A little bit older

How is it that I am now thirty-six and I have an almost-three-year-old?

 

 (Iver's preschool pic, 2017-- so grown up!)

I enjoyed a quiet, low-key, post-call-but-not-sleep-deprived birthday amidst a Thanksgiving week of OB call. Iver got us up at 445 (a nicer present would have been >5 am!) and I got to: go for a run, read, do some errands (including office paperwork), watch a movie while I folded laundry, do some online Christmas shopping with coupons, visit the library, and enjoy time with my family!

Here's to us all being a little older and wiser!  Thanks for all the birthday messages and texts! I'm happy and lucky to have so many great people in my life.

Bà nội and ông nội are here!

Kelvin's parents are here this and next week to visit and help with childcare closures over Thanksgiving week, when I'm on call.

Iver sure loves hanging out with his bà nội and ông nội, who jump right in and help us so much at home with home maintenance and meals (and who take a lot of photos and videos, capturing moments that we wouldn't otherwise have documented!). I am ashamed to say that aunties Katherine and Theresa were here to visit us during the previous weekend, and I managed not to save (/take?) any photos at all!

At the mall

Library trip

Self-imposed Time out

Humboldt Bay

 

Church

Farmers' Market

Helping in the back yard

Fun video of "Jingle Bells," his new favorite song (they must have sung it in daycare!)

Performing "Jack and Jill"

"NEW PARK"- Greenview in Arcata

Weeping may endure for a night (or 365)....

One dark and stressful, outrage- and grief-filled year after the most heartbroken, scared, and hopeless I remember feeling in my lifetime, there is reason to (dare to) hope again.

This week, on election Tuesday 2017, Democratic candidates won up and down the ballot in many states, with many people of color, women, and first-time candidates defeating longtime Republican incumbents, some in unlikely seats, asserting the will of the majority of this country that did not want to see incompetent, malevolent assaulter-in-chief as president (or his corrupt, racist, narrow-minded cronies in any public office).

I'm so proud of the voters (many friends and relatives) in my (former) home state, Virginia, for electing Dr. Ralph Northam as Governor,  Justin Fairfax (Virginia's second-ever elected African American) as lieutenant governor, Danica Roem as the first openly transgender (VA state) legislator (who defeated a homophobic, 13-term Republican), and Chris Hurst, the boyfriend of a reporter who was shot and killed on live TV in 2015 (who defeated a NRA-loving incumbent in rural Virginia).






I can't find my snapshot of some other really notable firsts but congrats to (among others!)
Elizabeth Guzman, Hala Ayala (first Latinas elected to Virginia's statehouse), Kathy Tran (first Asian-American woman elected to VA's House of Delegates),  Ravi Bhalla (a Sikh, now mayor of Hoboken, NJ), Vi Lyles (Charlotte, NC's first female African-American mayor), and Melvin Carter (St Paul, MN's first African-American mayor).  I love that Ashley Bennett in NJ beat the sexist Republican who wondered whether the Women's March in Washington in January would be "over in time for them to cook dinner."

If only we can sustain this enthusiasm and turnout in 2018 and beyond, there is hope for this country and in the hands of compassionate and moral representatives fighting for fairness, justice, positive progressive change, and for the interests of all of its citizens, particularly the "least of these" /most vulnerable. If it was necessary to go through the devastation of 2016 to arrive at this point and to move forward, I pray it will have been worth it.