Lovely

lovely-blogThank you, Nicola Bourne, for nominating me for the One Lovely Blog Award! One of the best aspects of working on this blog has been connecting with people like Nicola, both in person and through their writing.

To accept the award you must 1) thank the person who nominated you, 2) display the One Lovely Blog Award button, 3) say seven things about yourself, and 4) nominate others for the award and let them know you’ve done so by leaving a comment on their blog. (I haven’t been able to figure out how to do this for all of them)!

 

Seven things about myself…

1) When people ask me where I’m from, I never know what to say…Arlington? Charlottesville? Korea? Outer Space?

2) I have a catastrophically poor sense of direction and am constantly getting lost. Fortunately, I’m married to a freaking bloodhound, who could be dropped blindfolded in the middle of the Sahara and still manage to make his way home. I’d be lost without him.

3) I’m a night owl. For as long as I can remember, I have always dreaded the moment when I have to actually go to bed. I love sleeping, but for some reason, the decision to go to bed always fills me with irrational anxiety and makes me feel like I’m giving up. I’m out like a light as soon as my head hits the pillow though.

4) I adore nature in theory, but am most definitely an indoorsy kind of person.

5) Similarly, I love the idea of pets, but it never seems to really work out for me.

6) I veer between complete shiftlessness to obsessive, single-minded fixation on whatever project happens to capture my interest at the moment.

7) I’ve always thought people have certain kinds of luck. For example, I once had a roommate who always won prizes and lotteries. I’ve never once in my life won so much as a gumball. My particular kind of luck in life has been my family.

 

The ten blogs I nominate for the One Lovely Blog Award are all written by Charlottesvillians, almost all of whom I’m lucky to count as friends…

100% of our brothers have cancer is a blog by a husband and wife team, who write about their lives with raw honesty and humor. I have all kinds of respect for them.

Amomynity is written by a blogger from Charlottesville. I don’t actually know her, but I feel like I do. I think we’d get along!

Cold is written by a friend who has just published her novel, The Bone Church. For years I knew her only as the mother of one of my son’s friends. I was blown away when I discovered that she is an amazing writer.

I went to see DeeDee Stewart’s one woman show, Dirty Barbie and Other Girlhood Tales and was utterly enthralled. The show is based on personal stories from her blog DeeDees Living Will.

For What It’s Worth (FWIW) is an advice column written by a friend and featured in the It’s Obvi blog. Her advice is always, always spot on.

A Gringuinha Grega is written by a friend who has been doing research for her dissertation in Brazil. She describes her struggles and triumphs along the way with vulnerability and infectious enthusiasm.

Jocelyn Johnson is not only the amazing and beloved art teacher at my kids’ elementary school, she is also a wonderful writer.

A Minister’s Musings is a thoughtful and thought-provoking blog written by my former next-door-neighbor, and favorite Unitarian minister, clown, magician, fire-eating philosopher.

Mothermade is “a collection of thoughts on being American, Asian and adopted,” written by my friend, who has been burning up the internet lately with a #flipthescript campaign to give adoptees a voice. Although she’s moved away, I’ll always think of her as a C’ville friend.

Riding the A Train is my friend’s whip smart and deeply moving blog about “a mom, a boy, and autism.”

 

Bloody Good

I brought my nine year old daughter to the hospital last Friday morning for her quarterly blood draw.

She took her seat and warily waited for the phlebotomist to begin.

“How are you doing?” the woman asked my daughter in a cheery voice as she readied her equipment.

“I’m fine,” my daughter mustered, valiantly trying to hide her misery, “How about you?”

The phlebotomist seemed genuinely surprised. She stopped what she was doing to say, “I’m fine! Thank you so much for asking! You’ve made my day!”

As we were walking back to the car after the blood draw, I launched into the entirely predictable, tedious, teachable moment speech that tiresome parents such as myself simply cannot resist inflicting upon their children:

“I was SO proud of you for being so polite to the lady! And did you hear what she said to you? You made her day! Do you see how easy it is to make people happy, by just…”

She cut me off and said, “Of course I’m going to be nice to someone who’s about to stab me with a sharp object!”

I guess we can all have teachable moments…

Portraits

Beach portrait

I’ve just added a new Portraits tab. Please check it out, and let me know if you’d be interested in having me take portraits of YOUR family!

 

Cheese

WARNING: If you haven’t had dinner yet, DO NOT READ! And, I apologize in advance for this post.

As you might imagine with a husband who teaches philosophy for a living, conversations around our dinner table tend to be rather highbrow. Here, for example, is what the professor had to say when he finally made it back home in a cast after his fall down the mountain our family now routinely uses air quotes to refer to as: “Mount Pleasant.”

“You think the leg cheese under your shin guards is bad after a soccer game,” he said to my daughter, “Imagine how bad it will be when my cast comes off. My leg will probably be completely coated in a slimy layer of ripe brie.”

To put what happened next into context, you need to know that my fourteen year old boy lives to shock us with gross stories he’s heard from his fellow pubescents or gleaned from the bowels of the internet. He is also going through a growth spurt that makes him ravenously hungry. You can’t even imagine the staggering quantities of food he eats. All this to say, it takes some high octane intellectual firepower to both disgust him and cause him to lose his appetite.

He recoiled in a rictus of visceral horror, dropped his fork with a loud clatter, and pushed his plate away.

“DAD! We’re eating! And this salad has feta in it. I seriously can’t eat any more.”

Pray for me, friends. It’s going to be a very long few months…

The Great Fall

My husband has been wanting to take our oldest son on a hike for ages. This Saturday they seized the opportunity to go to Mount Pleasant in the George Washington National Forest.

In the morning we bade a fond farewell to our intrepid hikers:

Heading out…

and went about the rest of our day:

Meanwhile:

“It was freezing up there!”

That afternoon I received this text from my husband:

I went to pick up my son at the ER to spare him the inevitable, lengthy wait for a verdict and his dad’s eventual discharge. Back at home, I continued to check in with my husband over the next several hours by text:

When he was finally home with a diagnosis of a multiple fracture, he explained what happened…

After reaching the summit, they started to make their way back down toward the trail head. My husband’s boot caught on a rock hidden by fallen leaves, and all six feet three inches of him went crashing down. Unfortunately, they were still quite a distance away from the car.

“It was agonizing. Believe me, you would not want to walk two miles down a mountain on a broken ankle,” he told me that evening.

“Uh, yeah. As we all know, I wouldn’t want to walk two miles down a mountain, period,” I replied…”Why didn’t you call for help?”

“I didn’t want to cause a fuss. I would have been too embarrassed,” he said…”I hobbled along, and whenever anyone passed, I’d straighten up and pretend like nothing was wrong.”

He mimicked how he would give a cheery wave and say to every passer-by, “Beautiful day for a hike!”

I shook my head.

“Remember when your dad fell into a ravine on his hike and he got a gash on his forehead that required stitches?! And you were so upset with him, because instead of getting help, he just made his way back to his car and drove home for hours gushing blood from the gaping wound? Remember?! Remember how you scolded and scolded him for doing that?! You are your father’s son!”

“There’s a HUGE difference!” my husband protested, “My dad hid behind rocks whenever he saw anyone on the trail!”

“NO DIFFERENCE! You two are EXACTLY the same!”

“Well,” my husband conceded, grinning…”That’s the spirit that built the great British empire!”

It might explain the fall of the great British empire too…

The Berlin Wall

Today is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Twenty-five years ago, I was a junior in college working as a teaching assistant for my school’s foreign language study program in Lyon, France. Armed with our Eurail passes and someone’s Lonely Planet guide, a group of us took an incredibly long train journey to Berlin…

Changing of the guard
Changing of the guard
goose stepping guards
Statue of Marx and Engel
The Brandenburg Gate
my piece of history

Please read my friend’s musings on the Berlin Wall.

This Boy

My dad was working in Korea when my first child, his first grandson, was born. He was finally able to meet him when we all converged in Minneapolis to celebrate the wedding of my brother and sister-in-law.

All weekend long, as soon as my dad would spot us, he would scoop his grandchild from my arms into his own.

“You look tired,” he’d say, “I’ll hold the baby for you.” Or: “He must be really heavy for you. Let me take him.”

Because I can be astonishingly dense, the first time I said, “I’m OK, Dad. I can hold him.”

“Nah,” he said gruffly, “You need a rest. I better hold him for you.”

No one else got a chance to hold the baby that weekend…

The words “I love you” have never once fallen from my father’s lips, but that weekend I heard those unspoken words when he gazed upon his grandson and said wistfully, “You won’t believe it, but in the blink of an eye, he’ll be grown up and out the door and you won’t even know how it happened.”

Dad’s babies

Here’s that baby fourteen Novembers ago…

November 2000

I blinked and this happened:

November 2014

Today my son was wearing a t-shirt my husband used to wear when I first met him. Today we measured him, and the boy who, I swear, was a baby only yesterday, is now 6 feet tall!

Oh, Time, our greatest friend and foe! May I remember that every minute of this precious life, even in the most challenging of times, is a gift of immeasurable value. May I not squander the days that I have with these beloved children under my own roof. And when they eventually do go out that door, may they fly back home now and then to my loving arms.

Adult Attention Deficit Disorder

Here’s what happens when you have adult ADD. You say goodbye to your husband as you head out the door to go to work. He replies with a smirk, “Bye! See you in 40 seconds.”

After a moment of confusion, you realize the impertinence behind this statement. He fully expects you to come back into the house (maybe several times) to fetch something that you’ve forgotten. And why shouldn’t he? After all, it’s happened every single day for the past seventeen years you’ve been married to him.

“How rude!” you say severely, but you chuckle nonetheless. Your mirth fades as you realize it’s really cold, and you haven’t even left the garage. You ponder your equally unappealing choices.

Do you:

A) Slink back into the house to fetch the coat that you’ve forgotten, but clearly need?

Or:

B) Do you preserve your pride, get in your car, and resign yourself to freezing your @$$ off all day long?

Now that my limbs have finally thawed, I can pound out my sad little tale…