Loving February 

My daughter is coming to stay with me soon. I see her often, but she doesn’t consider my apartment her home lately (she is 24 years old) so I’m happy and excited she’ll be staying in her room here again for a while. We get along great, but in so many ways, we are very different. She doesn’t share my interest in drinking tea or enjoyment of flavored sparkling water, so I bought orange sodas and the dragonfruit drink she likes, I got a strawberry Ramuné too. I want my baby to feel welcome and cared for!  We’ll probably order Chinese food her first night here because that is a part of our visiting ritual as well. My diet is not something that she would like to tolerate for long and even though I’ve shopped for groceries and snacks she might prefer, I think it’s important for her to choose a few things herself from our neighborhood take-out.

I feel like I have to stick with soup and other soft foods that I’m confident won’t harm my brutalized dental situation! Soup and tofu fit the bill for me, and my child can get whatever else she wants. While it’s extremely healthy to eat oatmeal and other soft foods like a sweet potato or baked fish regularly, people with really strong teeth remaining in their skull (for now) just love to bite and chew their food. It’s just an entirely different approach to eating I can’t understand, but for my child I’m willing to accomodate. 

Something we used to do together after lunch or dinner sometimes, in my grown-up kid’s childhood anyway, was “play a game”. We went through so many Mad Libs books, for example, we were writing with different colored pens onto the same pages trying to re-use them again. We have a few simple board games (meant for playing with young children) while not particularly challenging, are still cute and fun. As I was cleaning in preparation to make her room more inviting, I brought out of the deep recesses of my closet, a bag of old card games! Some are Hello Kitty playing cards and not at all obscure, but others seem kind of unusual. I’m hoping at least one of these might seem inspiring or nostalgic to my kiddo from her childhood, that she might want to play with me again. Here are a few fun card games from our collection:

Hannah Montana UNO. The Disney channel show was very popular when my daughter was in middle school and she was a kind of fan at the time. Nowadays I’m the bigger Miley Cyrus fan though, I really admire her and enjoy her music more now

Memory aka “Pick Up Pairs” it’s pretty self explanatory. We’ve had this game seemingly forever. It’s some kind of off-brand MEMORY game, an easy matching game, with many adorable animal pictures printed on cardboard sqaures 

Rats! The art on these cards is really fun. I think, in general, real rats are very cute, even the real-life NYC subway rats. My daughter isn’t scared or disgusted by them either. The game works somewhat like UNO.

TAROT! Well it’s not a game exactly, and these weren’t packed into my closet. Tarot cards are the deck we handle most often. Between both our collections we probably have about 30 different decks. I read somewhere it’s recommended for people trying to learn about the tarot card meanings to do a daily reading, and I have been at it for many years. My card today (Valentine’s Day) is not very chill, its the inverted Wheel of Fortune. So, not the best luck! The wheel is about life’s cycles and sometimes they are at a low point of revolution, so I will take that as advice to just hang on tightly and prepare to go around again. It’s such an anti-Valentine card to see this message, really, but I love every image in the tarot deck anyway and am thankful for the advice. 

The last time my daughter was visiting me we binge-watched season 2 of The Gilded Age and also finished the series Marvelous Miss Maisel, that was something she kind of insisted we watch together over the last year (she mentioned seeing many clips on the app TikTok that got her interested, and they also reminded her of me?!). Overall, I liked it but also hated so very many moments, too. I’m excited to read there’s a new ballet show called Etoile coming to Prime Video by the same creators. I’ll watch that one for sure! Project Runway is another series my daughter and I watch together, I think we’re up to season 15 by now, and if it seems like we’re total couch potatoes, that is correct. There’s about a foot of fresh snow outside since just last night, and temperatures are below freezing. Where we live in New York has been known to snow into May sometimes, so I’m sure there will be many more TV binges to come! 

I hope that blog readers are doing well, and have a happy day somehow. I send my V-day love to those with no more immediate Valentine’s celebrations! If you’ve never seen or heard Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” ballet, I think that’s a great idea that can be enjoyed solo today. You’ll probably recognize some of the tunes even if you’re unfamiliar. The full ballet with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev from 1966 is on Youtube (and there’s many more versions on there as well) or any music streaming app should be able to play a recording. 

I took a picture of a tarot card that’s usually called The Lovers to celebrate my love for posting online, and I hope to write again soon. I’ve been doing ok lately but just kind of busy.