.

After Noah’s second interview he said even if he got that one, he thought he’d prefer the first one, so he’s going to accept it. It’s not all nailed down yet, but even so, it’s a relief that he (probably) has a position. Later that evening Beth, Noah, and I watched one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because it wouldn’t be a proper visit from Noah without that. (Just thirty-eight episodes to go.)

Wednesday-Thursday: Departure #2

I took Tuesday and Wednesday off work because Noah’s visit was so short, but he spent most of Wednesday unpacking and repacking his things, so I actually ended up working a little that day. While Beth was driving North to school in the morning, he got a robocall asking if he’d like to be switched to a direct flight because his was overbooked, but he wanted to check with Beth to see if she could get him to the airport earlier than planned and by the time he found out, the airline had given the direct flight to some other lucky traveler.

We left for the airport at three. He wanted to get there really early and it ended up being a good idea because we ran into several snags: there was unexpected traffic on the way to the airport; one of his suitcases was overweight and he had to get out of line and shift things from the heavier to the lighter bag to get them both under fifty-two pounds, saving $100 in the process; and he forgot to take his iPad out of his backpack while he was going through security and got called aside for a long time. Beth and I were watching from the other side of the cordon and wondering what on Earth was happening.

Finally, he got on his plane and while he was in the air, he was informed his connecting flight from Detroit to Los Angeles had been cancelled. So, with some coaching from Beth, he learned some high-level flying skills, like how to get one’s luggage back mid-itinerary when it’s not on the carousel. The airline put him up in hotel, so he didn’t have to sleep in the airport. It was more than twenty-four hours from the time he left DCA until he got to LAX.

But he arrived and Friday and Saturday he got settled into his apartment, which he’s sharing with three other Ithaca students. He’s been shopping for food, shoes, and housewares. He’s going to attend a watch party for the series finale of Succession with some other Ithaca folks tonight. He was supposed to attend an orientation for Ithaca students and grads in Los Angeles on Thursday, but he got switched to another one that will meet next Tuesday.

While he was flying, Noah took a picture of the ad on his seatback suggesting that an airline gift card would be a good gift for “The Grad Who’s Going Places,” and texted it to Beth. She texted back “That’s you!” and it is. In less than nine months he’s gone to Australia for a semester, then home for a month, back to New York for his final semester, and now he’s in California to begin seeking his fortune. He doesn’t have a return ticket because we don’t know where he’s going next or when, but I can’t wait to find out.

Arts & Sciences

Posted on April 29, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

It’s been a busy week for all of us, full of artistic events and (mostly medical) appointments.

Monday Afternoon and Evening: Visual and Musical Arts

In art class, North’s most recent project is a painting of cherry blossoms, based on some photos Noah took while he was home for spring break. The cherries on our block were just starting to bloom when he left in mid-March. On Monday, their teacher asked North to finish the painting so she could put it in the art show at their school later in the week. This was a nice thing to learn because the kids don’t always know ahead of time what’s going to be on display.

That night Ithaca’s Campus Band (for non-music majors) had its twice-yearly concert. It’s livestreamed, so we got to watch Noah play triangle, suspended cymbals, snare drums, and timpani. It was a short concert, just four songs, but I always enjoy hearing him play. I have since he was nine and it was a little bittersweet watching his last college band concert after all these years. My favorite song was the last one, “The Cave You Fear,” because I could hear him playing the timpani pretty well. I asked Noah about the title, and he said it’s a Joseph Campbell quote: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” That’s something to think about, as he stands on the brink of his adult life.

Tuesday Morning: Medical Science

North had an appointment at the pain clinic at Children’s on Tuesday morning. They were being evaluated for POTS because of some dizziness they’ve been having. I didn’t go because I thought it would mainly be a procedural appointment, during which their heart rate would be measured in different positions (laying down, sitting, standing). And they did do that (and found they don’t have POTS), but they also had a long consultation about pain as well.

It was a new doctor and Beth and North both reported that they liked him. North has had a lot of experiences of not feeling heard by pain doctors, but he seemed to listen, to have reviewed their chart before the appointment, and to have consulted with the neurologist they’re seeing for their migraines, all points in his favor. He gave them a referral to see another doctor to consult about possibly getting braces to help stabilize their joints and he mentioned that the new migraine drug they are about to start might help with other kinds of pain, too. We’re all feeling cautiously hopeful about these developments. North mentioned it would be nice to have their hands freer if braces made it possible to use their cane and crutches less. They were specifically thinking of standing for long hours in the kitchen at culinary school more easily.

Tuesday Evening: Literary Arts

That night was Favorite Poem Night at the library. North was considering coming with me but didn’t because they’d gone to bed with a migraine. For years I didn’t read a poem at Favorite Poem Night because the pressure of picking one favorite poem was too overwhelming. Seven years ago, I chilled out and realized it could be just a poem I liked, and I read an Emily Dickinson poem (#670, “One Need Not Be a Chamber to Be Haunted”). I’ve read a poem most years the event has been held since then. It was cancelled for covid in 2020 and I think in 2021, too.

Tuesday, inspired by all the spring wildflowers (dandelions, asters, buttercups) in my yard, I returned to Dickinson and read poem #81, even though it’s actually about fall flowers and how they extend the floral season just when it seems to have ended.

We should not mind so small a flower—
Except it quiet bring
Our little garden that we lost
Back to the Lawn again.

So spicy her Carnations nod—
So drunken, reel her Bees—
So silver steal a hundred flutes
From out a hundred trees—

That whoso sees this little flower
By faith may clear behold
The Bobolinks around the throne
And Dandelions gold.

There were many lovely poems read, including pieces by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Alice Walker, Jack Prelutsky, Ada Limón, Mary Oliver, Robert Penn Warren, and Maya Angelou, among others, but I was particularly excited to see “What You Missed that Day You were Absent from Fourth Grade,” on the program because I just love this poem. There were two precocious little girls who read poems in French and the poet laurate of Takoma Park—yes, we have one—read from his work. It was a fun event.

Thursday Evening: Visual Arts

We had a fairly uneventful 504 meeting at North’s school Thursday morning. We didn’t make any changes to their accommodations, decided that they will stick with the half-virtual, half-in person schedule they’ve had since January for the rest of the school year, and discussed possible changes to their senior year course schedule, but we didn’t make any final decisions about that.

After the meeting was over, we decided to take a sneak peek at the art displayed in the hallway and we discovered that not only was North’s cherry blossom painting there, but also their winter landscape, which is based on a composite of a photo Noah took of me at Blackwater Falls State Park and other photos both kids have taken there. North noted with some amusement that the cherry blossom picture had been hung upside down. The blossoms are supposed to be dangling down from the branch. Beth needed to get back to work so we didn’t have a chance to look at the other art right then, but we returned that evening.

Walking through the art at a more leisurely pace, we found North had three pieces in the show. The ink wash cityscape they completed largely at home last fall and winter was there, too. We got to chat with their ninth-grade ceramics teacher who taught them virtually during the pandemic, and with their current painting teacher, and to look at painting, drawing, photography, and digital art from other classes. There was a whole room that was dedicated mostly to ceramics and other forms of three-dimensional art, which interested North because they are signed up for Ceramics 2 next year.

Friday: Theatrical Arts

In the morning, North had a psychiatrist appointment, again pretty uneventful. That night North and Beth went to see Sister Act at a high school in Virginia, so North could review it for Cappies. They’ve been really busy with this activity recently—in the past two weeks they’ve also attended and reviewed Mean Girls and Legally Blonde. The theater director and Cappies’ co-ordinator for their school reads the reviews and he pulled them aside recently and told them he really enjoys their writing.

Beth has gone to many of these shows with North and I intended to at the beginning of the school year, but because the Cappies have a meeting to debrief after the play and many of the plays are at schools pretty far away (often in Virginia), going to one usually means getting home after midnight. After the one time I did it in October, I was never up to it again. I am not the night owl I was in my youth. I always had mixed feelings about skipping the plays because I like theater and I would have liked being familiar with the performances when I read North’s reviews. And as this was the last play North would review this year, I had some FOMO as Beth and North left the house, around five p.m.

It turned out to be a good night for me to stay home, though, because an hour or so after they left, I started to feel dizzy and sick to my stomach. I ended up putting the pizza and salad I’d ordered straight into the fridge as soon as it arrived and crawled into bed at seven. I listened to podcasts for a couple hours until I fell asleep during one. I woke recovered in the morning, so I’m not sure what was wrong.

Apparently, I missed the best show of the year, according to Beth. She raved about the acting, the choreography, and the pit orchestra. North wrote the production was “dynamic and enchanting, with stunning acting, magnificent vocals, and expert behind the scenes work.”

Upcoming: Visual Arts, Medical Science, and Pastry Arts

The play was just the beginning of a busy weekend for North that will include a therapist appointment, Sol’s birthday party, and a trip to the National Art Gallery with Ranvita. Then next week North has in-person appointments at urology, the pain clinic, and a Zoom meeting with Accessibility Services at Johnson and Wales University to get more detail about what accommodations are possible in the Baking and Pastry Arts program.

Speaking of pastry arts, North has volunteered to make my birthday cupcakes next month, so in addition to appreciating both offspring’s musical, photographic, artistic, and theatrical talents, we’ll soon have the opportunity to appreciate the younger one’s baking, too.

Dragons, and Seahawks, and Cats, Oh My! College Tours

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Friday: Takoma Park, MD to Providence, RI

It took us over ten hours to make the six-state drive to Providence for the first of three college visits we did over North’s spring break. It could have been done more quickly, but we took a lot of breaks for lunch, restroom visits, and for those of us with hourly step goals to try to meet them. I also need to walk every hour or two to prevent leg cramps.

We ordered pizza ahead of our arrival, but apparently not early enough because when we got to the busy pizzeria, the friendly young man at the counter said it wasn’t going to be ready for another forty-five minutes. That was what the app said, too, but we thought it might have been a mistake because we’d ordered almost an hour earlier. I was hungry and it was almost eight and I try not to eat after eight p.m., so I bought a slice, or I tried to—he gave it to me for free, stage-whispering not to tell anyone. I ate it in the car. It was good.

We settled into the house and Beth went back to get the much-anticipated pizza. Beth and North ate their slices while we watched the first forty minutes of Do the Right Thing. I’d nominated this film for family movie night, back in February for Black History Month, and now on the last day of March, we were getting around to it. We were too tired to watch the whole thing, though.

Saturday: Providence and Environs

The next morning, we attended the open house for Johnson and Wales University’s culinary school. This school offers the only bachelor’s degree in Baking and Pastry Arts in the country, and it is currently North’s top choice.

The event began with a scavenger hunt in the Culinary Arts Museum. There were spaces to explore, like a diner built in the 1920s and a colonial era tavern. (It wasn’t clear to me if they were real or recreations.) North had a list of things to find, such as the jacket of a celebrity chef and a prototype of the microwave from the 1940s. It was fun and North found all the items on the list. Unfortunately, they missed hearing when you were supposed to turn in the paper, so they didn’t win a bag of cooking utensils and swag.

I sampled a small cinnamon roll from the table of student-baked treats, and we visited several booths, including one for study abroad and another for accessibility services. The woman at that booth was surprisingly discouraging about accommodations for a student with chronic pain and mobility issues.

We proceeded to a panel discussion. While we waited for it to start, we discussed how the school seems to have two mascots. The official one is the Wildcats, but the school’s logo includes the flag of Wales, which has a dragon on it (although at first, I thought it was a griffin). You actually see as many if not more dragons than wildcats in the graphics around campus. Depending on how far you can zoom in, you might see one on the right side of the chef’s jacket North’s wearing in the first photo, across from the words “Future Wildcat.”

At the panel, a dean and about a half dozen professors who described the program and explained how the different tracks in the culinary school are structured. A few of them stressed how JWU’s culinary school is unique in that it’s housed in a university and students also take academic classes. Toward the end, during the Q&A Beth asked about accessibility again and got a very different, more positive answer from the dean. So that’s something to investigate in more detail because except for this one concern, North is really sold on this school. At the discussion we picked up samples of student-made confectionary. I choose a bag of salted caramels that I saved for later—they were excellent.

We went on a tour next. There are two campuses, one in downtown Providence and another on Narragansett Bay. The culinary school is in the harborside campus, though students can also take any academic classes that aren’t offered there in the downtown campus. We toured the two main harborside classroom buildings, which were bustling for a Saturday morning. Several clubs were meeting—including a Latin American cuisine club that was holding a competition and a baking club. We were invited in to watch students present their meals and baked goods, and we were offered pastry samples. I had an almond cookie even though I’d already had a cinnamon roll and I did not regret it. (It reminded me strongly of a tart I used to get at the Portuguese bakery in Provincetown where Beth and I often travelled back in our twenties and thirties. That and the fact that something called “New England coffeecake” was on offer made me wonder if that day’s baking focus was New England regional pastry.)

We could have boarded a bus to tour the downtown campus at this point, but there wouldn’t have been time for lunch if we did that, so we decided to wander around downtown Providence on our own later. We checked out a food court-style dining hall where North could have used their visitor’s badge for 10% off, but they were in the mood for Panera, so we went to one just across the Massachusetts border, before walking around the downtown Providence campus. We tried to go to the Admissions Office and the bookstore, but they had both closed for the day.

While we were driving to Rhode Island the day before we’d glimpsed the ocean from the highway (in Connecticut) and that got me in the mood to see it again. We considered going to the beach that afternoon, but it was late afternoon by the time we got back to the house, and we were farther inland now, almost an hour away from the Atlantic, so we decided Greenwich Bay was a better idea.

However, North didn’t want to risk leaving the house during prime migraine time because they get one in the late afternoon more often than not these days and they were saving their last dose of the really effective medicine for the next night because we had evening plans. After some discussion, we decided to leave them alone in the house. We have not done this since they were hospitalized in October, though we’d been considering it for a while. It felt momentous and anticlimactic at the same time.

It was a short drive and a long walk to the bay. It was a scenic walk, though, along a wooded, riverside path. When we got to the beach, we sat on a bench and looked at the water for about fifteen minutes before we headed back.

When we got back, North had gone to bed with a headache after all, so it was just the two of us for dinner. After considering a few options, we ordered takeout from a Japanese restaurant the dean recommended during the part of his spiel in which he lauded the many fine dining options in Providence, where many alums work as chefs. His praise was not misplaced. We got several small dishes, and the garlic eggplant and crispy cauliflower were especially good. You should go there if you’re ever in Providence. It was very satisfying.

Sunday: Providence to New York, NY and Union City, NJ

Sunday morning, we drove to New York City. North was supposed to meet a friend from camp for lunch in Brooklyn, but the friend cancelled by text when we were right outside the city. That gave us enough time to reconsider our next destination and our lunch plans. We stopped at a pretty little park by the Hudson River, had a picnic, and regrouped.

We decided to go to Coney Island. It took us longer to get there than we thought it would—isn’t that always how it goes in New York?—and when we did there was no legal parking to be had anywhere so Beth kindly volunteered to stay with the illegally parked car just in case she had to move it and North and I took a quick jaunt to the amusement park and beach.

We had early evening theater ticket so we could only stay about forty-five minutes and we had different priorities. North was hungry for pizza and drawn to the wooden roller coaster and I just wanted to go to the beach. I bought two slices, one for North and one to take back to Beth, and North found it unsatisfactory as New York pizza. After they’d eaten the subpar pizza, I gave them money for the roller coaster, and they got in line. I took off my shoes and socks and walked on the beach for about ten minutes before North texted that the ride operators didn’t take cash. By that time it was too late to figure out how to get tickets and stand in line again, so we decided to get ice cream, hit the bathrooms, and meet up with Beth. The expedition didn’t go exactly as we hoped, but I did get to walk barefoot on the beach on a sunny day and eat strawberry cheesecake gelato, and that doesn’t happen every day.

We got to the theater (a converted church basement) where we were seeing Stranger Sings!, a musical parody of Stranger Things, a half hour before the show, which was a relief. If you’ve seen the source material (as North and I have), the show is funny and a lot of fun. If you haven’t (like Beth) it’s baffling, but she says she enjoyed it anyway so we will take her at her word.

We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant to get a post-show dinner of vegetable and tofu stir-fried noodles for North. The food came really quickly, and we took it back to our AirBnB in Union City, New Jersey. North liked it so well they left a glowing Yelp review.

Monday: Union City and New York to Takoma Park

On Monday we had a busy morning planned. We had a mid-afternoon tour of NYU and before then we had three stops. First was the Catacombs by Candlelight tour at Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral. This consists of a guided tour of the outdoor cemetery at the Cathedral and the vaults underneath it. The guide gives a lot of historical information both above and below ground. It was a little less creepy than North was hoping for, I think—no stacks of skulls and bones like in the Paris catacombs they read about in a 39 Clues book in elementary school, just sealed vault doors lit with electric candles—but it was still atmospheric and interesting.

From there we visited a high-end chocolate shop, which was Beth’s primary goal for our day in New York. We all picked treats (mostly candy, but North got a jar of fancy olives). The only thing I’ve tried so far was a pistachio truffle, but it was so good it made me take the lord’s name in vain when I bit into it. I still have a dark chocolate-cherry bar to try.

North wanted a pizza do-over so we went to another place they’d found. Here I should mention that North planned a lot of our activities in New York and navigated us to them. It made them seem like someone who’s almost ready to go to college, maybe even in a big city. They found the pesto, olive, and fresh mozzarella pizza at Prince Street Pizza much more to their liking than the boardwalk pizza. There were outside stools and counters, though we needed to wait a while for other diners to vacate the stools. There’s a lot of open air or semi-enclosed sidewalk dining in New York. I’m guessing at least some of it was born of the pandemic. A lot of the spaces are quite decorated and festive, but this one was more utilitarian.

At NYU, students were only allowed one parent and as I enjoy these tours more than Beth does, she walked around Greenwich village and sat in Washington Square Park while North and I went on the tour. Oddly, there was no introductory information session, which I’ve come to expect. We watched a two-minute video and set out. The other strange thing was that the tour was almost entirely outside the buildings we visited. We didn’t enter a residence hall or dining hall or classroom, though we approached them. We did go inside the student center and the main library and it’s lovely, twelve stories with an atrium in the center and the floors all enclosed in glass with an abstract gold pattern painted on it. We learned that NYU’s mascot, the Bobcat, is named after the card catalog. Bobcat is short for Bobst Library Catalog. You’ve got to appreciate a school that names its sports teams after the library catalog. Our guide was affable and informative. North was especially impressed with the study-abroad opportunities.

By the time it was over, North was done in—between the catacombs, our perambulations through the neighborhood, and the campus tour, it had been a lot of walking. They were starting to drag, so they sat down at a table outside a café to rest while Beth fetched the car from the parking lot. I went inside to buy a flourless chocolate-walnut cookie to justify our presence, and while I was inside a young woman took the other chair at the table where North was sitting and did not leave when I stared at her, so I ate the cookie standing up.

It was around four-thirty when we hit the road. We had long drive home, so it was past our bedtime when we arrived, stashed our perishable food in the fridge, and fell into bed.

Tuesday: Takoma Park

We had a one-day, two-night pit stop at home. North rested and Beth and I worked. I wrote half of the April issue of an e-newsletter for a supplement company, did two loads of laundry, mailed a care package of Easter candy to Noah, and cleaned most of the kitchen (losing steam and leaving the kitchen floor un-mopped) and started writing this.

North got a migraine in the late afternoon and tried their new device which arrived in the mail while we were gone. You strap it to your arm, and it vibrates in a way that’s supposed to block migraine pain signals, but it didn’t work (at least this time) and they ended up napping the rest of the day.

Wednesday: Takoma Park to Saint Mary’s City, MD and Ridge, MD

Wednesday morning, we set out on the southern leg of our trip. We arrived at Saint Mary’s historic site around lunch time, so we had a picnic there. Saint Mary’s was the first settlement in Maryland and its capital in the seventeenth century. Now it’s a living history museum and archaeological site. All fourth graders in Maryland public schools visit it. The year North went, I chaperoned. Turns out I remember this trip a lot better than North does because everything there looked very familiar. We wandered around a little before it was time for our tour and decided to return the next day when we’d have more time.

Saint Mary’s College of Maryland is a public honors college that’s located right next to the historic site. It’s on the shore of Saint Mary’s River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a gorgeous campus, full of red brick buildings, woods, and ponds. Their mascot is the Seahawks and we saw many actual seabirds, including ospreys, while we were there.

We listened to a presentation by an administrator and then set out for our tour. When North was registering for tours, Saint Mary’s was the only school that asked if the student had any accessibility needs, so North had requested a slower-paced tour. (They were able to keep up with the tours at JWU and NYU, but it was a concern ahead of time, and the NYU tour left them pretty wiped out.) We ended up with our own private tour, the three of us, plus two guides.

The tour was quite thorough. We went all over the small campus, and we saw the main dining hall, a dorm room (with a view of the pond), a townhouse (housing for juniors and seniors), the bookstore, and a classroom. We visited the boathouse where students can take out boats and paddleboards and saw students on the water and others sunbathing on the docks. We saw students wearing waders standing in the pond with nets and clipboards taking samples, presumably for a science class. The guide was attentive and at the end of the tour remembered to find out the answer to a question we’d asked that he didn’t know the answer to, even though we’d forgotten we’d asked.

After the tour, we checked into our AirBnB which was also on the water and had its own private dock on Saint Jerome Creek. It was so lovely we all sat out there for a half hour before we even unpacked. North went to bed with a headache soon after that, and I cooked dinner—vegetarian fish filets and roasted asparagus and carrots. Beth and I ate on the deck and then I went back to the dock to watch the sun set.

Thursday: Ridge and Saint Mary’s to Takoma

We didn’t have to be out of the house until noon, so we had a leisurely morning there. I ate my breakfast of yogurt, banana, and granola on the dock. North came to join me and we talked about the schools we visited and the college application process. Beth went for a walk and then went kayaking—the house had its own kayak you could use—and then I went for a walk. We got back about the same time and left the house to return to Saint Mary’s.

This time we bought tickets, and we took a guided tour of the Maryland Dove (a recreation of a seventeenth-century ship), a store, and a print shop, where we watched and participated in a demonstration of a printing press. We also wandered around some of the other buildings and read the historical signs about the people who lived and worked there. I was struck by the story of a woman who at the age of seventeen married a widower who had five children, and then bore him seven more. Being seventeen in the 1600s was a lot different than being seventeen now, I thought.

After a couple hours in Saint Mary’s, we left for lunch and our drive home. North’s considering a few more schools, so we’re not finished with college tours, but I think they’re off to a good start, with a lot of different ways to imagine their future—as a dragon/wildcat, a bobcat, or a seahawk.

Where They Are, Part 5

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Friday: End Game

North is finished with their afterschool therapy program. Their last day was Friday, about a week before we expected. The confusion arose from the fact that in the last two and a half weeks, they were only attending three days a week so they could stay after school and help with costumes for the spring musical, and we were under the impression those five missed days would extend their enrollment, but they didn’t, even though previous absences had.

We didn’t know for sure when their last day would be until Tuesday, so IOP seemed to end kind of abruptly, and I think before North felt quite ready. But it’s possible that after this four-and-a-half-month journey– of hospitalization, a long wait at home to get into a partial hospitalization program, the PHP, and then the IOP– any kind of end of intensive therapy would have seemed sudden.

There are upsides. North will have more time for schoolwork or extracurriculars or whatever they want to do now that they won’t be in therapy three to five afternoons a week and Beth will be logging a lot less time in the car driving to and fro.

And North won’t be working without a net. They still have their psychiatrist (Dr. C) and their therapist (A), both of whom they’ve known since they were twelve. We are considering going into family therapy and finding North a peer support group of some kind since they found that aspect of the PHP and IOP helpful. Beth and I were thinking when IOP was over, North would go back to school full-time, but they want to stay hybrid, so that’s what we’re going to do, at least for now.

Friday was busy. It started with a neurology appointment to discuss North’s worsening migraines and ways we can address them. The doctor was optimistic and exhaustive as he explained all the different medications and devices North can try. He also had a lot of lifestyle advice about food, hydration, exercise, and sleep. It made it seem like he was really committed to fixing the problem, which is what you want from a doctor, but it isn’t always that way, is it? Anyway, the upshot is he wants to keep North on the preventative that hasn’t been working, but at a higher dose until they’ve been on that dose for six weeks, and then if it still doesn’t work, there’s a plan for other medications they can try. And because the rescue medication they’ve been taking is very effective but can only be used twice a week, he prescribed a different one so they can alternate them and have relief more days of the week. They’re also getting a patch to put on their arm that’s supposed to block headache pain signals, but we don’t have that yet. (Since the appointment North has tried the new medication twice and oddly, it helps but only very briefly, and then the headache returns.)

From the doctor’s office we took North to school, but there was only a little over an hour left in the school day, and we were a half hour from home, so Beth and I set up shop in a nearby Starbucks and worked. Then we picked North up from school and headed to Columbia.

We decided to mark the end of IOP by taking North out for pizza and frozen yogurt. I worked in the library with Beth and had one last ramble around town, mainly in Symphony Woods, where I hadn’t been in a while. I took a lot of pictures of the painted picnic tables there. This one of a heron taking flight is my favorite. Herons always remind me of North because it was their symbol in preschool. The park was the site of the Christmas light display where Beth and I took a walk the day North was accepted to the PHP program three months earlier, though of course, those lights are long gone. I couldn’t help thinking of that day, though, and how relieved we were.

A little before 6:30 we went to fetch North. They were playing Scattergories with two other teens and a staff member. They answered one last question, said some goodbyes, and we left. They had a polished rock that says “Peace” on it they picked for a memento and a certificate for the IOP, like the one they got when they finished the PHP. We walked out of the facility for the last time and went to dinner.

Eating out felt like a bold plan because it involved eating inside a restaurant, which is something we still rarely do. But eating outside wasn’t feasible because it was dark, and the day was in the low 40s and damp. And takeout didn’t seem sufficiently celebratory because we get takeout pizza a couple times a month. So, we took the plunge. The restaurant, a combination pizza/Indian place, was large and mostly empty, so maybe not such a daring choice after all.

When we got home, we watched the first half of Loving. I’d originally picked it for Black History Month, but we didn’t get around to it in February.

Friday/Saturday: Bring the Boy Back Home

The other notable thing that happened on Friday, or rather very early Saturday morning, was that Noah came home for spring break. His bus was scheduled to arrive at 11:30 p.m. in— guess what suburban Maryland town? Yes, Columbia. So, after the movie, Beth drove up there and back for the second time that day and probably for the last time in the foreseeable future, as his bus back to school departs from Bethesda. Beth got him Taco Bell because he was hungry and brought him home around 12:20 a.m. I was in bed, and I woke up when they came in but just barely, so I didn’t see him until the next morning when I debriefed him while we both ate oatmeal.

I learned about the film he’s making for his senior capstone project. He’s working with a classmate, who wrote the script. It’s a fictionalized account of the suicide of a friend of the scriptwriter. They’re going to start filming in April. They don’t have all the actors they need yet but they have some, which is better than this time last year when Noah was on the verge of dropping his cinema production class because he couldn’t find any actors.

I asked about his classes and he’s enjoying Machine Learning (apparently the professor is disappointed that Noah’s a senior and can’t take his more advanced Machine Learning class) and he showed me some CGI he made in another film class. Things seem to be going well for him academically. He’s applied for summer internships in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t heard back from anywhere yet.

Later that morning Noah and I started reading Eric, from the Discworld series—this one’s partly a parody of Faust. He and I made tortellini soup for dinner—I’d texted him about a week earlier and given him a choice of three pasta-based soups and that’s what he chose. It felt deeply right to all sit down to dinner together.

Saturday: My Favorite Year

After dinner, the four of us went to North’s school to see the spring musical, My Favorite Year. In the program, the actors and crew wrote about their own favorite years. I don’t think Beth, North, or I will be counting North’s junior year of high school as our favorite year, but it was nice for them to be involved with the show and for all of us to be able to see the play together and see the costumes they worked on worn. North found out today that a song in which the main singer wears a skirt covered in patches that they made was nominated for best song by the Cappies. If the song wins, the actors will perform it at the Kennedy Center, and presumably the skirt will be there, too. Even though North couldn’t participate in crew until the last few weeks before opening night, when t-shirts were distributed during Tech Week, they were surprised to see their name printed on the back in the list of cast and crew. I was touched by that, too. Ranvita had a small role in the play and North had brought a bouquet for her, which they gave her when the play was over. It was a fun outing.

Sunday/Monday: Springtime of Life

Noah’s been home a few days now and we’ve started season 3 of His Dark Materials and season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He folded laundry and helped North with their computer science homework this afternoon. It’s nice to have him home, and looking ahead at the rest of the spring, there’s a lot to anticipate—having a more normal schedule, North’s birthday, which is less than two weeks away, our spring break college road trip in April, Noah’s and my birthdays in May, and his college graduation. I hope you’ve got a lot to look forward to this spring, too.

Here and There

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

We’re two and a half weeks into our current routine. On weekday mornings Beth works and North attends online classes or does homework, depending on the day of the week. Beth takes them to school in time for lunch where they hang out in the theater room with friends or attend improv club, again depending on the day of the week. Then Beth returns home to work some more and picks North up after they’ve finished their afternoon classes and takes them to Columbia, where they attend their afterschool therapy program. While North is there, Beth works in the Howard County public library, as she doesn’t have an office in the coworking space anymore. Then she brings North back home. They usually roll in around 7:15, which means we’re eating dinner late these days.

Wednesdays through Fridays, I stay home, but most Mondays and Tuesdays, I go with Beth and North to Columbia so we can attend individual family or multi-family therapy. We leave the house at 2:15 and get back five hours later. A lot of that time is spent in the car, but during the two hours while North’s in IOP before family therapy starts, I either work in the library alongside Beth or wander around Columbia. I am learning a lot about its environs. If you want to know how to find a coffeeshop, grocery store, drug store, post office, or pretty trail within walking distance of the Howard County Library main branch, I’m your girl.

Here a few things that have happened in the past couple weeks while we weren’t driving back and forth between Takoma and Columbia, some here and some there:

Snowfall (Here)

We have had almost no snow this winter. Just some flurries a couple days before Christmas and a dusting on the first morning of February. It was pretty and so novel I took a lot of pictures on my walk, but by afternoon it was all melted, except in the shady spots. I particularly liked how the snow looked on the red leaves of this plant.

Swim Pass (Here)

You may recall I finally got the Piney Branch pool to agree to honor my pre-pandemic punch card, but I wasn’t sure it would actually work until I successfully used it on the first Saturday in February. I am pleased about this, as I had $25 worth of swims left on the pass. It should last me the rest of the month and a week into March if I go every weekend. I’ve been swimming three Saturdays in a row now and it’s nice to be doing it again after an almost three-year-long break.

Care Package (Here and There)

I made brownies that same weekend, for two reasons. I wanted brownies and I wanted something homemade to put in a Valentine’s Day care package for Noah. I wrapped the individual brownies up in foil and decorated the foil with snowflake stickers because I couldn’t find any heart stickers in the sticker drawer. (Later I got some in direct mail from the American Heart Association and I put them on the envelopes of my valentines for Beth and North.)

In the care package, I also included Girl Scout cookies, Valentine’s Day candy, and a set of long underwear Noah accidentally left at home. (I texted him one morning when the temperatures in Ithaca were in the single digits asking if he wanted them and he said yes.) The following Monday, I mailed the package from a post office in Columbia, because, as previously mentioned, I know where things are in that town.

Lake Kittamaqundi Trail (There)

Last week I stumbled across this trail, which is part of the longer Downtown Columbia Trail, which goes right by the library. For a while it just seems to go along the highway, with some weedy fields in between. But eventually it comes to a creek and that creek leads to a reservoir and there’s a trail with some public art that goes along each side of the water. I didn’t have time to make the whole loop the first day I went, so I resolved to return and, where the trail bifurcated, go the other way so I could see the other side of the little lake.

Home Repairs (Here)

As of a week ago, the repair work on our roof, eaves, and kitchen is finished. We still don’t have the final bill, which we need to know what we can afford this year in terms of summer vacation, but it’s good to have the house intact, with new paint inside and out, and to have it ourselves.

Early Valentine’s Day Dates (Here)

North went over to Ranvita’s Saturday afternoon, for pizza and a movie and an exchange of Valentine’s Day gifts. North got Ranvita a box of chocolates; Ranvita got North a rose-scented candle. As a result, Beth and I had several hours alone, so we had a date, too. She picked me up at the pool and we got takeout from Mark’s Kitchen, a Takoma fixture that’s about to either close or be under new management after thirty-two years.

Because it might be my last chance to have my favorite dish there, I got the bibimbap with a fried egg, a bit of a diabetic splurge, because of the rice (and I did eat a good bit of the rice). I might not have done it, but my sensor expired that morning and because they are less accurate the first twelve hours after application, I wasn’t planning on taking any readings from the new one until that evening anyway. Sometimes during these gaps I eat just as I normally would, and some days I go a little crazy and have half a banana and a strawberry in my morning oatmeal, a splash of orange juice in my tea, and a rice bowl for lunch. This was the latter kind of day, and it was very satisfying. I have no regrets.

We ate at the picnic tables in downtown Takoma. It was in the high forties, and I had wet hair from the pool, but it was sunny, and we’ve gotten pretty hardy about eating outside in the past few years, so it didn’t seem too cold.

After lunch, we went back to the house and watched the Valentine’s Day episode of Abbott Elementary, then hung out until it was time for Beth to go get North from Ranvita’s and take them to McLean, Virginia where North was attending a play they were going to review.

What Middle-Aged Lesbians Do on a Saturday Night (Neither Here nor There)

We spent the evening apart, as North was attending the play, a musical based on a Mario Brothers video game, which they said was “surprisingly good.” Once Beth had driven them there it was too far away for her to come home, but the play was sold out, so she couldn’t attend and had to occupy herself for several hours. I told her to google, “What do middle-aged lesbians do on a Saturday night in McLean?”

She ended up spending it in a nearby mall, where she got Turkish food for dinner, and when the mall closed, in a coffeeshop where she got hot chocolate. The coffeeshop was having an open mic night and she kept me updated via text about the acts:

[R]ight now there is a white guy singing a slowed down acoustic version of “Little Red Corvette”off key.

Now there is a woman singing a rewritten version of “Blue Christmas” to a backing track. It seems to be about climate change. Also off key.

New guy singing now. Not being able to carry a tune seems to be a requirement of this open mic. Fortunately there is a two song limit.

Meanwhile I was home, doing the kind of thing I do when left to my own devices: cleaning out my mail drawer, menu planning for the next week, blogging, and reading Love in the Time of Cholera. I’d been in bed over an hour by the time Beth and North got home at 11:25 and then North stayed up into the wee hours to write their review.

Valentine’s Day (Here and There)

The day before Valentine’s Day North made chocolate hand pies. They consist of chocolate crust filled with a fudge-like substance and drizzled with more chocolate. They are as good as they sound. North filled a tin with them to take to school for Ranvita, but some were reserved for family (and Zoë, who had dinner at our house that night).

When North got up on Valentine’s Day, a few minutes before their first class, they sleepily nodded in the direction of the heart-shaped balloon Beth had left at their place at the dining room table, and said, “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

At nine-thirty their astronomy class ended, and they had a half hour before English, so they found me in the basement, where I was preparing to mop the downstairs bathroom floor and asked if I wanted to exchange Valentine’s presents now instead of in the evening. It seemed to be what they wanted, and I had no objection.

We gathered around the dining room table and opened cards and gifts. In addition to the balloon, we’d gotten North a box of the Lindt strawberry-white chocolate truffles they like and a Starbucks gift card. I told them it was a little extra cash to make their money at Starbucks go further now that the stars are less valuable. (North has been irritated about this.)

My card was a very cool piece of original art Beth commissioned from North. Two black cats I recognized as Matthew and Xander are standing with their tails forming a heart and it says, “Lucky to love you.” North explained it was because black cats are supposed to be bad luck, but of course, we don’t believe that. Valentine’s Day was the day North assigned the cats as a birthday (years after the fact) when they found out the shelter estimated their litter was born in “mid-February.” The cats would have been twenty yesterday and we miss them both.

Beth got me a book and a box of tiny cupcake-shaped truffles in five flavors (chocolate, coffee, caramel, lemon-poppyseed, and raspberry). It’s a great gift for a diabetic with a sweet tooth because their diminutive size allows me to fine-tune how much sugar I eat at any given time. Beth got treats from me, too, chocolate-covered cashews and chocolate-covered clementine sections.

That afternoon we all drove out to Columbia together because it was a Tuesday. I went back to the lake and explored the other side a little bit. There are a lot of docks and benches and a playground and some retail, including a few restaurants on the water. It’s a nice space.

The theme of multi-family therapy was love languages. We all had to identify our preferred ways of giving and receiving love and talk about how to navigate differences in family members’ love languages. It was well attended, with seven parents in the room and another on Zoom, for the six kids.

North had been looking forward to the dinner I often make for Valentine’s Day, tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches cut into heart shapes, but they had a migraine and went to bed as soon as we got home. I was sorry about that, as food is definitely an example of one of the love languages, though I’m not sure which one—acts of service or gifts? Anyway, this morning while they were doing astronomy homework I made them a grilled cheese sandwich, cut into a heart shape, for breakfast. There had been plenty of love the day before and in the month so far, but there’s always room for more.

Where They Are, Part 4

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

North went to school yesterday for the first time in a little over three months. (Well, the first time they went there to attend classes, I mean. We’ve been a couple times to watch Ranvita and other friends perform in the fall play and winter one acts.)

But to back up a little…

Thursday and Friday:

North’s last day in the partial hospitalization program was Thursday. They’ve transitioned to IOP, which stands for intensive outpatient program, at the same facility. It offers the same kinds of therapy that the PHP does, but three hours a day instead of six and a half. It meets in the late afternoon and early evening, so that cleared the way for North’s return to in-person school.

Their first day at IOP was Friday. They knew the other kids because some of them had been in PHP together, and on some days, there’s overlap between the two program schedules, so they’ve all been in group together. North is starting out attending five days a week, but they may cut back to fewer days later so they can be on costumes crew for the spring musical.

We decided a gradual return to in-person school was best, so for now North is continuing with online classes through IIS for astronomy, English, and world history in the mornings. Then they will attend statistics, computer science, and painting in person in the afternoons, and go to IOP straight from school.

The computer science class is the second half of the one they started to take in the fall, but apparently you can take the two halves out of order, and it fulfills a half of the tech requirement, so when their counselor suggested it, they decided to take it. The painting class is also the one they were taking first quarter. North completed some second quarter work independently and I think the teacher is going to waive some or all of the rest and let North start fresh with third quarter assignments. Over the past couple months, they completed this pen-and-ink drawing based on a photograph of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia for this class. I really like it.

Beth, North, and I went to Berkeley Springs for a weekend get-away around Valentine’s Day 2020, and as a result I have kind of a romanticized memory of that weekend, as the last hurray before everything changed so dramatically for us as a nation and as a family. I asked North if they have similar feelings about that weekend and if that’s why they chose Berkeley Springs for their cityscape. They paused, considering, and said that might be the case.

(North finished the cityscape two weekends ago when Beth was road tripping up to Ithaca with a bunch of Noah’s stuff that he couldn’t take with him on the bus. Left to our own devices, I read and cleaned, North crocheted and worked on the cityscape, and we came together to go to the farmers’ market, Starbucks, and watch a scary movie while cuddling on the couch.)

Thursday afternoon, after North’s last day of PHP, we had an appointment with Dr. C, their current psychiatrist, who’s filling in during their long-time psychiatrist’s maternity leave. North’s known Dr. C as long as they’ve known their regular psychiatrist because he led the trans kids’ support group they attended in seventh and eighth grade, and he has a good rapport with them. We talked about North’s transition back to school and other issues, including some medication changes and we all left feeling a little better than when we got there.

Weekend

I went swimming on Saturday afternoon at the pool where I used to swim weekly before it shut down first for the pandemic, then for extensive repairs. It re-opened in late November, but between being out of the habit, being salty about the fact that they were not honoring pre-pandemic punch cards, and the pool’s erratic schedule (it’s always been prone to unannounced closures and still is), I didn’t manage to show up at a time it was open until this weekend.

As frustrating as the pool’s management is, I like that it’s convenient, being a less than a half-hour walk from my house and it’s on a few bus lines if I don’t feel like walking. It was nice to be back in the water and it wasn’t too crowded. Perhaps I will get back into my old routine of weekend swimming. It might help that the day after I swam, I finally heard back from the pool manager I’ve been emailing since November, and she said they would honor my old card after all. Now it still has to happen and I’m not counting on it, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Ranvita came over late Saturday afternoon and stayed for dinner. North tried to teach her to crochet, an effort that was hindered by the fact that North is right-handed while Ranvita is left-handed. After dinner they watched a movie together.

Sunday was a quiet day. Beth went ice skating, and we were considering going out for ice cream in the evening to mark the last night before North’s return to school, but they went to bed with a migraine a little after four and didn’t get up until almost nine-thirty, by which point Beth, who was worn out, had already gone to bed and I was in the living room reading, about to turn in myself.

Monday:

Monday would have been a big day even if North going back to school was all that happened, but in addition to that, we had 1) an appointment with two geneticists, 2) another with North’s school counselor, and 3) a family therapy session.

The first meeting was a screening for Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. North’s half-sibling from the donor’s side, Avery, has been diagnosed with it and EDS is associated with a lot of symptoms North experiences, such as chronic pain, especially in the joints, dislocations, and migraine. They were hoping for a diagnosis because it would tie a lot of things together under one overarching explanation, but the results of the interview and exam were inconclusive. After the appointment, North was disappointed. We are going to follow up with a cardiologist, however, because some forms of EDS are associated with heart problems. The doctors didn’t think it was likely North has this subtype of EDS, but they want to check for it, just to be cautious.

Soon after that was finished, we went to North’s school to meet with their counselor to iron out some details regarding their return to school. We got their second quarter grades and learned one of them (history) had not been turned in, probably because of miscommunication between the IIS history teacher and the teacher North will have for history this semester. None of us realized the counselor was going to want North to pick senior year classes in this meeting and that felt a bit rushed and maybe less considered that I would have liked, even though the counselor stressed we can make changes later. Anyway, after fulfilling graduation requirements, North had room in their schedule for art and chorus and a mythology class they’ve wanted to take for a while. I think it could be a fun year.

We left North at school, where they had lunch with Ranvita in the theater room and attended their three classes. When we picked them up to go to IOP, they didn’t have too much to say, but I did learn they are starting a winter landscape with acrylics in painting class.

Beth went to her coworking space, and I took a walk in the grounds of Merriweather Post Pavilion, a concert space. It was a mild afternoon—I wore a sweatshirt with no jacket—and the late afternoon light was pretty in the bare woods. By the time I returned to Beth’s office, with just a half hour until family therapy it seemed too late to start any new work project, so I blogged instead. Then we went to North’s facility where we met with a therapist for our weekly family therapy session, which we spent mainly processing the prior events of the day.

It was 7:20 by the time we got home, so I threw together a quick dinner of ravioli with vegetarian meatballs (a rare splurge on pasta for me) and then we played a couple rounds of Scattergories before bed.

Tuesday:

Because I was going to be in Columbia again during dinner-making time to attend the multi-family group, I got up a little earlier than usual and made a cabbage soup for dinner before the workers (more on this below) arrived for the day and took over the kitchen. But as it turned out, they were finished in that room by 9:30, so my early morning cooking session wasn’t necessary after all.

By nine a.m., North was on the couch attending an online astronomy lecture while crocheting. English started an hour later. Their online classes all meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When they were in PHP, they had to watch the videos after the fact, but now they can attend the ones that don’t conflict with their in-person classes as they happen. I hope this helps them participate and engage more with those classes, though as I mentioned, one of them is astronomy, which was their best class last quarter already.

North went to school again and when we picked them up, they mentioned their art teacher said their cityscape turned out well and asked if she could display it. We drove to Columbia again. I thought about walking at Merriweather Post Pavilion again, but I’d already walked in the morning, and it was cold and drizzly, so I took a short walk to get a warm cup of coffee and I brought it back to Beth’s office where I worked a little. She rented the office for January and now that she’s only there for a few hours a day it didn’t seem worth it to renew for February, so it was her last day there. She’s going to try working in the public library starting tomorrow.

We said goodbye to the little office at 5:20 and walked over to the facility where we had our first multi-family group since North started IOP. It was very much like multi-family at PHP, but with a somewhat different group of kids. Just this fact made it seem like we’re progressing through the steps toward something better.

Meanwhile…

While all this was going on, we had the roof and some structural damage in the kitchen fixed. Remember when the tree fell on our house last May? It’s taken that long to get our insurance and the contractor to agree on the scope and cost of repairs. The work took place indoors and outdoors and has been going on for a week and a half. For the past few days, it’s always supposed to be done the next day, in the way of home repairs.

There were three consecutive days when the kitchen was sealed off from the rest of the house with plastic sheeting to keep the dust from spreading. Because of the way our house is configured, this meant every time I needed to use the bathroom, I had to go outside, walk to the back of the house, open the back door, interrupt the workers, and make them move ladders, etc., so I could pass through the kitchen to get to the bathroom. I ended up routing my mid-morning walk to go by places with public restrooms and tried to limit myself to one other visit to the bathroom in the early afternoon but being cut off from the bathroom was kind of stressful for me.

The best part of having this work done, other than not having holes in the roof anymore and having functioning gutters for the first time in eight months at some point in the near future, is that the repairs to the kitchen walls required re-painting. We’ve lived in this house almost twenty-one years and for that whole time there’s been brown-on-tan sponge painting on the kitchen walls left from the previous owners. I never liked it.

Beth said she didn’t care what color the kitchen walls were, so I got to choose. I went with a golden shade of yellow. It was just what I had been envisioning for the kitchen for many years. North campaigned for lavender and I told them that would be very nice in their first apartment, but I had my heart set on yellow.

I like thinking of them in that hypothetical apartment, though, several years from now, maybe in a college town or a bohemian neighborhood of some city. I imagine my beautiful, talented youngest child happy there, drinking coffee (always iced, even in winter) while baking elaborate cakes, or making art, or maybe painting the kitchen walls lavender.

Winter One Acts

Posted on January 18, 2023 by Steph

[Show as slideshow]

Two Saturdays ago, we went to the Winter One Acts at North’s school to see some of their friends, including Ranvita, act in them. In the spirit of concise storytelling, I’m going to present what we’ve been up to over the past few weeks in bite-sized pieces, three paragraphs max per topic. Can I be that brief? We’ll see.

Theater

It felt novel for the winter one acts to be put on in winter, as last year a covid surge and subsequent scheduling problems delayed them until May and the year before, of course, they didn’t happen at all, as school was closed for most of the year and there were no extracurriculars even when it opened briefly in the spring.

It was our first outing of the year as we didn’t do much for New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. We got an invitation to go to a small New Year’s Eve party our neighbors were holding, but we didn’t feel up for it. We didn’t do our usual New Year’s Day hike or cheese board either. We did all watch Carol because North found it on a list of New Year’s-themed movies. Afterward we all agreed it was a good film (Beth and I had already seen it) but the connection to New Year’s was tenuous at best. Afterward the kids stayed up to usher in the new year with salty snacks, sparkling juice, and tv, as is their sibling-bonding tradition.

Back to the plays…there were three one acts, followed by an improv presentation. Ranvita had a small part in the first one act, which was also the best one. It involved John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Cornelius Vanderbilt playing Monopoly in the afterlife and it was very funny. Ranvita also had several parts in the improv pieces. These weren’t being improvised in the moment but were workshopped as improv and then turned into very short plays. The schtick was the actors were trying to get through thirty of them in less than an hour (and they succeeded). It was fun to watch and North seemed to enjoy seeing friends, especially Ranvita, and they gave her a bouquet. They haven’t been able to see much of each other the past few months, but they did have a brunch date recently.

Game Nights

The next night, Beth, Noah, and I played Settlers of Catan with the Seafarers’ extension kit Noah got for Christmas. As you might guess from the game, there are ships involved, and you can use them to settle smaller islands off the coast of Catan. It took us a little while to figure out how strategy differs in this version, but we were getting it by the end, I think. Noah won the game. On other nights during his break, we played Sleeping Queens, Jeopardy, and Scattergories, some of these more than once.

Therapy

We have family therapy every Monday and Tuesday these days. Mondays it’s a virtual session in the late afternoon after North has gotten home from their day program. Noah joined us for a couple of these sessions. On Tuesdays it’s hybrid and it’s not just us, but all the families of all the kids in North’s program all together, which I have to say is kind of an odd format. All the kids are there in person, as it’s the end of their day. Some parents come in person, and some attend virtually. Often, Beth and I are the only parents in the room.

Beth has been working in a room she’s renting in a co-working space in a big office building near North’s facility, so she doesn’t have to make the hour and a half round-trip drive twice every day. Since she’s right next door, she always goes to multi-family group in person. I usually do, too, since the one time I tried attending virtually I couldn’t hear well and the person I could hear least well was North. Getting to Columbia by myself wouldn’t be easy, so attending group in person means I spend the day in Beth’s office on Tuesdays. There are four desks, so I can set up my laptop on one of them and I have new environs for my daily walk, so it’s not bad.

Anniversary

Beth and I had an anniversary a week ago today. It’s now been thirty-one years since our commitment ceremony and ten since our legal wedding (they were on the same date). We had breakfast for dinner, and I made muffins using the recipe for the spice cake that was our wedding cake (both times). I’ve made it almost every anniversary since 1992, usually with a lemon glaze, though the original wedding cake had white frosting with purple frosting violets on it. North is quite attached to the lemon glaze and was kind of outraged the year I made an orange glaze instead. Last year was my first year with diabetes and I left the glaze off entirely, but I’ve gotten a little more relaxed and when I was wavering about the glaze, North advocated for it and I ended up making it.

We exchanged presents after dinner. One of the advantages of having an anniversary two and a half weeks after Christmas is that you can just check your wife’s Christmas list and see what she didn’t get. I got Beth a kit of salad dressing spice blends and she got me Hamnet, which were unbought items from our lists. But I also got her two fancy dark chocolate bars, and she got me a roll of postcard stamps because I can always use them for get-out-the-vote campaigns and postage is going up later this month.

Her card said “Always and Forever” on the front, which is exactly what I wrote on the inside of mine. I’m taking that as a sign that we’re going the distance. ‘Til death do us part.

More Baking

I’d been in the mood to make cookies for a while, and I thought I should do it before Noah left so I could send some of them with him. The day I ended up making them was the Sunday of MLK weekend, which was also the thirteenth anniversary of my father’s death. It seemed kind of appropriate because he loved sweets of all sorts and Snickers bars especially, so something with chocolate and peanuts seemed a fitting tribute. North’s been baking, too. Their last creation was a very tasty carrot cake with a chocolate ganache. We’re still eating it.

Media Binges

The end of Noah’s time at home is often a rush to finish television seasons and books and this one was no different. In four weeks, he and I started and finished the current seasons of What We Do in the Shadows and The Handmaid’s Tale. I didn’t think we were going to manage that last one, but he ended up staying home a few days longer than he thought he would, and the extra days included a long weekend, so we watched the last four episodes in two days. That season was something else, wasn’t it?

With Beth, we also made it to the end of season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (bingeing the last three episodes in the middle of the day on MLK day while North was at their program). Noah is puzzled at how the series will continue for two more seasons, as the title character dies in the season finale, but we’re not telling. With everyone, we got to the midpoint of season 7 of Blackish. We’ve reached the covid era episodes and while the first couple about it were excellent and very evocative, I was disappointed that it basically fell out of the plot after that, as if it barely happened and didn’t deeply alter our lives for years.

As for books, over the course of his break, Noah and I also read What Strange Paradise, The Nova Incident, and Wyrd Sisters. We often save a Terry Pratchett novel for last because they are short and easy to fit into a little scrap of time if we happen to have one left. We finished it on Monday, the last full day before he left. (Meanwhile two days earlier, North and I finished The Inferno, which we’d been reading since early December.)

Goodbye

Once we’d finished Wyrd Sisters, around 3:45 on Monday, I had a bit of an empty feeling, because there was nothing else to finish, after spending much of the last three days in a sprint to read and watch all the things. But there was plenty to do: we had a family therapy session (Noah skipped this one to pack) and I made dinner, a vegetable-bean-noodle soup, not unlike what I made for his first night home, and North made the carrot cake, and I packed Noah some snacks for the bus (pecans, dried cranberries, and a half-dozen of the cookies), and that night we all played an online Jeopardy game. Noah made a valiant effort to fill up on homemade treats while he could, eating two slices of cake and a cookie.

Yesterday morning, we all got into the car at 7:55 a.m. and drove to a mall parking lot just outside Baltimore, where at 9:15, we put him on a bus that said “Let’s Go” on the side. And heeding its suggestion, we all did, to college, to treatment, and to a little office in a co-working suite.

All For The Love Of You

A Chronicle of Suburban Lesbian Family Life

Category Archives: Medical Issues

We Went to the Animal Fair: Coronavirus Chronicles, Part 80

Rock Around the Clock, Part 4

Summertime, Part 2

The Grad Who’s Going Places

Arts & Sciences

Dragons, and Seahawks, and Cats, Oh My! College Tours

Where They Are, Part 5

Here and There

Where They Are, Part 4

Winter One Acts