Has spring finally arrived?

It was a beautiful spring weekend in the northeast! The sky was mostly clear, the sun was bright, and it may even be fair to assume we have seen the last of winter. I was probably a bit too optimistic as I packed clothes for our trip up to Sharon, taking lighter cotton sweaters instead of the heavier wool ones. It’s funny how the clothes that look so nice in October suddenly seem so tired by the end of April. It is not that the new clothes I had bought last fall are not wearing well; quite to the contrary I have been quite pleased with everything I purchased. It is that I have just grown tired of looking at them. I am definitely ready to move on to spring. And as we are on the eve of the month of May, I am feeling very optimistic.

Unfortunately, although the weather did not disappoint, Simmie called us first thing Friday morning to say that little Maya had woken up with a fever. Our plan for last weekend was that we were all to have dinner on Friday evening at Simmie and Ronen’s house, with Barry bringing steaks to barbeque from New York and Simmie preparing a vegetarian dish. But even though I am many months past chemotherapy, I still have my long-time pulmonary disease, so I have to be as vigilant as I can in exposure to respiratory pathogens. So, we decided that the barbeque would be moved to Dina and Aaron’s house, and Simmie would stay home with Maya while Ronen and Eliana came to join us there. Barry and I had prepared Sabbath lunch for Simmie and family, so we divided the food and brought half to Ronen while we served the remainder at our apartment. Ronen stayed home with Maya, who slept most of the day. After we ate we headed over to Dina’s house. We should have noticed that Eliana was rather lethargic, even dozing off for a bit after lunch. We chalked it up to the fact that she had slept over at Ella’s house on Friday night and they were apparently up giggling until 10 pm. By Saturday evening it became clear that she was following in her sister’s footsteps with this virus, and by Sunday morning she, too, had fever. So now Maya is back in the swing of things and poor Eliana is home sick. This was particularly disappointing for Eliana because yesterday was a minor holiday on the Jewish calendar and the school had planned a lot of fun activities for today.

First thing Sunday morning, Dina left for an educational conference taking place over the next few days. We watched Joshua playing with his little league team, and then Joshua, Ella, Aaron, Barry, and I headed off to the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence. I remember they had been doing a lot of construction and much of the new space has now opened and is very nice. It will be even better once the weather gets warmer, because there is a nice water play area. We came back to Sharon where there was a barbeque co-sponsored by all the synagogues and various other Jewish groups in Sharon. There were a huge number of people there!

I continue to find myself somewhat overwhelmed in such settings. I simply cannot take in and process too much input at one time, so I can almost feel myself shutting down a bit. I am reasonably fine just chatting one-on-one, although sometimes things come out of my mouth that even confuse me! But once there is a large group I quickly find myself feeling lost. It seems to me that an important piece of the cognitive therapy is to learn to do things even when other things are vying for my attention. A number of the Lumosity games contain specific distractors, and I am hopeful that over time my ability to handle this will improve.

With my newfound knowledge of how to insert videos into the blog, I feel compelled to put something in here, lest I forget how to do it. Here is the last of the Mozart symphonies, #40 in G minor. We learned about this one in the music class. But actually I am extremely familiar with it, because when I first met Barry during his sophomore year (my freshman year) at the University of Rochester, he told me about a music course he had taken the year before in which they had studied this symphony, and the instructor had given them a little trick to remember the tune:

It’s a bird,

It’s a plane,

No it’s Mozart!

I can’t say I remember all that much from my early college years, but this has stuck with me!

Have a wonderful week!

Love,

Rebecca