Adventure Mom

Un-happy Anniversary, Sweetie Still Missing You – January 23 rd , 2011 Sean, It's been 365 days since you left earth and I'm still missing you. A whole year without my right arm. A whole year without the one who could make things right. A whole year without the one who chose me to be wife and mother. A whole year without the one who knew me best and loved me anyway. A whole year. I'm still missing you. I need you: Hovering above a heaping bowl of cereal each morning. Holding our children in your arms. Retreating to the basement to finish a project. Telling me how proud you are of me, of us. Giving our children a bath at night when I'm too tired for the task. Shoveling for an hour, twice a day, when the snow won't stop. Laughing at me and with me. Making me laugh. Pitching our tent trailer. Raising our son to be a man. Mowing the grass. Raising our daughter to be a lady. ...

Christmas didn't Suck - and I'm okay with that At "home" in Gordon, NSW, Australia It's 9 p.m. Sydney time, and we've nearly survived our first Christmas without Sean. Actually, we did better than survive. We - dare I write this - enjoyed ourselves. Part of the reason is I expected Christmas would suck. No one who loses a loved one makes it through their first Christmas without crumbling into a heap, do they? And if they don't crumble, they're fooling themselves, right? I disagree on both points for 2 reasons 1: We had a pretty rotten holiday last year. We spent part of it in the hospital: 2 kids, 3 adults and 1 convalescent (Sean). The kids, Fiona and Finley, repeatedly lowered and elevated Sean's bed, then played with the TV remote. My job was keeping them somewhat in control, and ferrying Sean in a triple-wide wheelchair (the only one a nurse could find) through the elevator doors and maze of hallways to the cafeteria. Not easy when you...

Mac Attack Oct. 25, 2010 Club Mac, near Porto Alcudia, Majorca, Spain Macky the Mascot at Club Mac's Mini Disco Gabriella dancing to Michael Jackson's "Dirty Diana" Water too cold to swim Fiona gets her hair braided at the Alcudia market Scattering Sean's ashes at Cap Formentor Chelsea and Finley at Alcudia's Roman ruins Lunch in Pollenta Sangria and The Full Monty I'm drunk. Let's get that out of the way. Something about all-you-can-drink Sangria will do that to you. I'm in an alternate universe on the island of Majorca, Spain, called Club Mac. It's one of those all-inclusive resorts. I'd never been to an all-inclusive before, unless you count the 3-night Royal Caribbean cruise Sean and I took from Los Angeles to Ensenada, Mexico, a couple months before Fiona was born. This place is...like vacationing in Liverpool, England, or Stoke-on-Something. Imagine the cast of "The Full Monty," only with at leas...

Dingle All the Way I love Ireland. Yeah, who doesn't, especially after 3 pints of cider in a single evening? I wasn't sure about the affair after nearly a week on the road – a week of driving on the left-hand side down lanes skinnier than driveways outside many American homes; a week of winding our way from the top of the Emerald Isle to the Southwest, a week of way-finding and "How much for a family room?" and "If I don't get away from these kids [uh, Finley] soon, I will lose my mind." Yeah, there's all that. Then, there's tonight. A night that probably shouldn't have been mine. I asked Chelsea to take the kids back to the B&B so I could check out a pub I'd read about in a guide book; one I liked mostly for its name: Dick Mack's. Somewhere I read an ad that said, "Where is Dick Mack's? Across the street from the church. Where's the church? Across the street from Dick Mack's." It's a former shoeshi...

Lost and Found (Perdu et Trouvee) Paris Edition -Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves (Henry David Thoreau) Dawn and Fiona at the Luxembourg Gardens Now, that's Talent I have a peculiar talent for losings things. Like journals, documents, jackets, husbands and human remains. It happens. I may have to accept the fact that unless (and even if) I create a master inventory list for our journey of what we have and where it is, I will continue to leave behind a trail of stuff (and even if a husband were on the list, well, you know...). My new yardstick (or metric stick, depending on where we are) for putting each loss into perspective is this: "Are the kids okay? Alrighty, then, let's move on..." Who's Exaggerating? Except, I still lose my mind sometimes. When Sean was in the hospital with the so-called "flesh-eating" bacteria last fall, he underwent an extensive skin graft on his legs: Doctors removed about a foot of skin fro...

The $80 Omelette, Bird Stomach Salad and Other True Tales about Eating in Paris C'est Tres Cher (It's very expensive) If you've been to New York City, or know someone who has, you know how expensive everything, including food, can be. The $12 hot dog, the $25 hamburger... Outrageous, right? Well, Paris is much like NYC. With an attitude. And an accent. What's more, dragging around 2 small children in the City of Light makes dining more challenging... to your patience and your wallet. My dad's wife, Kathe, has 3 Paris guidebooks, all dog-eared and bookmarked, filled with suggestions about where to enjoy French food without blowing up your credit card (unless you want to, and in that case, at least you've been forewarned before eating at someplace like La Tour d'Argent , which translates to the Silver Tower). We're staying at an apartment near grocery chain Carrefour , so we have easy means re-stock our kitchen and eat cheaply. But dining out (which ...

Premier Jour a Paris – First Day in Paris Happy Birthday to Me  Sunday, September 5, 2010 We linked up with my Dad and his wife, Kathe, at the Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris. Our flights had landed simultaneously, ours from Miami, theirs from Atlanta. We saw them at baggage claim, trudging forward with a cart stacked high with luggage (hmmm... they're obviously not traveling for a year, are they? Too much stuff...) A taxi driver with a full-sized van eagerly whisked us away, 40 minutes to the city center, charging about $130 for the journey. Bienvenue a Paris, tout le monde (Welcome to Paris, everyone). It was a precursor of prices to come: C'est tres, tres cher (it's very, very expensive). [and for you sticklers, no, I can't figure out how to produce the accent for French vowels on my netbook :)] Even after a night locked in a metal tube with Finley The Merciless, I was excited to be in the City of Light. "Are we going to La Tour Eiffel?...