New Towels and Grunting

It's still hot and southernly humid here in New York. Our window AC units can't really keep up. The humidity in our home makes the wood floor tacky, soft and extra creaky. I was surprised when last week I noticed more color on the road as we were driving home after a rain storm. Yellow leaves were sprinkled about collecting in the gutters of the road and the gutters of my windshield. Even though the trees are still mostly green the first leaves have started to turn color and drift to the ground. Just like that fall is nearly upon us.

So soon? I'm not fully ready to embrace fall just yet. It's my favorite season but I'm still wanting to squeeze the last drops out of aimless summer days. Nevertheless, nature pushes forward in that gradual way she has. The dreary cloud cover over the past few days didn't leave me much choice but to face the changing seasons. It's time to leave lemonade and iced tea behind in favor of spiced apple cider and hot chocolate. So, we fall-ified the house over the weekend. Yep, seasonal dish towels, some winking felt owls from the Target dollar bins and a Yankee Harvest brand candle in "Autumn Harvest" made their way to our home. Plans for apple picking and a s'mores party are taking place. Mailers with fun Halloween events at the zoo and botanical gardens are dangling from magnets on the front of our refrigerator. I even was able to resurrect the wreath Ada and I made last year.

Ada picked all the components including the owl and the first letter of our last name. Other than the owls pupils being blown out and him looking kind of high it's not too bad.

I made alphabet vegetable soup



We quietly played some games. I highly recommend Goldie Blox and the Spinning Machine. Ada got it for her birthday and it's awesome!




There has been a terrible cold making the boys in the house feel miserable. Ingram had an ear infection, our first ever and I sincerely hope our last.




Ingram was so sick that he was hardly willing to give up full-body contact with me with the exception of a couple very special people. Ada cared for him like a good big sister.



And his dad did too



Our family has a new form of communication that basically boils down to nothing but grunting. We're like a bunch of cavemen. Granted, this is about as communicative as Ingram can manage now and he is pretty good at getting his message across. We'll still push for using our words and that kind of stuff. I love Ada at the end of this movie!

MVI 7313 from monica shepherd on Vimeo.

Thankfully, this cold seems to have skipped right over Ada and me too. She's stayed happy and in great need of entertainment. This hasn't been easy with a sick, clingy, nap-needing baby but we've managed. She's a good sport.

Macadamia nuts are her new favorite.

In fact, she's crossed over into some new territory like knowing the passcode on my iPhone. This is how I find her watching some video in hiding. As if I don't know where she is...



Ada starts school again on Monday. I read so many parents who have bittersweet feelings about this. Not me. Nope, I know her school is perfect for her and I'm so excited to hear her stories and watch her learn and grow in this truly amazing environment. She's in class with all new kids and while she's fine with it I find that I'm pretty disappointed! She was a little thrown off by the idea that she'll have a new teacher I think she's warmed up to that too. More to come next week after her first day of school.

Oh, and let's not forget the biggest news around here. We finally got new towels! It's actually exciting.

The Edge

This is a post linking up with Medical Mondays, a community for medical folk and spouses of medical folk to connect. I am an animal doctor, my husband is a human doctor.





A couple of weeks ago I sat at the kitchen counter in my friends home. She was describing this recent "ships passing in the night" thing that was going on between her and her husband. It's brand new to them. She's not sure what to do about it but knows that she doesn't like it and doesn't want it to continue. I was practicing my very best active listening skills and sipping a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. That's when she sprung it on me: "How do you guys avoid this? What do you do?"

I paused for a long moment, letting the silence fill up the space behind that series of questions. The ships in the night thing is well within the continuum of normal for us. We met when we were each working on a PhD so we've always given each other a wide berth for work. This includes months in separate locations to accommodate special training, externships and distal rotations. I remember with vivid clarity those long stretches during internship and residency when my husband was on night float. One morning I was on my way to work and he was on his way home. We stopped our cars, which were headed in opposite directions, to lock eyes for a few minutes. It was the only time I saw him awake and in person during that entire month-long rotation.

Even now that he's "out", a word that, when used in this context, makes him sound more like an ex-convict than a high-achieving professional, we still have weeks when we just don't see each other in any meaningful way. I can't tell you how often it happens that some decision or another is hanging in the balance but I need to discuss it with him first. I dread the call, "Well, haven't you talked to Tim yet? It's been three days!" because then I have to try to explain something that really isn't easy to convince most people of:

DAYS can pass before I have a face-to-face conversation with my husband because of his work schedule

and

I'M OK WITH IT.


Unthinkable, right? Well, I look at it this way:
For one thing, this is the life we chose. Long hours, working holidays, being on-call...it's not like somebody all of a sudden sprung it on us. We knew what we were in for. It sucks slightly more in reality to be alone on a holiday than it does when it's only conceptual but we still can't really complain.
For another thing, like any other modern couple, we've pushed the envelope. We've discovered our personal edge when it comes to apartness. It's shifted a bit over time as our circumstances have changed but our edge is pretty constant.

For a long time I held the attitude that when one partner is working their ass off then maybe it is better if both parties are so engrossed in their own work lives that the absence of the other isn't so glaring. You probably have a higher tolerance for apartness when you're really into your own thing.  Now that we have kids the tune has changed a bit such that our crazy-making threshold is lower. Tim considered a couple other interesting specialties but made his choice so that he would know his kids and they would know him. My career has slowed down because for our family it really feels right to have at least one of us at home more than they are at work to captain the ship on a daily basis cause those little people can't do it themselves. 

In that long moment when I was constructing a response to my friend I realized that I needed to be careful to not diminish her concerns. It's not a who-has-it-worst contest. Rather our conversation helped me remember something important: Everyone has a limit. On that day in that kitchen my friend had found hers. Tim and I are familiar with ours. We take great care to make adjustments so as to not get too close again.