A Whirlwind (and Not Entirely Complete) View of Our World During the Last 5 Months

OK, like “The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Abridged) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_William_Shakespeare_(Abridged) here, in a nutshell, is the last five months:

Margaret had her last appointment with Dr. Flimlin in Burlington at the end of October and was given the green light to ease back into her activities. Although the vertebrae will never regenerate, they are healed and stable. She is back to tap and hip-hop and pretty much everything at school has returned to normal for her. Her back still aches at times. I’m afraid she may be plagued by a sore back. She can join the club.


Meanwhile, my wrist went from bad to worse back to bad and then to healing. Visits to Burlington in October, November, December and January mean more radiation than the folks at Cherynobl. In the films, you can clearly see the break under the plate that happened AFTER the surgery Sept. 3. By the Jan. 20, 2011 visit, he said it's healing nicely and I don't have to return until the end of March.
The good news? The original pain I went in to have him treat is gone.


Both Margaret and Patricia received exceptional report cards in November — straight A’s and A+ for Patricia; high 90s and 100s for Margaret. The class we were most concerned about was Margaret’s AP Global, which she is taking as an independent study. But she aced it, and the teacher was very complimentary when we met for parent-teacher conferences just before Thanksgiving.


Brigid, meanwhile, has been entering a phase that may be turning into a character flaw. She has been screaming and yelling and being an overall pain — easily angered, easily frustrated. They said at Sibley that they don’t see much evidence of it, so she’s saving it all for when she gets home.


We went to Buffalo for Thanksgiving break, stopping over in Verona both on the way down and back again. It makes the trip much easier to bear. Had a wonderful visit. Spent time with family members, had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with Dave, Connie, Stephanie, Tim and Grandma Wright. Saw Chet and Marilyn for breakfast and stopped by Jan’s house on the way out of town where Brigid was introduced to the Wii. The girls and I even got in some thrift-store shopping. The weather held out long enough for us to get home.


After four years, the family – girls and Jack included – finally wore Santa down and low and behold, along came a Wii under the Christmas tree. Now Brigid can hack and slice her way through “Swordplay” any time she wants. Patricia is addicted to Mario and Jack and Margaret aren’t far behind. Even Brigid wants in on the Mario scene.



The winter finally caught up with us and we’ve been seeing some significant snow fall, much like the rest of the East Coast. Jack got into the not-having-to-work-for-six-weeks-after-the-semester-ended routine with aplomb, taking the opportunity to do some skiing. He said, after all his time in the private sector, it almost felt decadent to have so much time off. But he hit the ground running when the second semester came upon him. After one week, he was on his way to a week-long educational conference at the Poynter Institute in Florida where he learned about teaching multi-media topics to college kids. We endured as a single-parent family for the week with the help of friends, and Margaret and Patricia couldn’t have been more helpful. Jack returned on my 50th birthday just in time for dinner out. We went to Koto’s Japanese Steakhouse for the first time and weren’t disappointed. A low-keyed celebration of a half-century.

We had a surprise open-house party for his mother the next day, who turned 75. Brigid thought the party was all for her, and she ran around the room (the Emmaus Room connected to St. Peter’s) exclaiming it was a party.


Margaret began rehearsals in earnest in January for the Plattsburgh High School performances of “Hairspray,” set to open March 11. This week and next leading up to the performance are the hard ones where the rubber hits the road. But she’s loving it.



We visited the ice palace in Saranac Lake on the opening day of the annual winter carnival. They create this incredible ice palace, designed is based on the carnival’s theme, every year using blocks of ice cut from Lake Flower behind the palace site.
You can walk around, climb various levels, crawl through tunnels and generally mill about. This year’s theme, Medieval Times, had a particularly well-done palace. Mexican food awaited us in Lake Placid afterward as did a bad snowstorm that turned the usually 60-minute trip home into a two-hour trip home.

And we’re gearing up for Brigid’s 5th birthday with a bowling party for her pre-K friends. It will be her first birthday party – planned for her, that is. In her mind, everybody’s birthday party is her party. We’ll get together with family members later in the month.

Whew – I think that’s five months in a nutshell.