Contrived Scenes - Labor Day

 The Husband and I drove with our progeny down the highway to Orange County, where we visited our dear friends Erika, Phil and Izzy. Phil is the genius who put together the slides for the Extreme Parenting Video Project (that has now had over 4,000 hits thanks to all of you wonderful bloggers who posted it on your blogs!). Erika is the incomparable mother, holding on to her flippin' hat in the video, who can also cook some delicious Hungarian delicacies. Izzy is the hummingbird, their delightful daughter who smiles charmingly at my sons as she kicks her legs and giggles, completely belying the fact that a couple of months ago, she lay in an induced coma fighting for an intact brain and her life.

Here's a shot of what it looks like in Phil, Erika and Izzy's parts:

Here's another one:

Here's the contrived scene from the title. Something about my sons in this little hideaway makes me want to mock them. But I won't:

The children at the top of this grassy hill are sitting on cubes of ice and sliding down the hill. They are contriving to sled (is that grammatically correct?). Only in Southern Cal would you contrive to go sledding when the glorious Pacific crashes onto the sandy beach below, tanned and muscled surfers everywhere you look and bikinied damsels frolicking in end-of-summer waves.

Here's another contrived scene - disregard the blurry photo and Sophie's glittery eyes. I really only made them sit there, together, to get a shot of the fantastic chartreuse couch that Phil picked out. I'm still marveling over that. I mean, The Husband can cook, but pick out a gorgeous, completely hip, chartreuse couch? I had a contrived vision in my head of my beautiful children arrayed on that couch. The colors would pop and it would be worthy of a design blog. Never mind that I only had my Android phone.

We had the most wonderful, relaxing day with our friends and reluctantly left in the late afternoon to drive back to Los Angeles.  It's the last day of summer as school starts for my boys Tuesday morning. Oliver just went to bed in what I think are contrived tears as he earlier stated that he was excited to go back to school.

I could never contrive that light and that sky, the road to our little house just there, on the left, nor my gratitude for all of it.

Izzy and Erika

I drove about an hour south today from Los Angeles to visit my dear friend Erika and her beautiful little girl Izzy who has been hospitalized for over two weeks. Izzy has Angelman Syndrome and was in status (seizures not stopping) so had to be put into a chemical-induced coma to allow her brain to rest. As if that's not enough to deal with, when they weaned her from the coma, she got into a little trouble with her breathing and adjusting to life outside of intubation, so she's still in the PICU, struggling. The amazing thing about Erika is that despite a hellish few weeks, she not only looks adorable but continues to laugh uproariously at all the absurdities of this life -- like the sign above that welcomes one to Fountain Valley, a city basically off a huge Southland highway that's one of the plainest and most nondescript places you could ever imagine. That motto A Nice Place to Live was written for the likes of Erika and me who survive this bizarre world we live in by reveling in the absurdity quite literally. When Phil, Erika's very adorable husband arrived, I took Erika away from the little hospital to a nearby strip mall where we enjoyed delicious Greek food and exchanged horror stories. Erika shared a bit of her reading with me (dark tales of dissociation and split personality), I told her about my own dissociation during a visit to a brain surgeon years earlier, and we agreed that hard-core brain surgery for our girls was a line we'd probably never cross. We were actually shrieking together at one point, over the voices of the Vietnamese who have evidently settled in vast numbers in Fountain Valley because fountains are blessed? While my own horror stories pale in comparison to Erika's, the camaraderie between us is something that I just feel profoundly blessed by and another reason why these internets are just a powerful place to connect to others.

I'm sending all my love and healing thoughts to little Miss Izzy, who, while currently hospitalized in a nice place to live, must get better soon and go back to her little house by the sea. As for Erika, I'm hoping she'll get to wash and style her hair at some point soon.

Gus and Izzy

A sweet little boy in the fourth grade who lives in our community is very sick. Please pray for him, send him healing thoughts, acknowledge the abundance of the universe for Gus.

My dear friend Erika of The flight of our Hummingbird has a little girl, Izzy, who is also struggling but with persistent seizures. She is in the hospital fighting them. I hope you'll send good thoughts and healing prayers her way, too.

To Gus and Izzy and their beautiful families

May the long time sun shine upon you

May all love surround you

And the clear light within you

Guide you on.

-- Irish Blessing