Skipping Town

So, we’re still in California. Our best-laid plans were derailed on Friday, when our certainty that returning East was the right thing to do soon gave way to an equally firm decision that staying in California for a few more weeks was best. It came down to the idea of the simple solution being the best. Leaving today meant several flights (CA—FL—NYC), a flight back to CA for Andrew, several days of me and Lucia alone, my parents coming up for a weekend, an entire week alone, another cross-country flight for Andrew for the weekend, and possibly yet one more week alone. It just seemed…complex. Staying here involves just doing what we’ve been doing, with a flight back to NYC in mid-December. We can all stay together. Andrew has to be here for now, and so Lucia and I will be here too. Though we’re very sad to be missing Thanksgiving in Jacksonville, truth be told, it feels fine to be staying on. We’re going to buy some more clothes and toys. We’ll join Beth and Nate in Napa for Thanksgivin...

We’ve had a lovely week in Mountain View. Temperatures in the seventies, cloudless blue skies, leaves crunching underfoot—a perfect California fall. Lucia and I have explored a bit further afield in the past couple of days. Yesterday we drove to Los Altos and walked around the cute downtown, full of nice shops and at least three fabulous toy stores. Today we went to the Stanford Shopping Center, an outdoor mall in Palo Alto, and browsed around for a bit. And Andrew and I have been sampling some of Castro Street’s restaurant offerings this week: ramen at a Japanese noodle house on Tuesday; burritos on Wednesday; and sushi tonight. All delicious. I took Lucia to another free-trial gym class on Tuesday, at The Little Gym. Like the Gymboree class, Lucia was not amused. She did not want to crawl from the center of a circle to me, on the outside. She did not want to sit either on or underneath the gigantic parachute. She did not want to “walk” on a balance beam. She did not want to sit on a ...

We’re in California. Again. Craziness! Insanity! It feels so surreal. All the time we were in California we yearned to be back in New York, and now we have a lovely New York apartment and are STILL living in California. We can’t get out. Or do we simply not want to be out? More on my suspicions about this another time. Our trip here went well. Lucia is a good traveler, but a six-hour flight plus an hour delay on the runway at JFK will tax anyone, and by the end she was quite fidgety. She had her own seat on the plane but still slept for only forty minutes. When we arrived, she fell asleep the instant we started up our rental car and woke only briefly at home when we zipped her into her sleep sack. She was up, confused, for the day, at 5:30am PST. We have slowly been working our way out of zombie land, but we’re not out completely. Our apartment here is nice—right off of Castro Street, the main restaurant artery, and directly across the street from a playground and a nice library. Over...