Friday, November 7 - Sunday, November 9

A relaxing weekend. Glorious! It's been so long since we've had one of these. Not relaxing for Andrew, of course, since he left for Germany Friday afternoon. But relaxing for me and the girls.

Friday was no school because of conference day. Andrew and I had Greta's parent-teacher conference via zoom at 8am and then Lucia's in person at 9:20. Then Lucia rode a lot of miles on her bike with the XC teams and coaches, and Greta had four hours of musical rehearsal. After rehearsal, she and the other eighth-grade cast members walked to Walnut Street for snacks and shopping. 

Friday night, all of us finally home, I made pierogies and kielbasa for dinner and then we put on a fire, lit a pumpkin candle, cuddled up on the couches, and watched Wicked. I had never seen it--a year ago, when it came out, I was in the hospital and Lucia and Greta went to see it with Mom and Dad. I wanted to see it before the second part comes out, and I'm so glad I finally did. It was a perfectly cozy evening.

Saturday, Lucia went on a run with her team and Greta went to musical rehearsal. I went to Anthropologie and bought a skirt covered with dogs that was sale-on-sale. Lucia worked on homework, and then later in the afternoon went off to babysit for the rest of the evening. Greta and I had a random assortment of food for dinner, put on a fire, and watched the first Christmas movie of the season, the first of Hallmark's Countdown to Christmas premieres. I have not yet decorated for Christmas, wanting to give my fall/Thanksgiving decorations their due, but we are otherwise brinnging in the holiday and I am here for it. 

Lucia didn't get home until 11pm, pleased as punch to have earned almost enough to replace the $200 she spent on the fancy Nikes that are taking her XC team by storm. I was reading in bed when she came in, pj's on, and told me she'd been sitting on the couch after she's gotten her babysitting charges in bed, doing mole conversions (mol? it was chemistry homework), and she'd suddenly realized that mole conversions were what a character from High School Musical was doing when she babysat, and that the babysitters from the Babysitters Club also did their homework while sitting at night; and now she was doing the same thing. She couldn't get her head around the fact that she had become those girls: a real teenager doing teenager things that had somehow seemed distant and out of reach. "I felt so old," she marveled, thrilled. I think the future opened up for her in that moment--she got a glimpse. 

I was thrilled, too--not because she is, yes, a teenager; but because she was struck by that moment and, instead of just shrugging and moving past it, had felt the shift it marked and was turning it over, trying to find the words for it, trying to figure out what it meant. Such a small moment, a small thing--doing chemistry homework in someone else's house, half an ear listening for the young kids in bed upstairs; and somehow clocking it as a moment to remember. A Life Moment. She won't forget it. She may not work it out in the lines of a poem as I would have done at sixteen--not yet, anyway--but she has that same soulful thoughtfulness that makes such moments glimmer. 

Today, Sunday, was rainy and gloomy, but we had a lovely day nonetheless. We went to Costco in the morning, then Target, where we bought a pile of candles on clearance for $1 and $2. Then we had the entire afternoon free. Free! We relaxed and read and did laundry. At one point, when I was reading in the Long Room, the girls both came in and we watched some of the fun movie trailers they'd filmed two years ago in NH, and the chaotic cornhole-championship movie they made with Luca at the beach this year. Classics. We were howling. We looked at other Cape May pictures too. Lucia had squeezed into my chair with me and Greta was crouched close at my feet. No one was bickering, no one was rushing around, no one (me) was lecturing anyone (Lucia) about bringing up a precalc grade. Bliss.

In the early evening I made dinner and then we put a fire on and watched a few episodes of This Is Us. Dessert was mini tiramisus from Costco. (Today's Costco trip originated because earlier in the week Lucia decided the perfect thing to do this weekend would be to eat tiramisu and watch This Is Us. How could I say no to a plan like that?) 

Somehow, it is still only 9:15pm, though it feels like midnight. What a long and easy and excellent Sunday.