Winding down the school year

 Time has passed! It was relentlessly cold and rainy here for a long time, and then very terribly hot for a week, and now we're back to a normal late spring, and everything is so green and flowering and lovely. A lot of things have happened. 

Duchess is wallowing in intense sentiment as she wraps up her high school experience. She chose a college, had a great time at prom, finished up debate season, ran at a fancy track meet in the fancy Eugene stadium that apparently runners care a lot about, walked the Wildwood Trail in a day, published her last edition of the school newspaper, picked up her graduation gown... all the things. 

Meanwhile, Skipper was busy hating track, playing ultimate frisbee, turning 14, and going on a long-awaited 2-week school trip to Osaka (where she loved the orderliness, the built environment, the rice for breakfast, and the vending machines, and disliked the lack of fresh green produce). True to form, she returned from Japan with piles of candy to share with us, but no photos of herself, so you'll have to settle for a photo that she took in Japan.

Here are miscellaneous photos of my smirky girls.

 

Miscellaneous updates

 It is not snowing. Just rain, and more rain, and we've all reached the end-of-Portland-winter moment when we just want to see some goddamn sun. 

Everything else continues as normal. Both kids started track, which means a lot of running and burpees and squat jumps and whatnot in the rain for now, but presumably will get slightly less tortury over time. I remain puzzled over the fact that both my children have signed up - voluntarily, multiple times - for running sports, something I never would have done and never will do because running sucks and what even is the point of doing a team sport that isn't collaborative? However, I recognize that they are not me, and also I am looking forward to seeing what events they end up doing. I hope Skipper chooses long jump for one of hers.

Duchess experienced her first-ever not-a-drill full school lockdown this week. It turned out to be a false alarm (shots fired a block away from the school during a period when students were going in and out of the school led to a lockdown until police arrived and got a handle on things), but it was pretty harrowing for the kids and staff, all of whom had to consider, while huddling in their darkened, locked classrooms for an hour, the possibility that they might be about to die. And since they were all holding their phones, all their loved ones got to spend an hour considering that possibility, too. It wasn't great. School was actually cancelled the following day, which feels both like an over-reaction and also totally appropriate. 

Duchess also has now been admitted to four colleges. She'll have all the offers/rejections by April 1, and then she'll have a month to decide, but I think she's comfortable that she'll end up in a good place even if all she gets from now on is rejections. 

So the spring is shaping up to include a lot of track meets and difficult decisions for Duchess, and please no more lockdowns. 

It snowed.

 I mean, it snowed a LOT. A historic a LOT. We thought it was a classic Portland snow, with some flakes and nothing sticking, and then rain, but then the rain turned back into snow, and the snow started sticking and it just kept snowing. Luckily I was working from home and the kids' schools are walking distance. Cook made it almost all the way home by bike, and then had to walk the last mile, but he's very fortunate that he wasn't driving, as many people's car commutes home turned pretty nightmarish.

We have no dramatic stories. It just snowed A LOT. The kids had two days off school. They shoveled a bunch. 

In other news, I went by myself on a lovely weekend trip to visit another family with teenage daughters - I snuggled a cat, ate new food, watched a Korean drama, got the full social analysis of a middle school dance, and enjoyed myself enormously.

That's about all. My job continues to be good. Duchess has been accepted to TWO colleges so she's going to have to make at least once choice. Both kids have signed up to do track in the spring. Life goes on!

2023 is not boring so far

 Oh, hey, it's been a while. As forecasted, it's been a busy month - Duchess wrapped up college applications, I started my new job, and we moved to our temporary home. 

My new job is good and interesting, but a bunch of factors converged to make my first month much more chaotic and intense than I was anticipating. I also go into the office twice a week, and deal with all the human interactions that involves, which is delightful and tiring. (Though I am really happy to have bus buddies again - I missed having a little cast of characters I see on a regular schedule.) 

Our temporary home is fine. It's interesting how living in a different physical environment pushes us into different patterns - in this house the girls have adjacent bedrooms on the main floor and share a bathroom, which means they have more contact with each other. We don't have room upstairs for a dining table, so we cook dinner on the main floor and then carry our food to the basement to eat dinner at the table there. (The basement is finished and furnished; this isn't as squalid as it sounds.) There's no good grocery store nearby, so we grocery shop less often. 

Duchess got her first college acceptance letter, relieving her fear that she wouldn't get in anywhere. She'll get the rest of her responses over the next two months, and there will be a lot of Feelings. 

Anyway, we're all fine. I think things will be a little more serene for a bit, but I make no assumptions. 

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.