Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household.
In a blast-from-the-past, I got to read this little snippet from one of my grandfather's letters, written while visiting my parents two months after I was born, but bragging more on my dad than on me:
Some of the time we have spent performing the duties of doting grand-parents. We took over one afternoon while both [my son] and his wife were at work. One evening we went to watch [my son] pitch a softball game for the Department of Physics team, which is in the Stanford Championships playoffs. He had pitched 38 1/3 innings without allowing his first earned run, but one [sic] 5-1 anyhow. He has a remarkable style. Have not yet learned how the final championship game came out.
My husband is still galavanting happily around eastern Europe, but more toward the western part of Eastern Europe, if that makes sense. Here are some snippets from his short emails to me:
I visited the very first concentration camp yesterday and then the Church where Luther was on trial. . . . Riding to Wiesbaden today to see General Gronski from PA Guard. Tomorrow is Fulda with [his long-time friend] Cliff. Staying here making short trips till I go to Israel. . . . When I got back from the 65-mile ride, I rode up to Frankenstein's Castle . . .
J-son spent the week with his foster mom, which made this house much quieter (in ways that were nice, as well as in lonely ways). She gave him a lot of pep talks about the future that he took very much to heart, and he's come back full of plans of applying for jobs and for his driver's license. It is very, very nice to have multiple parents helping to raise kids!
N-son started summer school. Because he got into his dream program (all-day culinary arts) next year, he needs one more history class before he can graduate high school. He's really loving the class, coming home to talk about debates that he and his friends in the course are having about race, the role of police, the army and the draft, and other topics. We also got to fit him for his chef's uniforms that he'll be wearing all next year -- black aprons, white aprons, sous-chef hats, pants, shirts, jackets with his name embroidered on them . . . we dropped $300 on clothes for him, which (for me) is a HUGE amount.
K-daughter has a job at our local Y, which is within walking distance of the house, and which also has childcare for Baby-A. Yay! I got to spend a half a day with Baby-A on Saturday, and she was a fabulous help with watering the garden plants.
In other daughter news, I-daughter had a scare with her eye: she's got "iritis" (meaning inflammation of the iris). She'd gotten eye drops that didn't actually help, and then was referred in a rather dramatic fashion to specialist eye doctors, who decided to run blood tests for auto-immune diseases. They prescribed medications that took an annoying number of attempts to fill, but now my daughter is on steroids, and she says they're helping. Phew! Yay for steroids!
I'm enjoying summer research with my summer student. We got to the point where we got stuck on a question we'd been trying to solve. I got to teach my student my favorite fabulous math trick: change the question to one that we've already figured out how to solve. She wisely asked if she was allowed to do this on exams -- I told her no, she needs to get her PhD before she's allowed to try this trick on her own.
And that's the latest from the Miser Mom clan, a family that has been prosperous in adventures. May you and yours be similarly wealthy.
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