We are sitting at Finca Cafe enjoying a decadent breakfast of pain au chocolat and El Salvadoran quesadillas.
The background music is lovely. The pastries are delicious. The coffee I'm drinking is superb. It's perhaps unfair to compare it to yesterday's in Janesville, but I will: there was no pleasure in sipping yesterday's. Visually, it was a disaster. The taste was unimpressive. (On the upside, the flour sack dish cloths I bought there, to replace our rags, are impressive.)
But I'm thinking that part of my pleasure today is due to the joy of having a tough period now behind us. We've come out of the tunnel!
It was the last day of an early wake up so that we could make it to Janesville in time for a super early post-surgical appointment for Ed. And the verdict is good: the doc now thinks Ed will heal well on his own (for a while, this was not assured). My repeated drives with him there, which started less than 12 hours after returning from Europe, are now done.
The storms held off for the drive once again and though it's dark, dank and dismal, I know that our more typical autumnal fare will return tomorrow. And so we are finally in a good place!
Afternoon.
I have warned Snowdrop that, in her time here after school, we are to have a "clean up" day. Things are not exactly messy in her play room, but we have a problem: Snowdrop's favorite way to play is to take any object and pretend that it is something else, relevant to whatever story she is spinning. Her most common segue into the new reality is to say "How about we pretend that this (here, she takes out anything: a toy, a pillow, a book, a pot, a plastic banana, anything!) is a..." -- whatever her game requires. A book can be a suitcase. A pillow can be a bridge. She says this a hundred times each day and all these items become part of her story setup. And they cannot be touched because the story is never ending. A hundred items, laid carefully all over the playroom and they cannot be disturbed.
Today, I aim to disturb them. We are to have house guests this weekend and though they are Ed's oldtime friends, and they have stayed here numerous times, and more importantly, they are used to Ed's inattention to matters of neatness, still, I have my standards, and they include having a floor you can walk on.
Do I succeed? Of course not. But we have a plan! By tomorrow, we will apply ourselves and things will look good once more!
Today? Well, there isn't time. Because, you know, there's reading, and playing, and dance.
Sometimes, I am mush to my children and grandchildren. And that's a good thing.
The background music is lovely. The pastries are delicious. The coffee I'm drinking is superb. It's perhaps unfair to compare it to yesterday's in Janesville, but I will: there was no pleasure in sipping yesterday's. Visually, it was a disaster. The taste was unimpressive. (On the upside, the flour sack dish cloths I bought there, to replace our rags, are impressive.)
But I'm thinking that part of my pleasure today is due to the joy of having a tough period now behind us. We've come out of the tunnel!
It was the last day of an early wake up so that we could make it to Janesville in time for a super early post-surgical appointment for Ed. And the verdict is good: the doc now thinks Ed will heal well on his own (for a while, this was not assured). My repeated drives with him there, which started less than 12 hours after returning from Europe, are now done.
The storms held off for the drive once again and though it's dark, dank and dismal, I know that our more typical autumnal fare will return tomorrow. And so we are finally in a good place!
Afternoon.
I have warned Snowdrop that, in her time here after school, we are to have a "clean up" day. Things are not exactly messy in her play room, but we have a problem: Snowdrop's favorite way to play is to take any object and pretend that it is something else, relevant to whatever story she is spinning. Her most common segue into the new reality is to say "How about we pretend that this (here, she takes out anything: a toy, a pillow, a book, a pot, a plastic banana, anything!) is a..." -- whatever her game requires. A book can be a suitcase. A pillow can be a bridge. She says this a hundred times each day and all these items become part of her story setup. And they cannot be touched because the story is never ending. A hundred items, laid carefully all over the playroom and they cannot be disturbed.
Today, I aim to disturb them. We are to have house guests this weekend and though they are Ed's oldtime friends, and they have stayed here numerous times, and more importantly, they are used to Ed's inattention to matters of neatness, still, I have my standards, and they include having a floor you can walk on.
Do I succeed? Of course not. But we have a plan! By tomorrow, we will apply ourselves and things will look good once more!
Today? Well, there isn't time. Because, you know, there's reading, and playing, and dance.
Sometimes, I am mush to my children and grandchildren. And that's a good thing.
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