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.

Taking Care

Written in early 2022…

Well I survived colonscopy #3 (in five years) recently with a clean bill of health. Man those preps suck.  This is the new routine since I found out several years ago that I carry a genetic marker that gives me a higher risk of colon cancer, which killed my maternal grandmother, though not until she was 94. With the threat of Covid (and worse yet, long Covid) hanging over someone who has already dealt with long mono for over half my life (especially since they just found that EBV is one of the top drivers of getting long Covid, FML), I'm trying to take better care of myself. 

I treated myself to a food sensitivity test recently and boy were the results a surprise. My top problem foods include coffee, almond, and vanilla (weird), but also cow's milk, pineapple, and orange, so the breakfast routine got a bit of an overhaul. If you haven't tried organic oat milk, which I hadn't, it is amazing. It's also cheap at Costco. Score! I never really liked drinking milk, except in coffee, but I'm a cereal girl, so it's kind of part of the deal. Thank goodness I can still have other dairy products, like cheese and yogurt. Let's not get crazy, I am from Wisconsin. I had to give up caffeine many years ago since it makes me feel like I'm having a heart attack, but man I like the taste of coffee. Trying to make a go with decaf earl grey...

Since the whole family was finally fully vaxxed before Christmas (yay!), we decided to take advantage of the extra long break to get out of dodge. A new year's snow storm almost set us back, but we all got on a plane for the first time in two years and went to Florida to get some sun and be able to eat and be outside. We were very lucky and the weather was perfect, though as someone who spent some summers in Florida growing up, I know it's not always the case. I honestly have no idea how/why anyone lives there year round. Unlike everyone we know, we managed not to catch Covid (double yay!!)

Turning 10! End of 2021

The twins just turned 10! They are each five feet tall. Not too bad for two preemies who came home weighing barely five pounds each. 

They are rocking fourth grade. Though she’d much prefer to be in fifth. Their school has all mixed age classrooms, so they are in 4/5. They are out of their braces and keeping busy with lots of activities, even though we are entering year three of pandemic life. 

My unvaccinated 48yo sister nearly died of Covid in the hospital earlier this month (her body was riddled with blood clots, so she ended up with multiple pulmonary embolisms). Her four kids are aged 9-14. Get your fucking shots folks. We celebrated my very last grandparent (my late step-dad’s mom) turning 95 last month. I was blessed with nearly a dozen in my life due to divorced and remarried parents and grandparents and we lost Rita (my late paternal grandfather’s second wife) in the spring at the age of 97 and a half.

Our tiny nuggets are growing up…

Cheers to 2022!!

The House that got away

Happy Summer!! It's been exactly 25 years since I started my first summer on Cape Cod. Boy that makes me feel old. Spending the whole summer (not a week or a month, or just weekends) in a place like this is a whole other life. The Cape is probably more my style, even though my best sister moving to NYC meant I became a Hamptons summer person a decade ago. Ah our first vacation in a year and a half is coming!

I lived in Hyannis Port for three summers in the mid-/late 90s. If I do say so, it was their heyday (post 60s, of course) when JFK Jr. and Senator Kennedy were still alive and out and about. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Andrew Cuomo were still Kennedy adjacent then too. The original Kennedy house in the compound (just west of the pier) is now part of the EMK Institute. Taylor Swift has come and gone. Ethel is still hanging on. Now 02647 is left with the likes of RFK Jr. Sad...

I met my first ex at the West Beach Club while working for a family who was friends with him and lives up Wachusett (they recently traded "school year living" in Wellesley for Jupiter, of course). And with their encouragement, we courted there and at the Hyannisport Club (where Jack and Jackie had their engagement party) and the HP Yacht Club ("the pier", where he was a patron and held court, is infamous for being a weekend paparazzi hangout) and Oyster Harbors with his parents. We dated into the fall, I spent weekends here even after going back to college. September here is the best. He wanted to buy a house in Wellesley and give me his family ring kept at Harry Winston, but I just couldn't. Even when his "friends" tried to talk me into doing it for the hundreds of millions. We decided, begrudgingly on his part, to be friends instead. So I kept visiting for years after. I remember the morning after JFK Jr.'s secret wedding in Georgia, because they never could have pulled it off here, when he told me about his friend finally getting hitched (they were the same age and grew up here together).

The ill fated Kennedys w/Friday at the pier in the mid-90s, 

they would die just off the Vineyard in 1999 after less than three years of marriage.

My ex-boyfriend passed away last August, after his mother in 2011, and his only brother in 2010. His father is in his mid-90s and lives in Miami. Not surprisingly, he's just put the family summer home (since the 60s) on the market. It's been mostly untouched for decades (that's how the old money rolls), save the new kitchen, this is just how I remember it. (and of course it closed on my birthday...)

The house is named "El Bajareque" (the shack, ironically, sort of) overlooks Nantucket Sound with a big yard sloping down to the Rose Kennedy memorial, Fortes Beach, and the Yacht Club. I would have married his parents if I could have. Though they probably wouldn't have wanted us to buy our own house here, it would have made them "look bad," as this was meant to be passed down. Loved them even if they were a bit too conservative for me. Very Cuban and Catholic (the latter of which HP became a haven for when the Kennedys moved here in the 20s, because the HP club was one of few that admitted Catholics at the time), so I stayed over in the guest room when they were there. A few of his cousins still have houses there. His father's great-grandfather founded Bacardi and the family still owns and runs it out of Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico (since their exile from Cuba the year my ex was born.). He and his brother were adopted, because that's what even wealthy infertile couples did in the 1950s. I never met his brother, he was by then a persona non grata to all but his mother, another HP raised addict, a victim of Fessenden abuse, like so many others. My ex was the "good son" even after getting tossed from Exeter. He redeemed himself at Georgetown and beyond. May he rest in peace.

I spent so many hours on that porch... Ah the memories...

Another hot property on Oyster Harbors (formerly Bunny Mellon's) that has recently hit the market... (and also sold end of summer)

Studying my own family's history, they owned large swaths of the Cape (from Yarmouth to Falmouth), as they (the Hatches) were the first white settlers to buy land from the Indians in the 1600s, so I'll be back...

Down to one!

We finally sold our old house! Wahoo! We started getting offers when we listed last fall, but they were low and we decided to hold out. We accepted a decent offer in January, but that progressively fell apart due to the buyers in late winter so we relisted it even though we were still officially under contract. The market had totally turned in those couple months and we started getting multiple offers (over asking!) with no contingencies. We finally closed and I’m still kind of in shock. Two houses (even in the same neighborhood) is a huge PITA. So why do I want to look for another farther away? Glutton for punishment.

We spent 15 years in that house. We got engaged in the living room our first week (we had plans to go downtown on our anniversary, but I wasn’t feeling well). Six years later we brought home babies. They are now almost five feet tall. 

It made me start thinking about all the places I’ve lived in my life. I only spent ten years in my main childhood home (which was my sixth overall). I’ve lived in over 20 homes/apartments across four states.  I spent a third of my life in that house. It was the end of my nomadic life. So many memories from the best to the worst.

It's debatable whether I'm more excited about this or being fully vaccinated as of the this week.

End of 2020 (the ultimate annus horribilis)

It's hard to believe it's been ten long years since I last wrote about a annus horribilis (a horrible year). This time of year always has crazy mixed feelings for me because of how 2010 and 2011 ended in such different ways (nevermind what we had to go through to make that happen). 

We recently celebrated the twins turning nine. They are huge (I'm buying them 12/14 clothes...) and dealing pretty well with this nutty year. They are doing well with remote school (halfway through 3rd grade!), but unfortunately given the pandemic their activities have been scaled back considerably and/or moved online. We finally got a pet bunny just before Thanksgiving after months (years?) of begging and a PowerPoint research presentation. His name is Cookie. We are getting more settled in our new house, but still annoyingly trying to sell our old one. After six months on unemployment, I did all my regular annual work in Oct-Nov this year, which was a bit much, but we are obviously thankful to come out of this historic year better than we came in. It's a strange feeling, similar to one we had in the long 2008 recession, when the world is falling apart around you, but things are going well for you (except for when they aren't, see infertility).

Even though this is really an introvert's time to shine (though not so much if you are also a wanderlust), Covid also brings up so many feelings given all the loss we've experienced. It makes you grateful that all the people we've lost in recent years weren't lost to a pandemic that precluded us being together. It makes you worry about your remaining two grandparents (step-grandmas) in the rural Midwest in their fragile mid-90s and your three remaining parents in their 70s, especially a mother with preexisting conditions like asthma and RA, and siblings who are cancer survivors and those who work in health care. It's made me think about how I've spent the second half of my life as a post-viral long hauler. It's been 22 long years since I came down with a relatively mild case of mono early in my senior year of college, which single handedly changed the trajectory of every single aspect my life since then. My education, professional and personal lives, relationships, everything is different than it would have been had I not gotten sick and am now still plagued by CFS. I also had to reconfigure my life ten years ago because of infertility and parenthood that meant I already had a pandemic friendly WFH job and life before this year. How's that for foresight (aka trauma)...

The only lingering issue with the kids was getting them to gain a bit of weight. Enter quarantine and the Covid 15 and that problem is now officially solved for Alistair, though it means I have to actually have to make an effort to lose weight for the first time in my life. Our basement gym is now set up and I have a driveway a mile long to shovel. Watch out pool season, we are coming for you!

Wear a mask, stay home, and get your jab. Happy New Year!

How it started...how it's going...

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Happy Holidays!!