Hope

Nov 6, 2018

It was pouring rain this morning when I asked my trusty sidekick to get dressed and go vote with me, even though she hasn’t been feeling well. Just a couple weeks ago, she had played the role of Leslie Cockburn in a debate for Civics class and had won the mock election. I wanted her to be there when I cast my vote.

Go, Leslie, go!

Despite the wide grins…

…we’ve actually been feeling like this all day:

But the future is NOW…and we are going to live in hope. Even on a cold and wet day, there is beauty to be found…

By the time I got home from work, the sun was shining. There were even some flowers valiantly blooming, bowed but unbroken by the torrential downpours we’ve been having lately…

We live in hope.

Goodbye, Summer!

Sep 22, 2018

In honor of the first day of Fall: a farewell to a summer of transitions.

The first frame shows my oldest with his siblings, celebrating his high school graduation. After trips to New York City, Cape May, and let’s not forget: Bumpass, we dropped our son off for his first semester of college in Manhattan, a city dear to our hearts because it’s where his dad and I met as graduate students. A short while after, my college friends and I got together for our annual reunion. I like to imagine my son someday in the future getting together with the friends he’ll be making in the next few years. A week after my college mini-reunion, I flew to California to attend the wedding of a childhood friend. I stayed with another mutual dear friend, and together we celebrated a beautiful wedding and a lifelong friendship that has weathered all kinds of life changes – big and small, sad and joyous. The last frame of the video is from this morning. After my second son passed his driver’s test and officially got his driver’s license, he drove me home, and then banged out this song with me. It’s one I used sing to each of my babies as a lullaby…

Cwm Idwal in the Ogwen Valley

Aug 10, 2017

From the cultivated beauty of Bodnant Garden, we drove on to the wild beauty of Cwm Idwal…A stone path guided our steps…

…to a lake:

It was a bit windy…

Actually, it was CRAZY windy!

Brooding Heathcliff moment.

No brooding here. This is the face of a man in his element.

Weekend Snapshots 47

May 1, 2017

Friday

My daughter and three of her friends are playing in a quartet together. On Friday after work I went to pick them up and got to listen to the last half hour of practice…

We met up with my 15 year old and his friend at a restaurant for dinner. As the kids piled into my trusty old minivan after dinner to head to the movie theater, I said, “Hey, please turn a blind eye to the mess inside. Just ignore it all! Pretend you don’t see a thing…”

As one of the kids gingerly stepped over the mess to take his seat, he deadpanned: “Like…the balloon punching bag, a Holy Bible, a warm six-pack of Gatorade, aaaaaaaand the brochure on chameleons?”

I’m not messy, really – I’m prepared. We could probably ride out the apocalypse in that minivan. We have reading materials. We have entertainment. And there’s probably enough food in crumbs and half-empty bottles of various liquids to keep us going for months. And if we happened to have chameleons during the apocalypse – we’d know exactly how to take care of them.

Saturday

The next morning I did a baby photo shoot. My camera stopped working halfway through, so I had to finish up with my camera phone. I’m planning to post more photos later, but here’s a sneak peak:

I had to dash home to get this girl to her soccer game:

Later that evening we met up with the quartet girls and their mothers and headed over to Staunton, Virginia to hear the Waynesboro Symphony Orchestra.

Elgar’s Concerto for Cello and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 were the musical highlights of the evening. The girls loved hearing their violin/quartet teacher play the violin.

Happy Easter

Apr 16, 2017

The five of us sang at four different Easter services at two different churches this morning. The Easter Bunny visited our house while we were at church and left an obscene amount of candy hidden around the yard.

Those beatific smiles disappeared as soon as the Easter Bunny’s mean, mean wife immediately confiscated aaaaaaaallll the candy and hid it away.

And then the poor Easter Bunny, who, after all that egg-hiding, would have much rather sat on a couch reading a scholarly tome, tried to change the air filters. He ended up having to get four stitches on a very important finger…

Music and Mayhem

Dec 31, 2016

Christmas crackers with whistles!

Postcards from Princeton

Dec 27, 2016

My sister and me – and my photobomber niece!

Hanging out with an Innkeeper and Joseph.

Silent Night

My niece and her dad.

img_2289-2

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!

Weekend Snapshots 43, or: The Ice Queen Cometh

Oct 10, 2016

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…”

scan-5

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.”

end of the middle 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…

Mid-week Snaps

Aug 11, 2016

Pre-season training camp for soccer has started…After three hours of practice between the two of them, the kids go straight from the car to the backyard to practice some more.

Beta Bridge today…A brand new mural on the Corner, inspired by Rita Dove’s poem “Testimonial”:

We wandered around town for three hours this evening waiting for one kid or the other to be finished with soccer…In one of the two grocery stores we visited to kill time, we were in the checkout line when I heard my daughter ask, “Can we get this?” Without even looking, I reflexively said, “No” as I always do. But when I turned around and spotted what she had in her hand, I said: “I mean, YES!” They could have tasted like dirt, and we still would have had to buy these:And even though the only banana-flavored things I usually like are actual bananas, these tictacs are weirdly delicious!

The dream is over…

Aug 1, 2016

My mother complained bitterly about being at the beach the LAST time we all converged upon Fenwick Island a couple years ago when my dad turned 80. We were surprised when she said she wanted to go again for her own 80th birthday. This time around my parents weren’t able to actually make it onto the beach, though one morning they managed to make it to the top of a sand dune so that they were able to take in the view of the ocean. They tried to pretend they weren’t having any fun at all…