We are ready to put 2016 to bed. On to new adventures in 2017! Happy New Year to everyone!
Tag Archives: family
Music and Mayhem
Christmas crackers with whistles!
Postcards from Princeton
My sister and me – and my photobomber niece!
Hanging out with an Innkeeper and Joseph.
Silent Night
My niece and her dad.
Nana’s famous Christmas cookies, Round 1
Triplets and Honorary Triplet.
Girl cousins!
Oldest cousins
At the top of every little girl’s wish list – a creepy elephant mask?!
Nana’s famous Christmas cookies, Round 2
Daisy, my new BFF.
Tea for two
Littlest cousins
Wheeeeeeeee!
What I Learned in Sunday School
For my brother is an hairy man…Genesis 27:11
I asked my kids what they learned in Sunday School today.
“We discussed the youth service,” said the 16 year old whose class will shortly lead a worship service for the congregation.
“Healthy relationships,” said the 14 year old.
“We finally finished Exodus and now we’re doing the Book of Judges!” said the 11 year old who is reading through the Bible in a year in her class.
“And what are you learning about in Judges?”
“We talked about Samson…”
“Hey,” I interrupted, “Remind me…how did Delilah get Samson to cut his hair?”
“He was a Nazarite so he was never supposed to cut his hair, but the Philistines each paid Delilah 1100 shekels to get him to cut it…”
“Yes, but how did she actually get him to cut it?” I pressed.
“Well, she kept asking him to, and basically he got tired of her nagging…”
(I’m not sure, but that slight misinterpretation of the story just might be related to the fact that I’d been nagging suggesting that all three men in my household cut their hair this weekend).
The 14 year old snorted with undisguised contempt for Samson’s deficiency of will and said, “It’s like Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of stew!”
His little sister piped up, “Yeah! I mean lentil soup is pretty good, but seriously?!”
Relishing the absurdity of it all, she concluded, “And he was really hairy so Jacob had to trick their blind dad into thinking he was his brother by putting a shag rug over his arm!”
Chance
One in a gazillion
As I was braiding my daughter’s hair this morning, we were chatting about one of her teachers who is about to have a baby.
“Does she know if it’s a boy or a girl?” I asked.
“No! They want to be surprised!” she replied, “Did you know that I was going to be a girl?”
“Yes, I did! You know how I hate suspense!”
“So they could tell that I was a girl before I was born, but they couldn’t tell that I had this disease?”
My daughter was born with a condition that allows her to live a perfectly normal life as long as she takes medicines throughout the day.
“Yes, that’s right. We didn’t realize that until you were born.”
“What were the chances that I would be born with it?”
“Well, we didn’t know it at the time, but it turned out that there was a 1 in 4 chance that you would have it.”
“Oh GREAT!”she replied, “So there was a 3 in 4 chance that I wouldn’t have it?”
“Yes, that’s true,” I replied, “But there was only a 1 in a gazillion chance that you would be the amazing and awesome person you are…so I think we really lucked out.”
Weekend Snapshots 43, or: The Ice Queen Cometh
My husband went to Scotland last weekend to give a talk at University of Edinburgh. He got to spend some time with our niece at her new school and he’s been able to check in on his parents in England. He’s also carved out a little time to do some hiking. It seems like he’s been gone for an eternity, a feeling that is only exacerbated when he texts me photos like these:
…complete with breathless, rapturous captions about the wondrous beauty he is experiencing.
We’re having much smaller-scale adventures at home. For example, on Friday my daughter spotted this in our backyard:
We think that rather fearsome bird perched on the run-in shed is a Red-tailed Hawk. I had never fully appreciated what the phrase “sitting duck” meant until recently. My daughter did not at all appreciate my observation that this would make Reason #927 for not getting the pet ducks she’s been pining for…
On Saturday I made shakshuka for the first time, which – miracle of miracles – everyone liked:
Oh, shakshuka, where have you been all my life?!
I adapted this New York Times recipe for the dish, substituting in ingredients we happened to have. (Sautée an onion, a bell pepper, and a few cloves of garlic. Season with salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, and cayenne. Add a carton of diced plum tomatoes and stir until sauce thickens. Stir in about a cup of crumbled feta or goat cheese. [I used a little of both]. Crack eggs over the mixture and bake in 375 degree oven for about ten minutes). The kids ate it all up with slices of buttery toasted sourdough bread.
On Sunday morning I picked up my daughter from a sleepover and we headed out to the field for her brother’s game. His team won by a large margin, but in the final moments they failed spectacularly at one attempt to get the ball into the net. A player kicked it from only about a foot away, but instead of going in, the ball got a little too much loft and improbably landed on top of the net.
“How in the world did they not get that into the net?” my daughter spluttered, clutching her head in disbelief, “Grandma could have gotten it in!”
“Grandma’s Grandma could have gotten the ball in! I mean…”
She plumbed the depths of her wildest imagination to come up with an even more preposterous scenario: “I mean…YOU could have gotten it in.”
Tears of remorse sprung to her eyes as soon she saw the shocked expression on my face. Of course, they immediately turned into tiny little icicles…
Brrrrrr, that was cold, little Ice Queen, but I still love you anyway.
I’ll probably forgive Mr. Scotland too one day…
Happiness is…
…getting your very own pair of brand new cleats after years of wearing ones that had been handed down twice from big brothers!
Weekend Snapshots 42
My family and I went to NYC this weekend to see my cousin in one of the final performances of Julia Cho’s Aubergine. It’s a play about the barriers to communication and understanding; it’s about the ways in which we try to commune through food; it’s about how we live and die. Our cousin played the part of Ray, a Korean-American chef who is taking care of his dying father. They have always had a tortured relationship marred by the inability to truly connect with one another. As his father lies comatose, unable to utter more than a groaned word now and then, Ray wrestles with the weight of all that was unexpressed between them during a lifetime. The play was beautiful and moving, funny and desperately sad, and so much of it felt very close to home…
Thursday
There were a lot of loose ends to tie up before heading to Arlington, where we would spend a night at my parents’ house before driving the rest of the way to New York. For one thing, we had to make sure the pets were set with everything they needed while we were gone. I did an inventory of their food supply, then handed my phone to my son and asked him to run down to the basement to take a picture of the new kitty litter we’ve been using so we’d remember which kind to restock. Feeling rather smug about my prudent foresight, I strode over to the pet supply aisle in the grocery store and pulled up the pictures on my phone to discover this:
The Failure of Communication: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts
Friday
The next day my mom cooked my kids’ favorite lunch: tender, salty mackerel with crispy, crackly skin.
In Aubergine, one of the characters talks about how her father would always eat the head and tail of the fish and give her the middle of the fish. One day she serves him the head and tail of the fish and magnanimously announces that she’s giving him his favorite part.
“Rice pot!” (i.e.: Dummy!) he says with exasperation and explains that he had always eaten the head and tail so that she could have the best part of the fish.
As the audience absorbs this revelation, Ray asks, “What part did your mother eat?”
As so often happens these days, my mother was too exhausted by her culinary labor of love to eat any fish herself.
She wasn’t too tired, however, to take care of some other pressing business. Before we left for New York, she handed me a thick envelope. She had prepared an identical one for all of her children. I opened it to see that it was a map and description of the burial plots she and my dad bought for themselves a few weeks ago. She had also included the contact information for two minister friends who already agreed to perform their funeral services.
“We got a 10% discount for buying early!” my mother chirped brightly as she dropped her latest weapon of mass destruction on our heads. “I thought we should be buried right under some pine trees, but your daddy was worried about the roots spreading. So we picked a nearby spot where we’ll have a good view of them. Remember! Put your dad on the left side, and me on the right. We’ll be able to call to each other in the morning and say, ‘Good morning! Have you eaten breakfast yet?‘”
Oh, dear God! Waterboarding? The rack? These don’t hold a candle to the myriad creative and devastating ways this woman devises to torture me.
We drove up to NYC where we met up with the rest of our family:
Admiring photos of the grandkids who couldn’t be there…
Saturday
Breakfast of the Champions.
My brother took my boys to the Pan-American No-Gi International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation Championship at City College of New York. Got that? Pan-American No-Gi International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation Championship at City College of New York! Now say it quickly ten times!
Meanwhile, the rest of us wandered around the vicinity of our hotel.
We stopped in at St. Patrick’s Cathedral:
Had lunch at Rosie O’Grady’s…
Then headed over to the theatre to see the play…
That night my four siblings and I spent a few quiet minutes with my parents in their hotel room, just the six of us. We thought we’d just have a casual chit-chat, but then my dad, a man who favors stiff pats over hugs, asked us to all hold hands with each other. He said a prayer for each of one of us and all the spouses and children in our family, asking for blessings for each of us by name.
Damn. Nothing like a good old-fashioned Pan-American No-Gi tag-team loving beatdown from your parents, the reigning champions of the emotional choke-hold. Clearly, this kind of thing should be banned, as there is no possible maneuver by which to escape.
Sunday
We drove back to C’ville. I decided to give my son some much-needed driving practice, and let him take the wheel for the last fifteen minutes of the drive:
It went pretty well until he almost drove off the side of the road…
There’s a line in the play I can’t remember exactly, but the gist of it was:
In the midst of life, we are in the midst of death…
I texted this photo of his traumatized little brother to my siblings:
My sister wrote back, “Oooooh. So that’s what faster than a bat out of hell looks like!”
Despite the plot twists and turns, we made it back home safe and sound. 
I’m a Korean mother, and I can’t help it.
When I was growing up, I never experienced a summer of complete freedom. My mother believed in the power of math workbooks as fervently as she believed in the power of the Bible. Every day I would have to labor away doing the prescribed five pages of what she called “Daily Math.” Ugh. I hated it with every fiber of my being. My friends were spending their days at the swimming pool, at summer camp, or just loafing around watching tv. How Korean of my mother, I thought, to ruin my summer by making me do math!
I vowed to myself that if I ever had children of my own, I would let them enjoy their summers unencumbered by scholastic assignments. When I finally did have children, I remembered that vow. I signed those kids up for all kinds of fun summer camps and activities. I’d pull into the parking lot to pick them up, basking in the glow of virtue you feel whenever you do a kind turn for someone.
“Oh, thank you, beloved mother,” I could practically hear them say, “Thank you for letting us go to this magical place where we could work on God’s eyes rather than algebra problems!”
“Thank you, sweetest and kindest of mothers, for letting us frolic with our friends getting bronzed in the golden sun, rather than making us hunch over a math workbook at the kitchen table all day growing as pale as grubs…”
But no. Every day, three slump-shouldered, resentful grouches would climb into the car and inform me that they didn’t want to do “Summer Playground” or “World Cup Soccer Camp” or anything really, other than hang out at home. “Don’t sign us up for any more camps!” was the message I heard loud and clear, and I was actually ok with that.
So this summer the kids basically became feral. I would come home from work to see them sprawled in exaggerated poses of relaxation as if they were posing as allegorical statues of Indolence, Sloth, and Torpor. I bore it for as long as I could, but as it turns out, I’m way more Korean than I thought I was. Their sleepy eyes, uncombed hair, and languid movements began to offend me. I literally couldn’t help myself. I started leaving them lists of things to accomplish by the time I got back from work. Nothing too onerous, mind you! The tasks were on the order of: “Load dishwasher,” “Do one load of laundry,” or “Put shoes away in the mudroom.” But every once in a while I’d slip in a small directive that might require slightly more effort:
- Brainstorm ways to alleviate the refugee crisis.
- Come up with an action plan to reunify the two Koreas.
- Find a cure for cancer.
The other day I overheard my son talking to his younger sister.
“Now when Mom asks me what I’ve been doing all day, I can honestly tell her I really have been working on a cure for cancer!”
Apparently the kid has connected his computer to a massive global project out of Stanford University, which harnesses the collective power of volunteers’ computers to crunch numbers. I can’t really understand the science of it all. (Despite my mother’s attempts to stack the deck with “Daily Math,” all those workbooks did nothing but send me reeling straight into the torrid embrace of Russian Literature). But here’s what the website has to say:
“Help Stanford University scientists studying Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and many cancers by simply running a piece of software on your computer. The problems we are trying to solve require so many calculations, we ask people to donate their unused computer power to crunch some numbers.”
You can check it out for yourself here:
and here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
As far as I can tell, the boy has discovered a way to plug into an astonishing feat of alchemy by which supreme laziness is transformed into something rather enterprising…It’s genius, really, and it makes this Korean mother so proud!
Related post: Amadeus and my own preternaturally precocious offspring.
The End of the Middle
I was complaining to my 16 year old son about a litany of problems – my inability to read small print, creaky joints, grey hairs sprouting with cruel, mechanical rapidity…
“I’m SO OLD!” I wailed in despair.
“Oh, Mom. You’re not old, he replied, “You’re just at the end of the middle.”
Perhaps I should be grateful that he didn’t situate me at the beginning of the end…?
A few weeks later I asked him, “Do you think I should try to figure out how to do Snapchat?”
Without a moment’s hesitation he answered, “No. Don’t bother. Snapchat’s not for people like you.”
Hear that, fellow geriatrics?! Snapchat? Not for the likes of us! Thus spake the 16 year old, so it must be true.
Maybe as a result of being “at the end of the middle,” I’ve been experiencing some really weird symptoms lately. For example, my legs feel unbearably hot, especially at night. Once I emailed my two sisters to ask them if they too felt like their legs were as hot as the barrels of curling irons. One of my sisters thought this was crazy talk. The other one said: YES, she too experienced that very same phenomenon! She is the researcher extraordinaire of our family, especially when it comes to medical conditions. She told me for years she was dying to google “hot thighs,” but was scared it would unleash a Pandora’s box of internet porn into her computer. When she finally broke down and did the search, she discovered that we are both suffering from a form of neuropathy for which there is no cure or treatment. Diagnosis: decrepitude.
Speaking of ancient things, my husband and I had been sleeping on the same mattress for eighteen years. I actually started campaigning for a new mattress eleven years ago, when I was pregnant with my daughter. Every time I moved in bed, I felt like I was being stabbed by a gang of vicious mattress coils. Because it always takes us forever and a year to do anything, eleven years later I was still waking up sore every morning on that very same, stabby mattress. Finally, I decided that as someone who was at the end of the middle, I deserved, nay: needed a new mattress to help me ease into my twilight years.
“AND it should be a king size bed, because you’re so tall,“ I announced to my husband, “and it should be a memory foam mattress with cooling gel, because I’m so. freaking. hot!”
My husband raised an eyebrow, but wisely remained silent.
We got a Loom and Leaf mattress, which is sort of like the poor man’s TempurPedic Breeze, and I love it, by the way. What in the world were we waiting for?! I love having a king size bed…It’s so big I feel like I need a passport to visit my husband’s side of the bed. I got linen sheets in keeping with my “cool” theme. They’re heavenly. We slept without any blankets or bedcovers for a couple weeks. I would have been fine with this arrangement, but I finally had to take pity on my husband, who begged me through blue lips and chattering teeth for a quilt.
This being at the end of the middle business has necessitated a whole slew of changes…We moved our queen size bed to our son’s room. We moved the full size bed that had been in our garage apartment to our daughter’s room. And we moved the twin beds from my son’s and daughter’s rooms into the apartment. The new king size bed made the placement of my dresser and our nightstands problematic. For weeks I’ve been moving heavy furniture around, trying to solve the puzzle.
I had given up on ever making our existing furniture work, and had resigned myself to buying a new dresser and new nightstands when inspiration suddenly struck. After removing the mirror from my dresser, it fit perfectly into the bedroom alcove:
I think I need a longish vertical something for that space to the left of the window…
With the dresser out of the way, we could fit our original nightstands where they were in the first place.
And now this elderly, Snap-Chat-unworthy senior citizen needs to go take a looooooooooong nap to recuperate from her labors.
o wonderful, wonderful 