January
As I looked back on my blog posts from January, a common theme kept popping up. FLEAS. Funny, you might say, didn't I just write about fleas a few months ago? Yes, I did. Our most recent flea infestation was only a mere chapter in the year long battle against these tiny monsters. The January flea problem traumatized me so much that I wrote about it here, here, here, and here. I must have blocked the entire episode out of my mind because it hadn't even occurred to me that we'd been dealing with the fleas for an entire year until now. So here's to 2013 being flea-free - PLEASE.
In January I made a lot of lofty New Year's resolutions, 90% of which never came to fruition. But I won't dwell on that. I did accomplish quite a bit, but that will be another blog post for next year.
In January we also marked the first time we spent my Dad's birthday without him. 2012 was chock-full of "the first time we did x-y-z without Tato". It really sucked. But we got through it and we're still laughing (for the most part).
January was also full of lots of fun things, such as . . .
Mummer's Parade in Philly on New Year's Day
Caps vs. Penguins Game at Verizon Center
Little did we know that we would not be watching ANY hockey the following season due to the increasingly frustrating NHL lockout that is going on right now. But that's another story.
February
Despite the meager snowfall this past winter, February was still chock full of freezing cold activity, the coldest of which was the "Love the Run You're Win" 5K that Jack and I ran together. The conditions could not have been more brutal - it was literally freezing cold, so cold that our feet turned numb as we waited at the start line. I wondered what kind of mother would subject her ten year old son to such miserable conditions. Jack, on the other hand, loved every second of it since he seems to have been born with ice in his veins and relishes any drop in temperature - the colder the better. We persevered and ran the race - just look at the joy on our faces as we neared the finish line!
We froze a little more about a week or two later when we made one of our infamous trips to the Traska farm in "Pennsyltucky". Unfortunately there was no snow on the ground to go sledding, and the pond never froze so we were unable to reprise our hockey game from two winters ago, but we did manage to squeeze in a day of skiing, during which our little Ella finally caught on and was able to keep up with all the big kids.
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| Me and the kids at Seven Springs - Ella can finally ski! |
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| Jack with Roman and Stechyk Traska at the "Foggy Goggle" pub with Captain Morgan |
March
On a whim I took the kids on a driving tour of the area where I grew up. Back in the 70's when we moved there it was a pretty nice area. Unfortunately things went downhill in the 1980s and we ended up moving away when I was sixteen - but I always remember it as the iconic childhood neighborhood: playing in the cul-de-sac, riding bikes around the neighborhood, playing in the woods behind our house where "hobos" used to camp out. Now that I'm an adult I realize that the man who was filling up his water bottle from our backyard hose was a homeless person.
Our first stop was the Catholic grade school I attended for eight years. The nuns, the lovely maroon plaid pinafores, the endless masses - aaaah, the memories. Now it's a charter school, the nuns are gone, and a big chain link fence surrounds the field where we used to play kick ball and frisbee tag. But it still looks the same. I remember waiting in the carpool line in the exact same spot where my kids are standing in this photo.
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| Jack and Ella in front of good old St. Ignatius School - still looks exactly the same. |
Then we drove toward my old neighborhood as I pointed out the 7-11 where we used to beg and plead whichever mother was in charge of carpool that day to stop and buy us Slurpees. I might add we were usually all piled into some type of station wagon, no seat belts, probably breaking every single safety law in existence today. I showed them the empty lot where we used to buy our Christmas trees, the mini-golf course where I got a hole in one, the apartment complex where people were constantly being evicted, their belongings tossed onto the sidewalk like trash. It wasn't always pretty, but that's life.
As we drew nearer to my old street I excitedly told them about the log cabin that stood at the corner and I hoped and prayed it was still there. It was - and it too looked exactly the same. That made me happy. Some things shouldn't change.
Then we did a SLOW drive-by of my old house - the house I lived in from age five through age sixteen. Those were my growing up years, the days of my childhood, the times of pretend play, learning to ride a bike, sledding down the street during blizzards, roller skating in the carport. The house looks different - but still basically the same. The big bushes were gone, as well as the crab apple tree and the black mailbox which we'd adorned with hand-painted flowers. It looked different enough that it didn't make me sad. We didn't linger - mostly because I was getting weird looks from the neighbor as I slowed down to take this photo.
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| My old house on White Oak Avenue - the same but different. Really needs some VWs parked in that carport. |
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| Me, the kids and my brother in law Olko in my mom's backyard. Not quite sure what is going on here . . . |
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| Ella leaping in my mom's backyard |
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| The kids reading some good books before bed - love the Great Brain! |
April
Lots of stuff happened in April - but by far the most memorable event was the mud run that I did with my sister. You can read all about it here.
The best thing about the mud run is that my sister and I got to spend a lot of time together. Let me rephrase that - we got to spend a lot of time together WITHOUT ANYONE ELSE. Don't get me wrong - I love our families, our husbands, our kids, our mom - but it seems like whenever I get together with my sister there is always someone else around. Her kids are little and demand a lot of her attention. She's stressed out a lot. I feel for her, but because my kids are no longer in that phase of life I sometimes have a hard time relating to what she's going through, even though I've been through it myself.
Throwing ourselves into a mud pit together and then guzzling beer afterward while watching other nutcases hurl themselves into the same mud pit allowed us to let go of all that stress and just be together. I would have loved to have seen the look on my dad's face if he could have seen us doing this . . .
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| I feel like there should be cartoon bubbles over our heads saying "Oink, oink!" |
May
At this point I was knee deep in my kitchen re-painting project when disaster struck, requiring a visit from a plumber and some unanticipated out of pocket expenses. But I pressed on, not realizing at the time that it would still be months before I would finally be done. Sometimes it's better not to know how long something is going to take when you're mired in the middle of it.
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| Mama walks the hills of Wales! |
Concerned friend: (sad face, hand on my arm) How's your mom doing?
Me: She's doing great. Actually she's in Wales right now.
Concerned friend: (look of surprise) Really? That's amazing. How long is she going to be there?
Me: Two weeks.
Concerned friend: (patting my back, struggling with whether to maintain sad face or to look happy) Good for her!
For some reason people always seem to think that my mom has been holed up in her house since my dad passed away, wallowing in misery and feeling sorry for herself. They always seem surprised when I say she's on a trip, she's working, playing tennis, whatever. Don't get me wrong, she has her moments - we all do. But life is meant to be lived, so we're living it. Losing Tato to ALS reminded us all that life is short and that the time to enjoy our time on Earth is now.
I turned 42 in May, which for some reason my kids delight in reminding me frequently as the days, week and months go by. "Wow, Mom, I can't believe you're 42." "Wow, so next year you'll be 43!" "Wow, Mom, I can't believe Daddy is only 40 - you're almost TWO years older than he is!" Thanks, kids, thanks - love the reminders.
I wrote about what I did on the day before my birthday and on my actual birthday, but one of my favorite outings was with my kids on the day AFTER my birthday. John had just left for a week-long trip to California, so the kids and I piled into the car and headed downtown. We spent a cloudy afternoon meandering around the gardens of the Washington National Cathedral, a place I hadn't visited since Father's Day 2009 with my dad and my sister, right around the time we first started hearing the words "motor neuron disease" and "ALS". As we explored the twists and turns of the garden I found myself wrapped in the contentment of spending time with my children and in the memories of our previous visit. Afterward we walked down to the same Mexican restaurant we'd gone to with Tato three years earlier. We sipped our drinks (margarita for me, shirley temples for the kids) and giggled at a lady sitting near us, who seemed stuck in the 80's in her polo shirt with turned up collars and aviator glasses. It was perfect.
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| Ella and me in the "Bishop's Garden" at Washington National Cathedral |
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| With my boy Jack in the "Bishop's Garden" |
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| Kids in the garden with the Cathedral in the background |
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| Jack enjoys his drink at the Mexican restaurant |
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| Me with my margarita and Ella with her Shirley Temple :) |
June
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| The kids and their wonderful piano teacher! |
I wish he could have seen it, although I have to believe that he was with us that day. I didn't have to look out at the audience to know that my mom was crying while we played that song. I managed to concentrate on the cuteness of Ella's concentrated efforts to play all the right notes and was able to keep my emotions in check to get through the piece, but it was a struggle.
In June we also said our final goodbye to my Dad as we finally laid his ashes to rest in Oak Hill, a beautiful historic cemetery in Georgetown. Up until that point his box of ashes had been resting on the mantel at my parents' house. My mom would joke that now he had to watch whatever she wanted to watch on tv. For the burial my mom decorated the box in what she named "The Shroud of Bethesda" - complete with fancy little buttons and her signature calligraphy. Our moods were surprisingly light and we took turns posing with the boxes and "hanging out" with Tato on a bench before the service.
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| My mom with my Tato's ashes |
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| A perfect caption for Tato |
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| Hanging out with Tato's ashes on a bench |
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| Hanging out with Poppy :) |
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| Ashes to ashes . . . |
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| . . . and dust to dust |
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| All smiles despite the somber occasion |
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| Me, my mom and my sister in my mom's front yard after the burial service |
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| Jack and his little cousins at the piano - a fitting way to end the day in honor of Tato! |
On a lighter note, I finally finished painting the kitchen cabinets in June! After months of scraping, sanding, priming, painting, and cursing I was finally done! I was so excited I made Jack take picture of me leaping for joy to mark the occasion.
Once I stopped leaping around the kitchen like an idiot I remembered that I still had to paint the walls which were covered in wallpaper glue and random splotches of paint. Oh, joy.
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| 24 hours of fun with our CA cousins |
The kitchen project was placed on hold in July due to the sheer amount of activity that we packed into that month. It all started with the "derecho", a bizarre storm that swept through the area and knocked out the power for miles around. The timing could not have been worse as we were trying to pack the kids for summer camp, host our cousins from California who were coming in for a (surprise!) visit, not to mention the fact that I was trying to mentally prepare myself for the week I was about to spend as a kitchen slave at the Ukrainian scout camp.
Whew. Just writing that sentence exhausted me. I'm not sure how we made it through that week in one piece.
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| Kitchen slave complete with hairnet |
At the end of the week John rescued me and we were off on our next adventure: a week in Canada with my sister and her family. Jack had already decided to stay the full three weeks at camp so it was just me, John and Ella. I was sad at first to leave Jack but it was a nice treat to have Ella all to ourselves. She thought it was pretty cool that she got to leave the United States and go to another country and managed to rub it in Jack's face every chance she got. I was just happy to go somewhere where I didn't have to cook three meals a day for hundreds of people. Oh, and sleep in a real bed with a roof over my head. Did I mention I'd been sleeping in a tent at camp?
We spent the week on the Georgian Bay courtesy of my brother-in-law's cousins who happen to own a cottage there. It was the most peaceful vacation we've had in a long time, despite the fact that we had two toddlers in tow. Most days we had the beach to ourselves, or at most shared it with one or two other families. We drank bourbon lemonades, read trashy magazines, and basically just relaxed. One day we dragged a canoe down to the beach and took turns paddling around the calm water. One of my favorite memories was when Ella and I took a walk down the beach and ended up doing our own little boot camp by the water - push-ups on rocks, lunges in the sand, yoga poses by the water. The week went by too quickly. We didn't want to leave.
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| My sister and her son Justin, age 3 |
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| Relaxing with John and a trashy magazine |
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| My little girl |
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| Our typical daily hang |
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| Ella and her little cousin Levchyk, age 1 1/2 |
But all good things must come to an end, so we packed up our bags and headed back to Ohio. Jack was still at camp and it was visiting weekend, which meant spending two more nights in a tent. Next year we're getting a hotel room.
Jack survived three weeks at camp and can't wait to go back next year as a "yunak" - which means he will have to rough it and pitch his own tent and build things with rope and logs. Ella says she wants to go back and stay for two weeks, maybe even three. I love the happy looks on their faces in this photo.
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| Jack and Ella at Pysanij Kamin in Middlefield, Ohio |
You'd think we did enough in July to last the entire summer, but of course there's always August, the month of the infamous Ukrainian week at Wildwood, New Jersey. We returned to Buttercup Road after a weird detour from the usual routine when we stayed at a condo without my parents last year. Our decision to return to the scene of so many memorable vacations was a good one. I'll let the pictures do the talking.
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| Jack and his buddy Stefchyk |
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| Ella on the Boardwalk |
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| Jack on the Boardwalk |
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| John's brother Pat and his son Graham - ice cream on the Boardwalk |
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| Ella with her cousins Levchyk and Justin |
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| My sister Vanessa and her son Justin, beautiful sunset over Delaware Bay |
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| Me with the kids in Cape May |
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| Ella drags the cooler across the desert to the water |
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| Mom comes prepared for many gin and tonics |
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| Little Justin at Buttercup Road - Ukrainians are more fun! |
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| A rare photo of the four of us |
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| Family photo on the last day at the beach |
Buttercup Road, we shall never forsake you again. Next year should be interesting - my sister will have THREE children by then. Margarita, anyone?
September
My adventurous mother embarked on yet another European adventure, this time to France for a calligraphy course. She happened to be there during what would have been my parents' 45th wedding anniversary. This must have been difficult for her, yet she managed to put a positive spin on things and had a wonderful time. Here she is, enjoying herself at a French winery!
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September also brought about a return of the dreaded invisible enemy, the fleas! The whole cycle started again and little did we know we'd be plagued by these things for the next few months. I still get chills when my dog scratches herself and I frantically search through her fur, praying that I won't see a flea. So far, so good (knock on wood). I think we should probably call 2012 the year of the fleas, since they have dominated many a blog entry and caused an untold amount of stress.
John and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary at the end of September with a weekend in Baltimore. Baseball, beer and lots of raw oysters - what more do we need? A perfect weekend with my best friend.
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| Happy 14 years! |
October
October will always mean the anniversary of my Tato's passing. As the month began I thought to myself "This will be torture, re-living those last weeks that feel like they happened just yesterday." But that didn't happen. Life happened instead.The dreaded anniversary happened to coincide with two other things, the Walk to Defeat ALS and my husband's 41st birthday. Whenever I'd mention this coincidence to people, they'd sadly shake their heads, as if to imply that John would never have a happy birthday again due to sharing it with such a sad occasion. But this is not what happened.
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| Two of our littlest walkers, Connor and Ella |
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| Our fearless team - The Legeckis Wave |
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| Walking to defeat ALS and honor Tato's memory |
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| Jack and his friends leaping for joy at the end of the walk - White House in background |
Oh, and John got to celebrate his birthday too - don't worry. We ate lunch at a barbecue place downtown where we got nice and messy and drank beer out of mason jars. The Cowboys game happened to be on, just for him. All the kids behaved and as we listened to the country music being piped in over the sound system, my mom commented that if Tato were here he'd probably be pulling someone up to dance. We ate, drank, talked and laughed and it felt right.
November
The biggest thing that happened to me in November is that I FINISHED PAINTING THE KITCHEN! The kitchen project had stalled after I'd completed the cabinets back in June. As the autumn months wore on I realized that it had been almost a year since I'd started on my quest to re-do the kitchen. Because I couldn't decide on a paint color, I handed John the enormous color wheel and told him to pick one. He picked well.
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| BEFORE . . . |
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| . . . AND AFTER!!! |
Word of warning - never sample paint colors on top of old wallpaper glue. It's a b!$+ch to get it off. Just saying.
November of course means Thanksgiving, which means Turkey Chase! Three years ago when I started running regularly I bravely signed up for the 10K Bethesda Turkey Chase near my parents' house. Last year Jack and I did the 2 mile race together and this year Ella joined us. She did great and for some reason preferred running up the big hills and then stopping to walk when it was flat. Jack left us in the dust at the start of the race and ran a little over an 8 minute mile - I can't compete with that. Ella and I took our time, holding hands occasionally and giggling.
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| Before the race! Lots of smiles |
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| Mother-Daughter matching ponytails |
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| Ella and I approach the finish line |
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| After the race! |
It feels good to get up early, run a race, and then spend the rest of the day relaxing and eating lots of food. As usual we had our two golden turkeys, our faithful cook, and lots of family togetherness. The faces around the table may change slightly every year but the basic feeling is still the same.
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| My mom the chef |
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| Olko prepares the brussel sprouts |
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| MMM, turkey dinner |
December
I've had a difficult time writing any lighthearted this month after the school shootings in Newtown, CT. My last few posts have been introspective and philosophical, as they so often are after something tragic happens. I lie awake at night sometimes and wonder how something so horrific could have happened and how those children could so easily have been my own.
I tried to stop and appreciate every single moment of the Christmas holidays this year. I hugged my kids a little tighter each night and took a few extra minutes to get in bed and cuddle with Ella at bedtime, instead of saying "Not now, it's time for bed."
We went to the ICE exhibit at National Harbor this year. The Shrek ice carvings were pretty cool, but what touched me the most were the beautiful ice sculptures of the Nativity scene at the very end of the exhibit. At Christmas Eve service we got to church early to try to sit inside - I managed to find a spot for myself and for Ella and spent the hour really listening to the service, singing the songs, paying close attention to the sermon. I realized after a while that Ella was softly singing along to the carols and I closed my eyes and thought "This is what it's all about." I squeezed her little hand and vowed to never take anyone or anything for granted.
2012 has been a great year, despite the deep ache of missing our Tato. He's still here with us in many ways and always will be. We just have to stop and listen every once in a while. That's what 2012 has taught me.
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