The weekend has been a whirlwind.
The boys had Friday off, so I arranged that day – naturally – to have E get his orthodontia. He went in with slick empty teeth and came out with nubbins and rubber bands and brackets and something called Invisalign. He has to have two things done: straighten his teeth, the job of the Invisalign, but on the top, first, he has to use rubber bands to correct his overbite. So he’s using the Invisalign on the bottom now, but has to wait for the top. In the meanwhile, he had a couple of brackets placed on the top for the rubberbands.
Invisalign is much niftier than braces. It’s like a tiny plastic overlay onto the teeth that nudge it into the right place. Like a plastic tooth-corset. After a 3D scan and some digital modeling, they 3D print a set of 50 (or 100 for top and bottom) of these suckers customized to move your teeth from where they are to where they want them to be week by week. The deal, though, is that you have to wear them at least 22 hours out of every 24 or else you have to wear it more days. So if you want to switch each Saturday, you have to be vigilant. You have to take them out to eat and cannot put them back in until you brush, so light snacking here and there is out of the question. Even drinking stuff that can get under it other than water is bad because it can lead to cavities. E came out not exactly enthusiastic, but feeling like he got a better deal than if he’d gotten braces except the snacking part. He grumbled about that.
So… we got home, had some lunch, and then set about doing more work on the back yard. This time the goal was to make something of all the wreckage and waste from the ripping down of half of the fireplace: lots of concrete and hearth brick bits. So we weeded where the oxalis and wild onions had grown over it, moved that crud around, and performed the kinds of back-breaking work that you cannot account for after except to know that you used at least five different large garden tools and filled the compost bin.
Then we head off to the nursery on two cargo bikes where we bought way too much making quite a picture that I – like the idiot I am – forgot to take a photo of. Auden, on his scooter, directed traffic, for Eliot and I. Eliot rode the long tail bike with 1cu ft of soil in each pannier on either side, masterfully biking uphill with the ~80lbs of dead – or decomposed – weight. I, in my big black and white bucket bike, carried a 2cu ft bag of soil in the base of the bucket, a nursery box with four six-packs, eight 2″ pots, and two 6″ houseplants (because I couldn’t resist), pots to plant those in, and mounted on top of all of that, a 8″ potted tree fern which repeated attempted to block my view. Two more back-breaking hours – reminding me why I didn’t go into the family business – later, we have a volcanic tree-fernan planted in an as of yet unmulched (eek) mound in the back corner of our yard. It is planted with something of an eclectic mix of ground-cover, alyssum, succulents: what you would expect from two kids with an indulgent mother. The mother, now in desperate need of Advil, was allowed to wrap up the project because the thirteen year old now also needed Advil because the first day effects of orthodontia finally kicked in.
Ah, the poor kid. He was in tears by that evening it hurt so much. Saturday morning was rough, but last night was better and today not too bad. He’ll get used to it like we all did, but boy did it bring back crappy memories.
Last night we went to Sandy’s parents for Passover. My oldest friend -whom I’ve known since we were five – joined us. She decided to come to SF to get away for an extended weekend to do some solo sight seeing. Because the dual holidays messed with the schedule, it seemed the best time to get together, so she ferried over to Sausalito, where Auden and I met her and walked her up the hillside house for lovely views, company and her first ever Seder.
This morning the kids found the trail of eggs and baskets the Easter bunny brought and cleverly (if I do say so myself) hid out of the reach of two scent-motivated hounds. The Easter bunny must have made a narrow escape from the cats, too, because we found a dead adolescent roof rat in the library. The cats contribution to the feast. Later, while the boys were at soccer, the dogs started making a fuss in the dining area, then in the living room, crashing over a fireplace poker rendering them impossible to ignore. This was when I realized that the cats must have each brought in a roof rat (a plague on their nest), and the dogs had cornered the living one by the fireplace. After opening the front door, doing my breathing exercises and grabbing the sword of doom (broom), I went to battle with the fiend. Both Siouxsie and Oli were nosing the ground at the corner of the fireplace, and while I was afraid it had gotten behind the screen (and then what was I going to do, reach in??!!), I couldn’t see it there. That was when I realized why they call them roof or tree rats, because this one had scurried up and was clinging to a towel we have hanging from a hook on the hearth. The towel is for drying off stream-tromping dogs upon entry and was not intended to camouflage a rat, so I noticed readily the not-so-fierce fiend, for which I am thankful because I would have hated to have bent over further to look at the ground making a roof of my upper back. My role as an exterminator came to a quick conclusion with a flick of the towel out the front door.
And this is where I will fast forward… the boys returned, the kitchen became a flurry of breakfast meats and egg making activities in preparation for Easter brunch, friends arrived, food was devoured. Stomachs bursting, we rounded out the early afternoon with an adult egg hiding activity followed by a child egg-finding activity, concluded with an adult remaining 10 egg finding activity.
Phew. What a weekend!