Chloe is still having an amazing time in London. The trip has been so amazing, in fact, that when her iPod Touch went permanently missing last evening (we think it might have been kidnapped), she managed to stay astonishingly calm despite the huge disappointment of losing her electronic link to the outside world. I attribute her level-headedness to the fact that we have seen so many wonderful things over the last three days that the loss of her gadget has not been as traumatic as it would have otherwise been. What are those wonderful things, you ask? Read on.
…Exclaims the 13-year old who is enchanted by everything she’s seen since we arrived yesterday. And anyone who knows Chloe knows she’s rarely enchanted. To quote my teenager:
“London is awesome. I like the way it looks. I like the gardens, the houses. I like the way people speak. I like the names of the streets and places. I like the food. I like the way London feels. I just like everything about London!”
Chloe and I are off to London tomorrow evening, our first vacation as a mother-daughter team. I have been anticipating this moment since our babies were born, hoping that someday I’d be fortunate enough to travel with them one-on-one when they were old enough to enjoy and appreciate it.
Sophie took a class called the “Art of Comic Books” at our local museum. She’s always been more of a graphic novel-type girl than a traditional novel kind of girl, and the result of her weeks-long effort at writing and illustrating her own story are spectacular, in my not-so-objective opinion.
Greetings, friends. It’s been some time since I last took over human mom’s blog, but I’ve been saving the stories for just the right moment. And it now seems that moment has arrived.
Chloe is a jeans teen. She loves her jeans. She only wears jeans, except in the summer when she wears shorts. She used to like to primp, but that was when she was seven and shopping for her was an absolute nightmare. I will never forget spending almost five hours at the mall in a tearful (she wasn’t the only one crying) quest to find a dress she’d actually be willing to wear. I firmly believe that the trauma of trying to find “fancy” clothes she liked in 2007 turned her against dresses and skirts for the next six years.
This was one of items on my every-growing to-do list since I left my job almost one year ago. It’s not that the letters and journals were lost – I’ve always known that they were stored away in boxes in our basement, but until recently, I hadn’t given them much thought. I started journaling in high school and continued it on and off for many years. The last time I regularly recorded my thoughts in hard copy tomes was during the two-year period just after my father died in 2000 until Chloe turned one in 2002.
The task has been on my list of projects since I left my office job almost one year ago. The photo files on the computer. Almost 10,000 pictures memorializing our family’s adventures since 2006. Plus a few stray photos from many moons ago when my husband and I were kids ourselves, scanned for posterity in case the paper versions someday disintegrate into thin air. And lots and lots of garbage – blurry photos, duplicate photos, ugly photos – that have no business taking up valuable computer memory.
If Sophie were a mood ring, she’d turn different colors with dizzying speed and without any warning. While she’s always been my happy-go-lucky little girl, her generally sweet disposition camouflages glimpses of something more sinister.
Greetings to all of my furry and non-furry friends, dogs and humans alike (as well as humans who are furry and dogs that aren’t furry).
My favorite Sophie and human mom have seen “The Lego Movie” twice so far. And my human mom has been warbling the chorus of the film’s song “Everything Is Awesome!” to everyone’s great dismay. But the song is the perfect musical accompaniment for today’s blog post. Why, you ask? Read on, my loyal fans, read on.
