We're here...and the rites of passage

Yes, I'm still here.

We were gone for two weeks the beginning of August, for a whirlwind vacation to Southern California where I attended Camp Widow and then Anna, Charley's mom, and I (and much of Charley's extended family) visited thoroughly exhausted ourselves with four looooooooooong days at Disneyland, another one at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, and then a few days to relax with Judy's sisters in Huntington Beach and Palm Springs before driving back home. Apparently I've been back home for eleven days, but they've passed in a blur.

We had a great time. And shockingly, we've had a great summer.

Yes, I really did say that. Me, the widow who's hated summers for the last five years. I've actually had a great summer. Not just a good or an okay one--a fantastic one.

But these past (almost) two weeks have been a letdown. I fell back into my usual, old, prior-summers habit of not doing much and staying home way too much. Some of it was necessary and overly welcome simply to recover from vacation, but I noticed that my overall mood was declining too, compared to the high I'd been on earlier in the summer and up until we got home. Apparently my strategy at the beginning of the summer to stay busy, busy, busy worked even better than I could have hoped...but I stunk at restarting it once we got home.

I'm glad, though, that this inadvertent, self-imposed immobility will be ending very soon. We're back down to southern Oregon the end of this week for a very good friend's wedding...and I'm their photographer. Eek. I'm excited and looking forward to it, but I hope nerves don't set in too badly by next Saturday. Anna's sixth birthday is on their wedding day, and as one of their four flower girls, she'll be celebrating it in high, fancy style. And then we come home, and school starts a few days later...her first day of kindergarten. I can't wait, and she's very excited.

We have a second loose tooth that may be coming out any day now (and yes, Snick, it's getting loose enough now that it's totally grossing and creeping me out now; maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that she was at my mom's when she pulled out the first one). We finished our school clothes shopping. I'm wading through and editing the piles of pictures I took on vacation. I'm reminding myself that this funk/lull/letdown right now is only temporary.

In other words, life is back to a remarkable normal...only I suppose it's better--a more positive overall mood--than it usually is for me in past years with only a week until Anna's birthday, a milestone that has been difficult (in varying ways) every year. The problem is that I don't seem to be very patient with the lulls anymore, because I had such pronounced funks for so long earlier in grief. I'm tired of lulls, of funks.

But in the meantime (and to end on a much lighter note), Anna had one of her first rites of passage on Friday:

She got her ears pierced!

And I, of course, had to capture it for posterity.


It started during our vacation, when I'd purposefully leave out key facts when talking up something to Anna--omitting that the ride is totally in the dark, that parts of it might be scary, etc.--to get her excited and willing to do something. (In other words, yes, I was intentionally lying to her at times.) And I did it again for getting her ears pierced. I'd been asking her for a year or more if she wanted to get her ears pierced, and she always said no, not yet, or that she wanted to wait til she was older. But when she changed her mind and said Thursday night, as we passed an earrings/accessories store in the mall, that she wanted to get them pierced, I took her the next day, before she could change her mind. And as I had mental flashbacks to her weeping and wailing during her shots two years ago and all the other times she's been physically hurting and simply had to suffer through it, I lied through my teeth when I said it wouldn't hurt at all, that it would just be a small pinch.

And fortunately, she didn't make a liar of me.

She flinched, and I could tell in that one split-second or two that she was trying to decide if it hurt, if she was scared, if she was going to cry.


But she didn't cry...


...but she didn't smile, either, until she finally got to see her new earrings in a mirror.


Thankfully, she's great about letting me clean them and they don't hurt at all. Phew.

And since I'm not one to waste an opportunity with my camera, a cute newer outfit, and a prettier backdrop than I have in our yard at home, here are more gratuitous photos.



Being a bigger girl now, with earrings? I think she likes 'em....