Holiday

 We did it! We got here! This year we're hunkering down at home for the holiday. The kids are on a 2-week holiday, and Cook and I are taking a few days off here and there. 

We did our traditional walk to a local pop-up Christmas tree lot, and picked an extremely bushy tree to carry home. (Duchess was in the lingering tail end of a bout with the flu, so she stayed home and peered out the window.)

The formal decorating ceremony always involves sugar cookies and cider, and also for some reason also always a brief and weird dance party. 

It's been a hectic month. I interviewed for and got a new job (first day Jan 9) and gave notice at my current job (last day Dec 30). Duchess and Skipper both had to deal with thinking ahead to their big transitions in 2023 - Skipper had to pick which high school she wants to attend, and Duchess had to deal with college applications. We've also started to prepare to move out of our house and into a rental in January for a few months for a major remodel. (2023 is going to be an expensive year.)

Christmas was cozy and delicious, with most of the gifts being things that are warm and/or comforting. Skipper always has cold fingers and toes, and she's reveling in her newly warm status. 

It's been, as always, a very low-key holiday. Both kids have lots of friends with high-energy families who do the holiday up with lots of skiing and parties and decorating and gifts and whatnot, so Skipper felt that we needed to step up our game this year and add some new traditions. Accordingly, we established a Reindeer Games tradition. Currently, Olds are losing to Youngs, 3 games to 2, after playing Anomia, Bananagrams, Carroms, Ticket to Ride, and Timeline. Tomorrow is the final day of games; we'll see if wisdom will beat callow youth in the end. It is certainly a pleasure to spend time together - we've lost some of the excitement of the holiday as the kids have aged, but we've gained the delight of hanging out with people who are genuinely good company. 

 

Fall progresses

Updates! We did Halloween. Skipper went out trick-or-treating with a crew of fellow middle-schoolers. (The nice kind who dress up and don't terrorize the neighborhood.) Duchess passed on trick-or-treating, but put on some festive frog eyes for a photo op.

 

Other things that happened - we had an election! Duchess canvassed door to door to turn out the vote, something hard she had not done before. Duchess also turned 18, applied to college, and (voluntarily) got all 4 of her wisdom teeth removed. 

We had Thanksgiving! Family visited, thanks were given!

All things considered, I'm feeling pretty lucky this fall. 

Pumpkins

This weekend I took the girls to The Pumpkin Patch on Sauvie Island, a place where u-pick meets consumer kitsch, and the parking lots overflow with cars from all over the region. We haven't been there in a while. Duchess brought a new friend she met in French class, an exchange student (somewhat bewilderingly) from Sweden, and Skipper brought a friend whom she first met when they were both toddlers tagging along to their big sisters' kindergarten dropoffs. It was a nice outing, and the kids were all good company. I'm generally opposed to chauffeuring, and I usually stay out of the way of their friends, because I am embarrassing, but I was reminded today that it is often a pleasure to hang out with them and their friends, who are generally interesting and funny and able to keep a conversation rolling merrily along. (And apparently I was able to keep my embarrassingness under the tolerance threshold.)

Things are fine. The weather has been unseasonably warm and sunny. Duchess is in the throes of college applications. Skipper continues to do crosscountry and ultimate frisbee. Cook has been taking time off work to do house work, because that is still how he rolls. I just emptied my entire work email inbox into a new folder labeled "old stuff - unsorted" so that I can PRETEND I don't have 300 un-dealt-with emails looming over my head. I recommend this dumb psychological trick - I feel amazingly relaxed.

It's fall!

 Hello! It is fall! The girls started school (and did not at all want me to take their photos). Duchess is starting 12th grade, and Skipper is starting 8th grade. We are all quite old.

I went on an unexpected trip a few days after school started, and came back two weeks later to find that my family has a new routine, and it is the routine of a family with two teenage children in school. They go to school, they come home, they have a lot of Feelings, they eat, they go out again! They do independent exercise! They play sports! They go hang out with their friends! They come home again! They swirl around the house, eddy briefly around me and Cook, and swirl away. TEENAGERS! It's bewildering and delightful. And I think they're having a pretty good time. 

Stockholm

I went to Sweden! I had to pick up Skipper from camp, and I did some touristing on my own in Stockholm and also got to visit some family and friends as a wonderful bonus. 

I really enjoyed poking around Stockholm on my own and with Skipper. The transit (including ferries!) is fantastic, the public spaces are abundant and delightful (if short on public bathrooms), the bike and pedestrian infrastructure is good, and the cardamom buns are delicious. Skipper declared that Stockholm has "cool old stuff and nice new stuff" and she's not wrong.

I stayed part of the time in a hostel in a former prison in Södermalm. 

Katarina kyrka

City Hall

Bonkers statue of St George and the dragon in Storkyrka. I loved this dragon, which was carved in the 15th century and has spikes made of antlers and generally is extremely cool.

Gamla Stan

The rest of Stockholm.

I got to visit museums, wander around on my own, eat a million cardamom buns, and spend time with family and friends I haven't seen in over twenty years, and that was all wonderful. 

Summer Pt 2

Summer continues!

I got my eyelids cut open! It was another Real Surgery, with comical hat and IV and sedatives (hooray!) but it was very quick, and the recuperation is barely a thing at all - basically just getting over the sedative fog immediately after surgery and then putting antibiotic ointment on my newborn eyelid for 2 weeks. I am extremely relieved to have two eyes again, after 5 weeks of 1.5 eyes, and now I'm very antsy to get my contacts back in (which I guess has to wait until I finish the course of antibiotic ointment). My vision is so poor that glasses can't correct it fully, and wearing my glasses makes me feel very vulnerable and kind of half-asleep. Anyway, that adventure seems to be done. My rebuilt eyelid (about half of the margin of the lower lid was built out of tissue cut from the inside of my upper lid) is weird-looking and missing eyelashes, but good enough to pass casual inspection from anywhere more than a few feet away from my face. Cook thinks it's very funny that I am now a person who has had multiple plastic surgeries.

Skipper's Swedish adventure continues; it has been a big one for her. So far she has done all kinds of Swedish things (picked blueberries, gone swimming at 10pm, eaten many meals outside, been very bored at a summerhouse), and some American-person-in-Sweden things (fielding questions about America, being unable to manage Swedish "R"s, hating salt licorice).* She has met a score of Swedish cousins (half of whom I've never met) for the first time, used a credit card, put her contacts on by the light of a phone flashlight, swum with jellies, learned a bunch of solitaire games, and read Pride and Prejudice. She has eaten shrimp that were served whole, Swedish Swedish fish,**and many kanelbullar, and also experienced for the first time a wonderful food that she described as "cold hot chocolate" which was of course ... chocolate milk. This is a photo, courtesy of my mom, of Skipper and cousins swimming at 10pm, dodging jellies. 

When I was a kid, we visited Sweden sometimes, almost entirely in the summer, and I experienced it as a really Different place. The kids I met in Sweden were notably independent and creative, and everybody was outside all the time.  People had less stuff and lived in smaller spaces. Everybody spent long vacations at summerhouses, but the experience was always more or less like camping - even in the relatively palatial family summerhouse, there was one bathroom for the gajillions of people, supplemented by an outhouse, so everybody had to be thrifty with water and bathroom time. I guess my sense of (summertime) Sweden was a combination of thrift or moderated consumption balanced by an abundance of both time and light, and none of that seemed true about the United States in any season. I look forward to hearing Skipper's impressions. 

Duchess was house-sitting for nearly three weeks, and Cook and I had a strange preview of a future empty nest. On the one hand, it has been unexpectedly emotionally hard for me to have both my daughters elsewhere. I feel like my emotional center is reaching constantly for both of them. I don't know how the separation happens - I have to assume that this feeling fades as they grow older and build their own lives and we all become accustomed to being apart, but it feels like maybe it'll be harder than I guessed. 

On the other hand, it is really, really, nice to be able to decide what we want to do/eat/watch/listen to/etc without having to anticipate and/or deal with the kids. We have been eating and enjoying a lot of foods Skipper hates, like spinach and chard. Cook and I decided to go for a little hike, and we just went. We had a great walk. Nobody whined or dawdled, nobody complained about the drive or about being dragged on a hike, and nobody got cranky that we had packed only snacks and didn't get lunch until we got home. It was wonderful. (I told this story to a couple of my childfree-by-choice friends and they were very smug.) 

Duchess is working as a camp counselor, her first full-time job, and finding it very tiring. She got her first full paycheck, and marveled that she was getting so much money and also that it seemed like much less money than the work felt worth. 

*Over the last few years I have begun to recognize some ways in which my mom's Swedishness has affected my life and personality. I never thought of myself as a child of an immigrant - my dad is American, my mom speaks perfect American English, and I don't speak Swedish and am entirely a tourist when I visit Sweden. But some of my approach to the world is informed by a Swedish perspective (pragmatic, fond of pale wood), and some of my lifelong sense of not-quite-fitting is probably informed by growing up in a Swedish-inflected household, in which candy was eaten only on Saturdays, shoes were never worn in the house, and performativeness and excess were avoided.  There was always something un-American about us (though admittedly that was probably in large part due to my weird American dad's insistence that we not have a television). Anyway, it's just that I always thought I was all American, and now I see there's a little bit of something else there, too.  

**She claims they're different than American Swedish fish - larger and more delicious. 

Summer

 It's summer. It's a weird one. The day after school ended, Cook and Skipper went to Detroit, realizing a longtime dream of Skipper's. They watched three baseball games at Comerica Park, and of course the Tigers lost every game badly. Fortunately, Cook and Skipper were emotionally prepared for that outcome, and took it in stride. They did some other touristing - they saw the Little Caesars global headquarters, and looked across the lake to Canada. They seem to have had a very good time. They even got to attend a game with one of my excellent cousins, who schlepped up from Champaign for the occasion. He's a White Sox fan, but Cook and Skipper forgive him. While they were gone, Duchess and I ate snacks for dinner. It was delightful.

Once the dust settled from that adventure, Duchess started work (as a camp counselor at the Dungeons-and-Dragons-in-the-wilderness program she used to attend herself), and moved into her boyfriend's family house to dogsit for them while they were in France for 2 weeks. She found this much more taxing than she expected - long days of non-stop child-wrangling followed by dog-wrangling and house-keeping feels like a lot. And then a crow got stuck in the chimney at the house, and died slowly and horribly over three days (in a heatwave) while we slowly figured out a) that something was in the chimney,*b) that it was a crow, c) that it couldn't get out, d) which organizations/companies will remove a live crow from a chimney,** e) that the company that WOULD remove a live crow from a chimney couldn't come onto the property without signed permission from the homeowner, who was asleep in France at the relevant time. It was awful. And then their refrigerator died, and Duchess and Cook spent hours cleaning up the mess. The lesson here is NEVER HOUSESIT.

And then we sent Skipper to Sweden. By herself. For a MONTH. She was very clear-eyed in the planning that it would be challenging and lonely for her, but she wanted to do it. However, as the date approached, she felt increasingly terrified, and so did I. But she set her shoulders and got on that plane, and launched into the unknown. She is spending a couple of weeks couchsurfing with our generous relatives, including a long stint at the family summerhouse, and then attending a 2-week Swedish language camp in Stockholm. (I'm going to Sweden for the last week of her tenure, to see friends and family and do some touristing in Stockholm before retrieving her.) Here she is (photo courtesy of my mom) with another of my excellent cousins. 

And here is that same cousin with me and my brother at the summerhouse a long time ago.

And here she is with my mom (photo courtesy of my excellent cousin).

We miss her terribly, and it's really weird being without her. Duchess is still housesitting, and Cook and I are getting a preview of empty-nesting (except that Duchess comes over for dinner and drops off her dirty laundry, and needs our help with crows and other crises). It is clear that I need something to do with myself in the post-children-in-the-house era; I think I need to invest over the next few years in figuring out some hobbies.

* Please, for everybody's sake, CAP YOUR CHIMNEYS.

** Chimney sweeps, for example, won't remove a live bird.