Category Archives: Family

Weekend Snapshots 8

It was supposed to be a busy weekend with back-to-back soccer games, meetings, rehearsals, and recitals. Winter weather struck and one by one, everything got cancelled. What a gift to be stuck at home!

Cozy

Time to get ready for Christmas.
Peace on Earth and peace at home.
I’ve lost the colored vs. white lights battle. This little tree-shaped boxwood is my consolation prize.
The weather outside is frightful…
And since we have no place to go…Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
I stayed in my pjs all day. It’s good to have your very own foot warmer.
Teddy’s hanging…
…the best preschool project ever! (His own baby shoe, spray painted gold).

The Universe has Spoken

Many years ago a fellow minivan-driving-mother-friend of mine sent me a link to this video:

I watched it with detached amusement. It never occurred to me that this video could in any way reflect my reality. The video came to mind again recently when another friend of mine got into my car and erupted into frank and hearty laughter. As she picked through the random assortment of things that had accumulated in my car, she gave a running commentary, punctuated with giggles:

“Oh! Good thing you have this bag of pinecones here. You never know when they’ll come in handy.”

(OK – those cinnamon-scented pine cones were acting as air fresheners, that is, when they still smelled like cinnamon. Whatever.)

“And look at all these batteries in the cup holder! I was going to go the store to buy some, but how convenient! You’ve got a bunch right here.”

“Ha ha ha! And what’s this? Ah, of course! Empty DVD cases in the side pockets!”

Side note: I’d actually cleaned out the car not too long ago. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have, and has been in the recent past!

The tragic fact of my existence is that I’m a lazy slob. Wait, I haven’t gotten to the tragic part yet. Sloth and slovenliness aren’t so terrible in and of themselves. If I could contentedly wallow in filth and disorder, where would be the harm in that? The problem is that I can never truly enjoy my entropic lifestyle, because of the other fundamental aspect of my being – neurosis. I try to laze about on my couch, amidst the piles of books, newspapers, my daughter’s violin case, and toys, but I can never fully relax, because I feel like I should be cleaning up the mess. And yet – alas – I’m too lazy to do so! You see my predicament?

After my friend roundly mocked me for the mess in my car, I went home chastened and determined to turn myself around. I was going to be organized and I was going to get all those million and one tasks that I’d been putting off done, once and for all.

The top priority on my list was to give the dogs their second dose of preventative deworming medicine. I was supposed to administer this three weeks after the first dose and they were now overdue. I was procrastinating, because they had struggled so wildly when I’d given them their first dose that half of the vile smelling medicine ended up on my clothes. This time around, I had the boys hold the dogs while I squirted the syringes into their mouths. It was a piece of cake! I gloated over the ease with which I had executed this distasteful task, and congratulated myself on a job well done.

With this monkey off my back and small victory under my belt, I was emboldened to tackle the kitchen next. I cleared out and organized two whole junk drawers and then rearranged the pantry. I realize this might not sound like a big deal, but it took me all evening. I felt like I had cleaned out the Augean stables.

Basking in the glow of my own virtue, I decided to take a break from my Herculean endeavors. This time when I relaxed on the couch, I felt like I richly deserved to put my feet up. I languidly lounged, contemplating my own moral superiority. And that’s when my dogs started to vomit frothy yellow deworming medicine. Repeatedly. All over the carpet.

The universe had spoken and cosmic order had been restored. Its clarion message to me was this: You, Adrienne, are destined to live in squalor. It is written in the stars. You clean out a couple drawers? I will rain dog puke all over your carpet. Give. It. Up.

And really…who am I to argue with this?

Little brown haired girl

I have brown hair. This would not be noteworthy, but for the fact that I am Korean and Koreans always have jet black hair. When I was little, my dad would tell me that my hair reminded me of his little sister, who also had brown hair. In those days in Korea, brown hair was so freakish and unnatural as to be considered bad luck. My superstitious grandmother kept shaving her daughter’s head in the hope that the hair would grow back black, but of course it never did. I always felt connected to my dad’s little sister and felt sorry for her, but all I ever knew about her was that she had brown hair like mine and that she died young.

Today as I was sitting with my parents on the last day of our Thanksgiving break, the sun was streaming through the window. My dad stared at my hair lit by the sun and started talking about his little sister again. He told me again about how his mother would shave the little girl’s head. The poor girl hated this, but her mother insisted on doing it over and over again.

“It looked terrible, and she would have to go to school looking like that,” my dad said with pity.

For the first time, I began to ask questions about her.

“What was her name, Dad?”

He hesitated and I held my breath. I was afraid that it had been so long ago that he might have even forgotten her name.

“Her name was Yunja, but the Japanese gave her the name ‘Toshiko.’ My brothers and I thought that was such a fancy sounding name, we decided we would all call her that. She was rather tall for her age and good looking. She would have grown up to be a beautiful woman.”

“How old was she when she died?”

“She was in second grade.”

“How did she die?”

“Sunstroke. During the Japanese invasion, they made us all work outside for hours in the sun. The boys wouldn’t wear shirts and we would get so badly sunburned that all of our skin would bubble and peel off at least twice a year. My little sister was healthy and strong. She should have survived. I don’t know why she didn’t.”

“She died at school?”

“She got sick at school, but they brought her home and she died there. I was already working in the watch factory in Seoul, so I never even got to see her. I just heard about it through a letter.”

There is not a single photograph of the little girl whose name I have only just learned. And though her life was fleeting, she is remembered over seventy years after her death with abiding love.

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Im/maturity

It can be tricky to have children who are at different developmental stages. Our conservative strategy for navigating these treacherous waters is to wade in only as far as would be knee-deep for our youngest child. Recently, for example, the kids watched Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, even though the boys would much rather have seen Gravity. A couple years ago I caught my daughter, who was then six years old, reading The Hunger Games, which I had gotten for her oldest brother. I snatched it away from her and told her she could read it when she was older.

The other day I asked my thirteen year old son, “When do you think T will be old enough to read The Hunger Games?”

“Well, to be honest, I think she’s old enough now.”

“Really? But she’s only a third grader.”

“Yeah, but to tell you the truth, she’s way more mature than I am now.”

“Seriously? You really think so?”

“Yeah. And when I realized that, it kind of ruined my day a little bit. But I’ve come to terms with it, and I’ve accepted it now.”

This may also explain why I’ve heard the thirteen year old say to his younger brother, “We have to be nice to T now, so she’ll let us play video games in her basement when we’re all adults.”

I’ll be back in a week…Happy weekend and Thanksgiving!

The Inferno

Life in our household has been full of stress and strife lately. I’ve been having terrifying nightmares, which continue to haunt me in my waking hours. Migraines keep grabbing me in a vise-like headlock. The pain, always concentrated in one throbbing eyeball, makes me clench my teeth as I wait out the four hours until I can pop three more Advil. To tell you the truth, lately there have been moments when I have wallowed in self-pity and dark despair. I’ve asked myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?”

Here’s the thing. I have a beautiful child, who is intelligent, creative, talented, funny, sensitive, generous, and kind. He has always marched to the beat of his own drum, and I admire and respect him for it. To be honest though, I have to admit that I’ve also regularly engaged in epic battles with him because of this. We all have to function and live in a world of rules and deadlines and norms, I reason to myself. And so I try to coax and cram and bash my square peg son into the round hole over and over again. I do this out of love and concern for his future happiness, but all the good intentions in the world can’t transform it into a pleasant experience, or even a reasonable endeavor.

In school, children are assessed in ways that may make sense for most, but not for those who do their homework, and then routinely forget to turn it in or lose it between home and school. They don’t work for kids who can’t remember to bring home their textbook to study for the quiz they have to take the next day. The standard assessments simply can’t capture the abilities and gifts of children, whose minds crackle with intelligence, but shut off when confronted with boring, routine tasks. It can be exhilarating to parent such a child, but truth be told: at times it can also be thoroughly exhausting and demoralizing.

A couple nights ago, my son managed to finish his homework, take his shower, and practice his piano pieces at a godly hour. At the beginning of the school year we had optimistically stated that his bed time would be 9:30. Lately, bed time has been whenever we tell him he simply can’t work any longer on whatever paper, project, problem set, lab, or translation is due the next day, because it’s already 10:30, 11, or past midnight. On that blessed night, all of these tasks were done and there was a still a little time to spare before bedtime. It was a miracle.

My son and I looked at each other awkardly, uncertainly, not quite knowing how to handle this unexpected turn of events. This usually would be about the time when I would trot out a fist shaking “You can do it! Shake it out!” lecture à la Bela Karolyi, or a “Pull it together and FOCUS, kid!” lecture or the: “My head is going to explode if we keep having this same argument” lecture or the “Just crank it out, please, I’m begging you for the love of all things holy: just. crank. it. out” lecture, or the “Think, really think if there’s anything else you’ve forgotten that you need to be working on right now” lecture. You get the picture. That night, there was no need for any of those lectures.

“Well…are you heading to bed then?” I finally asked.

“I think I’ll stay down here and just talk with you a little, if that’s ok with you” he replied as he settled himself on the couch at my side. He hastened to add, “NOT about school or homework or anything like that. Let’s just chat.”

We did just that. When he finally did head to bed, I heard him say as he rounded the corner, “Oh, I forgot something.”

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! My heart sank and I tensed up as I waited to hear him tell me what important assignment he had forgotten he had to do. And then he came back into the family room where I was sitting, because what he had forgotten was to give me a goodnight hug.

As I hugged this extraordinary child, I thought to myself, “My God! What have I done to deserve this?” These moments of grace remind me why I would walk through fire for this boy. We’ll walk through this Inferno together and there will be love and light at the other end. Amen.

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Château des Poules

In the morning Noah gave us a tour of the henhouse, which he had helped to build:

He explained to us that the golf balls are there to encourage the hens to lay their eggs in that spot:

IMG_0251

We met the royal denizens, specially selected to withstand the cold Wisconsin winters:

Nicholas picked up a thing or two:

Country Bumpkins

On Friday afternoon I pulled into the pick up line at Nicholas’ school and settled down to wait for him. Soon I spotted him running towards me with his gigantic backpack slung over his shoulder and a huge grin on his face.

“Rooooaaaad trip!” I whooped as he opened the car door and got in.

It’s been a rough month for us, replete with the usual heavy doses of teen and parental angst, handwringing and recriminations. School has been stressful and that stress has bled into our home life. Too many of our interactions lately have revolved around nagging and arguing about schoolwork. We were both glad to escape from all of that, if only for a weekend.

Once we established the happy fact that Nicholas would NOT be dragging his backpack to Wisconsin, we relaxed into the hour and a half drive to Richmond International Airport. This is the first year my son has been able to sit next to me in the passenger seat, rather than in one of the back seats. It felt great to be chatting side by side, at the very beginning of our trip to visit our friends.

Dinner at Richmond Airport

Dinner at Richmond Airport

We switched planes in Detroit. As we made our way to the gate, we passed through this tunnel:

“We seriously need to have one of these in our house. You have to take a video of this!” Nicholas insisted.

“You know what Grandma would say if she saw us videotaping this?” I asked Nicholas as I complied with his request.

“What would she say?” he asked.

“She’d call us a couple of chonoms.”

“What does that mean?”

“Chonom is Korean for country bumpkin.”

“She’d be totally right. We are a couple of chonoms getting all excited about the light show. Oooo! Now let’s videotape this fountain!”:

We finally arrived in Madison, bedraggled and exhausted from our travels, but so happy to see our friends waiting for us in the lobby.

More on our trip tomorrow…

Athena

In which I demonstrate through a series of images that I never know when to stop:

My model obligingly posed through multiple scene changes.
Third or fourth scene change and still smiling…
Still in a good mood.
“I can do this. I can do this. I can do this.”
“Oh, Owl. Will she ever get tired of taking pictures?”
“For realz?”
“Oh.”
“My.”
“GOD!”
Aaaaaaaaaaaand…..
…it’s a wrap!
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Body parts

As it’s Halloween tomorrow, it seems as appropriate a time as any to discuss the body parts we have hidden around our house.

I saw my best friend this weekend and we compared our collections. Her son has teeth, scabs, and a black fingernail in his stash. My daughter has lovingly kept her own black fingernail in a little box that she trots out on special occasions. Last week, my son got four permanent teeth removed in preparation for braces and was sent home with a plastic tooth-shaped box crammed full with the teeth, giant bloody roots and all. And somewhere in our house is the treasure above all treasures, the jewel in the crown, the pièce de résistance…

When my oldest son was a newborn, we anxiously waited for his umbilical cord to fall off. We gingerly swabbed at it for weeks with rubbing alcohol. We fretted that he’d go off to college with the stump still dangling from his belly. I was delirious with joy the day it finally came off. As a joke, I hid it in a velvet jewelry box and wrapped it up as a gift for my husband. I felt really guilty when he looked genuinely touched as he opened the box, but because I’m kind of a jerk, I felt totally gratified when he gasped in horror when he opened the lid to reveal the gnarly, wizened, black stump. Having had my fun, I put it away and completely forgot about it for years. One day, I was cleaning out a drawer and found the box. Out of idle curiosity, I opened it and almost peed myself when I saw the shriveled, monkey-paw-like stump inside. 

(No pictures today, because that would be in poor taste, obviously).

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