Happy Thanksgiving

It has been hard to find the focus to write anything meaningful lately. So I've been putting this off.

Dayssi is very well, speeding along through LTM. Her counts have been stable, her mood is upbeat, she is physically strong and full of energy. And her hair is coming back in (peach fuzz at this point and, depending on the light, it looks either white blond or dark brown. hmm.) She is a little obsessed with death and dying right now. And I'm hoping that is just developmental. She seems to be playing right through it, with lots of morbid dialogue among Barbies and their friends, and she is sleeping fine. So with any luck this will pass, soon, as frankly it is a little unsettling for me to have to hear all of this dark stuff coming out of her cheery mouth and little bald head all of the time.

India is thriving -- loves kindergarten (and, we learned from her recent report card, is heartily loved in return), is making lots of new friends, developing new interests, and a new sense of herself as a growing-up girl. Last night at bedtime I leant down and told her "I love you, lots and lots," and she held my face in her hands and said "Me too (kiss on my nose), especially that nose of yours."

Jim is also in a very good place right now. He likes his privacy so I won't say more.

I, however, am a little off kilter -- exhausted, short-tempered, unfocused, and almost incapable of making any decisions or directing my own life in any meaningful way. Confused about what I am supposed to be doing, when. Kind of emotional, but not about anything important. Just not myself. Well, I guess the absent-mindedness IS actually kind of like me. But otherwise, no.

The psychologist in me knows this is to be expected. You keep all of these crazy fears and emotions bottled up inside to help others through a crisis, and when the crisis subsides and everyone else is doing ok, you just start to unravel. So, here it is -- I am officially unraveling -- and now I have to figure out how to deal with it. Concerned people: I am getting help, from loved ones and from a professional. And I am on a mission to reclaim my life.

Case in point: Thanksgiving weekend. We had a small family dinner at home. India and I gathered berries and greens from our yard and decorated the table, same as last year. The table looked beautiful and she was very proud. The food turned out pretty well but not as well as last year, which I now see was beginners luck (until now I thought I had displayed some raw talent!). Or maybe this year was the aberration -- I made a bunch of mistakes with the recipes, consistent with my observation about my current state of mind. So, the cranberry sauce was a little tart (I used a half cup of lemon juice rather than the juice of half a lemon) and the turkey was undercooked on the bottom (it was slightly frozen when we picked it up and it didn't occur to me to defrost before cooking, DUH.) The top of the turkey was delicious. I overcooked the stuffing, and the acorn squash, which was bad in the first case but kind of nice in the second. It can't have been all bad because Jim chowed down on leftovers after wrestling last night. As an aside, if I had realized the satisfaction in watching your man enjoying something you have made for him with your bare hands I would have tried cooking more often much earlier in my life!

We invited friends for dinner after a playdate on Friday afternoon but didn't really have enough food to make dinner for 8. So while the girls were playing under dads' "supervision" (just jokin' guys) I took my friend Carrie (who graciously made it seem perfectly normal) to the grocery store. We made burgers and salad, with ice cream cones for dessert, and it was so great to see them and to have a house full of kids again after all the weeks of isolation and quasi quarantine.

Friday night after they left we solidified a plan to stay in San Francisco on Saturday night and introduce the girls to some parts of the city. We booked a hotel in Fisherman's Wharf and headed up on Saturday afternoon post nap. By 5:15 we were in the Wharf, navigating huge crowds, taking in the sites and smells of crabs cooking and shells flying on the sidewalks. The girls were very excited about having crab for dinner until Dayssi realized that crabs have eyes. That killed it for her and, ultimately, for India. They had sourdough bread and pasta for dinner. Jim and I had crabs, shrimp, mussels and clams (you know how Jim likes to mix it up). Good stuff.

We stayed up until 9:15 (!!) watching the Cheetah Girls movie in our hotel room and finally hit the hay. Next morning we met Carrie, Bruce and the girls at the Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin for some great gospel music and so, so much more. I hesitate to describe this experience further, for fear of trivializing all of the truly amazing things about this church. If you want to know more: www.glide.org.

But that is not all. After church we took the girls on the cable car, from Fisherman's Wharf all the way to Powell Street, past Chinatown and the big Christmas Tree in Union Square. We waited in the rain to get back on the car, then rode back to Fisherman's Wharf, checked out of the hotel, and headed over to Chinatown for lunch. We couldn't find parking and it was pouring, so we double-parked on Jackson Street while Jim hopped into a tiny dim-sum place and grabbed a bunch of DELICIOUS treats for a lunch in the car on the way home. Dayssi slept though the whole thing but India enjoyed all of the different varieties of pot stickers and dumplings. When all was said and done, her assessment: "I like the colors better in Chinatown but I like the potstickers better at PF Changs."

This morning I THOUGHT I had a meeting at 8:30, so I drove India to school and sent Jim to the hospital with Dayssi for her blood work. Turns out the meeting is February 7 (as in 2/7), not November 27. Oops. I asked Jim to pick up a Zofran refill in the pharmacy at the hospital, but he couldn't get it and couldn't figure out why. Turns out I had called in the Zofran refill to the drugstore, not the hospital pharmacy. He did get the Septra at the hospital pharmacy, which is what I called in there. Can you even believe this?

I called Jim to apologize about the "wrong day" thing, and then had to apologize for the "wrong pharmacy" thing. And after all of this he didn't even yell at me or sound exasperated or anything. See what I mean? Jim is in a really good place. And I have so much to be thankful for.