11!

The twins are 11 already! My how the years fly by! They are fifth graders now. They are both killing it at school. They’ve both taken up the cello this year. She’s still into dance and started at a new dance school last summer. She’s trying out for the school musical this year. He is still into soccer as his sport of choice but is also getting interested in basketball. We had fun watching the World Cup. He’s also really into history and gaming. They both like to join clubs at school.

They are getting so tall and grown up. I don’t think I was nearly this grown up at their age. We had some fun trips this year. NYC to visit my sister as always and then summer back to NY and coastal New England. We are headed to Mexico for NYE and early January. I haven’t been in years and it's the first time for the kids and DH. Yay for new countries!

I just published a post I wrote earlier this year about getting another colonoscopy. I did this partly because I now have an old friend (we started our first jobs out of college on the same day, and later became roommates in Chicago) who is fighting stage three colon cancer at 45. She has a son the twins' age and has been having an unusually hard time with her treatment (surgery, chemo, radiation, etc.). She lives in Canada, but spent the first two plus years of the pandemic semi-stuck in Bali, where she obviously wasn't getting good care, as she had symptoms and nobody did a colonoscopy for years. It makes me angry for her.

And on the cancer front, because that's always a running theme, we lost my uncle Gary earlier this month to lung cancer. His wife, Laura, died of recurrent breast cancer back in 2013, and now their two kids are orphans in their 30s. He's the third of my father's siblings, and first of the four to pass away.

So it's September...

Which is my favorite month by far, but it's been a crazy year for us all. I started a post back in the winter about the seemingly pressing issue (at the time) of the kids trying to qualify for gifted and magnet programming (she did, he missed it by a hair, oh well, it's almost time to test again). Little did we know school as we knew it would be ending soon.

I took the kids on a great trip to Boston for President's Day weekend when things with Covid were starting to look hairy and then the shit really hit the fan. We stayed at the Seaport and the Boston outbreak really took off the week after we were there. Our planned trips to NYC for Spring Break and Nantucket this summer unfortunately couldn't happen safely.

The kids have been home for six months (now two weeks into 3rd grade) and for the foreseeable future, ditto the working husband, and my work project got put off in early April (and just got green lit again today for next month!), so I've been experiencing my very first taste of compensated unemployment, yet not at a lack for seemingly endless things to do. 

We found a new (to us) house in April near our old one and then moved in in June. We bought it from a lovely old lady whose late master carpenter husband built it with his friends 50 years ago and they raised their six kids here and (bless her busy perfectionist heart) she had the whole house completely redone to sell it (so I didn't have to!). We were thinking of building new, out of desperation, but I didn't think I (or our marriage) would survive that many decisions. I couldn't talk the kids into changing schools where we are all happy and the hubs didn't want to relocate either. It's rooms and closets are bigger and it has an amazingly huge yard, which is hard to find in our built up suburban area, and it's been a wonderful change, especially given all the time we've been spending at home. Now we just have to sell our old one of 15 years... 

Where the hell does the time go? A decade ago I was still trying desperately to get pregnant. 25 years ago I graduated from high school and moved to Boston and left Wisconsin forever. My first boyfriend from my new life in Boston just died a few weeks ago. My college bio classmate Maeve died in April, along with her 8yo son. Yeah these are crazy times. We are all still healthy, thank goodness, and my family is going crazy not being able to come see our new place.

The kids have done great with their upper expanders (now out after a long delay, they were due to get them out the day everything shut down), now a retainer, and lower braces. And the lowers come off in a just a few short weeks. We thankfully didn't lose any treatment time even with three plus months of no adjustments.

It has just started thankfully cooling down after yet another record setting hottest summer ever. It felt like a very long sweaty hotflash. Next big project is putting in an inground pool (next spring hopefully).

He's not even taller than her, they are both 4'9" and climbing, it's just hair...

Watch out THIRD GRADE!

Who’s a shitty blogger? (2018 wrap and dump)

I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions, but I should probably make one to do a better job documenting our lives. I completely skipped blogging in 2018.  Oops. Life is pretty good, but busy and exhausting. I should try to make this blog more than the year end letter I never actually write (until after the fact) or send to anyone.

We just got back from three weeks in India, our first visit in five years. My brother and sister in law had another baby last spring (a boy), so after avoiding the trip for several years (we went last after their daughter was born), it became unavoidable, even though I fell deathly ill last time and was avoiding it like another plague. My mother in law last came to stay with us three years ago, so we were a bit overdue. I don’t dislike it there, it just doesn’t seem to agree with sensitive Northern European/Midwestern constitution unfortunately. I was less sick this time than I usually am there, so that’s the good news. Yay for expensive new prophylactic antibiotics! The weather was lovely in Nashik (if a bit cooler than usual at night) and the kids had fun. It’s just kind of boring, as I spend a lot of time sitting around.  I made sure to bring some books to catch up on my reading, which was good, except that there isn't anything else to do. Many of his relatives don’t speak English, which is isolating. One of his many cousins happened to get married while we were there, so that was fun for everyone. Indian weddings are crazy.

Thankfully, we booked our last week to be just us four in Goa, which is a beach resort down the western coast and a former Portuguese colony. I felt like a heel leaving his family for a vacation in India, but we needed it, badly. We stayed at a fancy resort on the sea and ate way too much.

I went out to NYC in the spring to visit my sister, and of course it was monsoon season (per usual). After sixish years in Brooklyn, they finally moved to the Bronx to be near her NYPL branch and because they needed more space since her new husband’s adult son is now living with them (long story). I managed to injure my hip somehow (I always walk dozens of miles when I go), and that has sort of been plaguing me since. I went to an orthopedist (for the Bears, hello overqualified) and of course it’s another mysterious unexplainable problem, so I did many weeks of PT, which helped, but it’s still not great. Besides being annoying, it has also affected my mobility enough to contribute to gaining a good ten pounds, which is making me crabby after being the same weight/size for decades, including for years after having the twins.

It probably also didn’t help that the initial injury coincided with my first/only failed foray into anti-anxiety meds, which I’d started the previous year and my Dr. tinkered with unsuccessfully for months. They did nothing. So while I should be exercising to help not be a nervous hot mess, I have pain simply walking. My problem hip is my left where you may recall I spent four months residing back in 2011. Payback time isn’t a good time.

We took my mom and eldest sister with us on our summer vacation to the Hamptons this year. My mom has been doing a lot of genealogy research the last several years, since she left her job as a nurse to be a caregiver for my grandma, then my sister, and her grandkids, and most recently my late step dad. Unfortunately most of it since she lost her mom, who would have gotten a real kick out of all she’s found. She had mentioned the previous year when we were there (without her) that we had some connection to Shelter Island (which none of us had ever been to), but didn’t elaborate until we got there this year.

Well it turns out, across the shortest ferry ride, we had ancestors who owned the whole flipping thing!? We went together to visit Sylvester Manor, which is still there even though most of the land was sold long ago. And that was just the beginning. So the big news is I’m now working on a book on our Brinley ancestors who also owned huge swaths of Newport, RI, Boston, and NJ from the 1600s, because why not take on a ten year project. It gave me some serious direction and work for my September solo trip to New England, which I likely would have taken anyway, but was pretty mind blowing. Planning on NY/NJ next, with England to come.

I literally used to walk every day past Boston’s King’s Chapel cemetery (its very first), from one crappy job to the next, where my ancestors were buried and have a historical plaque proclaiming them “the richest Bostonians of the 18th century” (turns out their portraits are hanging in the Met for crying out loud), and a couple generations back further (to the immigrant one) were the same for the 17th. Just three centuries of Harvard guys. Well that’s about 25 years too late a discovery to be helpful to me. Oh well.  I used to row early morning crew on a river named for the King of England who my 10th great grandfather worked for. Remember I was a scholarship student, whose family barely went to state schools, and thought I was crazy for picking up and moving to Boston. How’s that for mind blowing? Oh and they are also my familial link to the current British royals (via the late Queen mum).

Sagar started a new job in late September, which seems to be going well. The whole process took awhile, but I think it's better. He was done after nine years at his old firm, which was well past ridiculous. The new one is a great firm where he is building their public practice from scratch. It's big time and I'm super proud of him. Of course they also offer market leading infertility benefits, and irony is never lost on me. Too old for that shit, but it did cross my mind for about a nanosecond.

I also turned 42 in late September, which should/would have otherwise been an uneventful Monday. But that morning, my boss/client/whatever you want to call him called me at 9am right after I’d sent him an update email on our project to tell me the evening before his wife (of nearly 30 yrs) had stepped in front of a train. He was still reeling and waiting for their three grown kids (b/g twins + another daughter) to arrive home from all over to be with him. Talk about sad. I had only met her once briefly when they hosted a party for the team at their old home in Barrington Hills back when he was my CMO. I didn’t know she had a PhD and was a clinical psychologist. Just goes to show that you can “have it all” (and be a mental health professional) and still have and succumb to serious mental illness. He is the nicest guy (and basically my professional benefactor, as I’ve been able to work from home on my own hours making beaucoup bucks for the last three plus years because of him), and I’m just glad I was in a position to completely take the project over, so he had one less thing to worry about. Probably one of the saddest funerals I’ve ever been to, and for someone I didn’t even know. I just can’t imagine. Now I get to feel guilty for having my best year yet, and for making a bunch of extra money because his wife killed herself. Mostly using it to travel, which it seems she would have liked.

The twins just turned seven, though as always, the celebration is a month long as their big party was later in January, after all the holiday/break craziness dies down. They are both loving and doing great in school (1st grade), though I’m already worrying about fall when their regular trimester testing will determine if they get tracked for the magnet program (at yet another elementary school for 3rd-6th, and our neighborhood middle for 7th-8th), gifted (at their current/each school), or regular acceleration (which they have now).

She is consistently on track to qualify for magnet (98%ile or higher for both math and reading), while he is right on the cusp for the gifted program (95%ile plus). These are the same kids who didn’t do much “on time” folks, in case you are wondering how relevant most milestones are. So now I’m faced with separating them potentially (worst case), and while they have been in separate classes for three years (and separate preschools back in half day pre-K), it's not the same as a separate school, I'm not thrilled with the prospect. I wish they could stay where they are and get what they need, at a school of our choosing, though the magnet school is another great school of choice (it’s thing is Mandarin immersion, though I don’t know yet if the magnet kids automatically get into that program or not). Two schools with two different schedules (ours now is late start) on two different buses, on different ends of town isn’t ideal. We could move to get him into the school, though that would likely separate them for junior high, and feeds to a different high school, or I could apply to them as a choice school, but the decision would be due before she finds out. Ugh. Maybe we’ll be cramming for 2nd grade testing this summer like a bunch of fools. They don’t send a new group into each program until 5th, if they don’t make the cut for 3rd.

Finally took them to the pedi for their 7 year visit now that we are back and they are continuing off the charts tall. Operation try to chub up the kids continues.

Hence my main genetic offerings, smart and tall. Rock on giant geniuses!

Early June Saturdays

My grandmother passed away peacefully on Saturday.  Just as my other grandmother did four years ago this week, when I was pregnant with the twins.  We will be traveling to my parents' hometown again for the services, including the funeral mass at the church where my parents were married 47 years ago.  I've never actually been inside, which seems odd, given all the times I've visited that town.  And save for my grandfather's second wife, who we will visit when we are there, I really have little reason to return to the town where all of my grandparents lived for all of their adult lives, where they raised my parents, and then where they lived (save the Army stint) until my mother was pregnant with me when they moved to WI.  The end of an era.

My grandmother was the eldest daughter of ten (five of each), and she outlived them all save her youngest brother.  She went on to have five of her own (my father was the third, though his older brother died at birth, making him the eldest son).  She had a lousy marriage, or more accurately a lousy husband (and father to mine), which led to their divorce soon after my parents's marriage in the late 60s.  She was a divorcee (and a devout Catholic one at that), before they were commonplace.  She didn't have the benefit of an education, but she was a classy lady and is responsible for all the Frenchie I have in me.  I have so many good memories of all the summer days we spent running around her perfectly kept house and yard. Love and miss you grandma.

We love you Laura

My aunt Laura passed away earlier this week. She was a young fifty-five, always so sweet and cool and chic.  I idolized her when I was a kid, probably because she didn't have any reason not to be sunny, unlike my divorced working mom of four.  She had breast cancer that we'd thought she'd beaten, but then it came back and had spread to the muscles around her heart, and even all her fight and the best care in the world couldn't beat it. She and my uncle (my father's next younger brother) were married 30 years and lived in Palm Beach Gardens, after first meeting in Chicago.  They were quite a couple...  She the sorority girl turned travel agent (remember those?) turned SAHM and teacher.  My uncle the golf pro/model turned small business owner.  When I was a kid, we'd often make the long drive from WI down to visit them (usually in the hot hot summer).

She was the first person I knew to do IVF (in the late 80s, for secondary infertility after having a son promptly after they were married and waiting years for another child), though it didn't work and she subsequently got pg on her own w/her daughter (who just turned 21). She was also the first person I knew to build her dream house, which we got to witness (it was the summer my sister Em spent with them, so of course she did the same a decade later).

When I was dating a guy who lived in Miami (in college and just after), I would always drive up to visit them when I was in their neck of the woods. It was on one of these trips, about a decade ago, that I saw her last. I guess I had a bit of a falling out with my uncle, who is as terribly opinionated as I am though he is also a rabid Republican and racist and has a thing for grudges, and we just kind of fell out of regular touch.  My family is weird like that, which is sad.  I'd heard through the grape vine last year that she was sick again, but hadn't been able to get down to see her.  They weren't able to travel up to my grandma's big 90th party last May.  She, thankfully, made it long enough to see her son have one of his own, the same week the twins were born. 

With Mother's Day this weekend, which is already know as "Thanksgiving Day in May" at our house, we'll be thinking of her, remembering the good times and just how lucky we are to have our health and our family.

When the heart of a home is gone

Last weekend, DH gave me the day "off" and I spent a whole six hours away from the kids, the most yet. It was nice to get out, but it also reminded me how much of my mental space they now consume.

One of the places I went to was Hinsdale, which is a haven for teardowns, but has an adorable historic downtown with several cute shops (now minus Lilly) that I used to get to on a regular basis and a few new ones I hadn't yet.  It is also known among followers of Giuliana & Bill Rancic as where they recently flipped one of their several investment homes.  Driving out of town, I happened past the Greek Revival that was the feature of the late designer Marija Stephens's blog "Holding Court" (which has been taken down, but the tribute blog "Holding Forth" has it now). I wrote about her passing here back in 2010...

So later I looked up what happened to the house and since I've apparently let my sub to Chicago Home lapse, I had missed this story from last fall.  Marija hadn't yet finished their family home she'd designed from the ground up when she was tragically killed in a car accident, so her husband had a friend of hers (Julie Edelmann of Buckingham Interiors) finish it before he sold it and moved with their two young children to my old neighborhood in the city before the story ran.  He'd written a beautiful final post on her blog about her and their life and their dreams and the house.  It is a lovely home, but when the heart of a home is gone, it is of course just a house...

  



What would you sacrifice?

It's Halloween today.  Never one of my favorite days, but instead of my usual living vicariously through other people and their children and happily handing out candy like I have the last five years, I'll be hunkered down in bed and hiding inside with the lights off hoping our house makes it through the night unscathed.  Hopefully next year will be more festive.

Everyone knows that parenthood is all about sacrifice (of your body, your autonomy, lifestyle, etc., etc), and sadly for infertiles the sacrifice starts long before the kids arrive.  Like many others, we've already given up years of our marriage, tens of thousands of dollars, and lots else just for a chance to TTC.  For the chance to focus on having a successful pregnancy (or more cycling), I gave up my job in April.  In the hopes of bringing our twins to term with an unexpected four months of bed rest, I've given up the chance to do freelance work on top of all the preparation and celebration that usually comes with a complication-free pregnancy.  By the time I go back to work in 2013 (potentially), I will have given up hundreds of thousands of dollars and most likely much of the momentum in my career (something my former boss actually pointed out to me after I told him we were expecting twins, thanks for the reminder).

Many people make it through TTC and pregnancy pretty easily, just to be hit with issues once the kid arrives (like my mother and sister both have), but then we are reminded that others give it all just for a chance for themselves or their children.

An online friend of mine passed away last week after a five year battle with cancer.  She and her husband were married the same day that DH and I were five years ago, but the very next month she was dx w/cancer.  I don't know much about her prognosis at that time, but they ventured on a long journey to not only beat her cancer, but to start a family.  After more than three years of both, and with the help of IVF, they welcomed triplets.  She tragically passed away just after their first birthday.  It is difficult to imagine what one would do when faced with situations and decisions like these, it is so heartbreaking.  It is just impossible to know until and unless you are faced with them, I guess.

Over the summer, my mother was telling me about a friend of hers from her hometown who in the early 70s, when they were both starting their families, was also dx w/cancer.  In the three years that my mother had my two older sisters, her friend had three kids and then, unbeknownst to nearly everyone, had gotten pg again.  This was around the time she first got her dx.  She apparently was told they could treat her if she wasn't pg, but as a devout Catholic she had no interest in terminating.  Her baby was later delivered early and she passed away within hours.  Afterwards, my grandmother had told my mother she'd often seen her at St. Patrick's just praying, but she, like everyone else, didn't know what was going on.  Her husband was left with four children under five and no wife.  To many's surprise (but not mine), after meeting a fellow widow in a support group, he promptly remarried (she w/three young kids of her own) and they were married and raised all their kids over several decades together.  His second wife passed away recently when my mother was back in town, which is why she was telling me this story that she had never told me before, which caused me to sob like a baby at the thought of what her friend and her family must have gone through all those years ago and since.

Obviously, there just are no guarantees.  Some people get handed a raw deal and have to make choices to remain without children or for their kids to live without a parent and spouse without a partner.  Others sadly don't have real choices and some are lucky enough not to even be faced with similar situations and their reality is to be dismayed by the minor inconveniences of TTC, pregnancy and post-pg life.  If I had a dollar for every suburban housewife friend (but ironically not my model friends) who can't deal with their post-pg body...  It is possible to tell yourself that others are always worse off, but I really don't think it's possible to really understand what any of this would be like unless you endure them yourself. 

I, as always, am thankful and hopeful.

Taking a break

We are getting ready to leave for NYC and the Hamptons for a nice long weekend, which couldn't come at a better time.  I'm actually relieved the Bump boards are down today, as news I heard yesterday has been haunting me. 

An online friend, who happened to have been TTC exactly as long as we had, is my age, left her job to focus on her pg, had to do IVF (repeatedly) to get pg, was expecting twins (boys, she now knows) just a few days after me, suddenly lost them at 18 weeks.  I think about this happening all.the.time, but to see it play out so horrifically for her is absolutely heartbreaking.  I can't put it into words.  What an awful test of the limits of human fortitude.

We are so thankful to have made it to 19 weeks (tomorrow officially) and that I am feeling the babies so much.  Thanks for making your old lady feel better kids, I appreciate it.  Counting down the last week to our anatomy scan and only five more to V-day.  Tick tock...

In Wisconsin

I don't know when I'll have my shit together enough to write a decent post, so I figured I might as well post an update since it's been awhile.

We had a great meeting with the OB on Friday at 9 wks., but my mother was trying to call me all through it and finally reached me after to tell me that my grandmother had taken a sudden turn and they were headed to the hospital. Though we've known she's been terminal for nine months, we'd of course thought we still had more time, since she'd been doing relatively well.  We'd just seen her over Memorial Day weekend.

I left right away to drive up and when I arrived at the hospital five hours later, she was still lucid and we were all able to sit together for an hour or so before she dozed off, aided by the morphine she was getting for her pain. Her cancer had spread to her lungs, among other places, and she'd been having great difficultly breathing, and as of just that morning was in extreme pain. They made her comfortable and she never woke up again after that short time that we all spent together. She took her last breath at 2pm this afternoon. She was 94 in March, so it probably seems odd to say that she's gone much too soon, but it's true. She was truly the glue that held our family together, a matriarch if there ever was one, and the sole force that kept my mother and sisters and me off of welfare after my father left. I could spend the rest of my years trying to be half the woman she was, and would likely fail miserably. She was an amazing woman, one who gave and gave to everyone, even when people were not worthy. We all already miss her terribly.

In other news, My sister E, who has three kids (4, 2 and 1), will soon have four under five, as she informed me today that she is six weeks pregnant, due three weeks after us...

Losing Louie

We sadly lost my grandpa Louie last night rather suddenly.  My mom had called me in the afternoon to tell me that he'd taken a sudden turn.  He was having signs of internal bleeding and his blood pressure had dropped way too low.  My step-father (his eldest son and like my mom, a nurse) was able to get to his side, but didn't think he'd be able to pull through like he'd done in the past.  And then by evening, he was gone. 

He'd been declining for some time, so I guess we can take some comfort in knowing that he wasn't suffering for long and was made comfortable and had his wife, sister, pastor, and his four dear sons nearby.  I'm so glad that I was able to visit with him and see him for what I didn't imagine would be the last time, just a few weeks ago, when I was up for my cousin's bridal shower.  He seemed like he was doing quite well then.  He was frail, but he recognized me right away, was very chatty and played cards with the guys while the ladies "showered".

I leave for Vegas in a few hours and am scheduled to return on the Wednesday red eye.  It looks like the funeral will likely be Wednesday morning, so we'll be leaving right from O'Hare to head to WI.  S will be a pallbearer, along with the other eldest grandsons and husband's of eldest granddaughters.  We will miss the visitation on Tuesday, but there is a viewing on Wednesday morning as well.

I understand there is nothing upside down in the universe when a man passes who has lived so fully all of his 80 plus years, leaving a wonderful family of four boys (and their wives), twelve grandchildren, and five great grandchildren. But he was the father (and the father of the man) who taught me how fathers should be.  Much like my late father-in-law as well.  Men who were good and honest and true, and embraced the responsibilities and joys of fatherhood, and lived for the simple love of their families.  Another beloved soul who will never share in the joy of our future children, and someone they would have been truly blessed to have in their lives.  A greater charge to us to live in their ways so that their love and the honor with which they lived will live on in the family we are working so very hard to build.

Amidst all the tears, I thank God again that he and the family that he and my grandmother created were linked (and enthusiastically embraced) with mine over 25 years ago in a unlikely pairing of my bachelor step-father and my young divorcee mother, who came with us four girls.

We love you Grandpa and we miss and love you dearly.