"I set my teeth and mock my misery"

Mysterious problems with the wireless connection in our apartment have kept us from posting what we wrote Sunday. Here, belatedly, it is:

We have had a couple complaints—okay, it was only one—about the recent scarcity of posts (i.e. that there was not one last Sunday). The irony is that we seem to post in inverse prolixity to the inherent interest of our narration. Last week, when we did all sorts of fun and exciting things, we posted nothing. Other times, we post thousands of words to the effect that the girls were cute and our activities mundane. In any case, we should record that last Saturday we went to Concord, Massachusetts where we visited the homes of ancient (i.e. nineteenth-century) luminaries like Mr. Emerson and Ms. Alcott, and we swam in a pond that a libertarian pipe-dreamer named Henry David Thoreau once audaciously claimed as his own. It was delightful. The one drawback was that Justin had tentatively invited our friends, the Hahls, now transferred from New Haven to Belmont (or from Yale to MIT), to take the literary tour with us. He then decided on a whim to go to Concord last Saturday, but hadn’t heard back from Oliver Hahl, so we just went. When we got home, there was an email from Oliver saying they’d love to join us. Drat!

The girls loved playing in the water but both cravenly refused to let Justin submerge them entirely. Yet another evidence of the unfortunate preponderance of the Suttner influence in their genetic code. But so much for events long past; we turn now to our Week in Review.

Monday (8/11/08): Because we failed to do so both on the first and second Sundays of the month, we conducted our monthly interviews with the girls for our family home evening activity. This was high entertainment. In Justin’s case, neither girl figured her father had much to say, so both leapt lustily and preemptively into what might have become the silent breach. Eli, in particular, narrated with great enthusiasm and concern a “bad thing” that had recently transpired. Stripped of its rhetorical embellishments, the narration amounted to this: there was thunder, and she was scared.

Tuesday (8/12/08): Lia and the girls spent the morning and early afternoon in the company of our saintly and indomitable Relief Society president, Joyce Thomas, visiting sisters in the ward. The outing was crowned by a special lunch at Friendly’s. Lia spent much of the afternoon shopping and preparing a toothsome meal for our New Haven elders, who joined us for dinner. After dinner, Lia went to the Sorensons’ home, where she babysat children, Todd and Rachel, while parents, Brian and Jeanie, went on a date. She got home late, stumbling through the door a few minutes shy of midnight, exhausted. Not too exhausted, however, to share with Justin a pair of priceless insights newly gleaned from Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook, a ponderous tome of learned nostrums from the eponymous thaumaturge of home economy. Lia is delighted with the book beyond expression and has begun zealously to apply its precepts. Our home is the tidier for it. Lia also paused before flinging her weary frame into bed in order to make covetous inquiries after a pen of Justin’s she had never seen before. Justin responded by hiding the pen with more of celerity than thought of thought.

Wednesday (8/13/08): We went to an open house tonight for Julia’s ballet class. The class starts early in September. Lia asked the instructor a series of leading questions, allowing the latter to respond about the course in glowing tones which, unsurprisingly, wholly answered Lia’s aims in signing Julia up for the course. The girls romped with great relish about the studio.
Eli was at her very most operatic tonight. Every contradiction of her mercurial desires gave new cause for the shedding of tears, the emission of groans, and the gnashing of teeth. She wept in turns because she didn’t want her quesadilla; because she did want ice cream; because she didn’t want a bath; because she wanted Julia’s nightgown and Julia wouldn’t surrender it; because she didn’t want to go to bed; because she wanted an extra bedtime song; because she had run out of reasons to weep. She fell asleep with a sigh that would have roused pity in the stoniest hearts.

Thursday (8/14/08): Justin took the girls over to play with Jerome Bombenza, one of Julia’s fellow sunbeams. Jerome is paralyzed from the shins down and uses a wheelchair. His dad, Johnny, is a refugee from the Congo and a single parent. Justin was surprised, when they arrived at the Bombenza’s apartment, that the door was opened by our new Whitehall neighbor, Brady Pope, who, together with his wife, Whitney, was babysitting Jerome while Johnny trained for his new job. Brady is an incoming divinity student. Predictably, the kids ended up watching cartoons while Justin and Brady talked about Hugh Nibley. For this negligence, Lia soundly reproved him when the gang returned home.

In the evening we drove out to Branford to take dinner to the Bonny family, another recent addition to our burgeoning ward. And what a family! Phil and Georgia Bonnie are the parents of twelve biological and two adopted children. They were staying in two rooms of the Branford Day’s Inn while they waited for their home to close, with the supernumerary children sleeping in the Winnebago. We split the task of feeding them with Jeanie Sorenson. The girls loved playing with their kids—mostly because they were watching TV—and we had a nice chat with them. During the drive home, Justin judiciously refrained from suggesting to Lia that now she really had something to shoot for.

Friday (8/15/08): This was the second anniversary of our arrival in New Haven, happily a much cooler day than its counterpart in 2006. It was an unremarkable day, punctuated by a trip to Target and pizza for dinner. For date night, Justin joined Lia in jiving to her new pregnancy workout video, a betrayal of his immense dignity justified only partially by the quality of the workout, but compensated entirely by the exquisiteness of the company. They then read aloud a couple chapters of Mansfield Park and went to bed.

Saturday (8/16/08). Lia woke up with a twinkle in each eye as she burbled an expectant paean to the rising dawn. She looked forward to attending the Milford oyster festival in the morning; getting a new couch in the afternoon; and seeing Hamlet performed under the stars at Edgerton Park in the evening. She was disappointed on all counts. We never found the oyster festival; the former proprietor of the couch reneged on her promise to deliver it; and our Shakespearian babysitter had to reschedule. Still, Lia conceded in a romantic postlude to a distressing day, she would gladly sacrifice a thousand oysters, a million couches, and a trillion immortal Bards or Danish princes, if doing so meant spending a day by the side of her beloved Justin, navigator nefausti but blogger unlimited.