Four full courses

Lots of Mom this week. She's been pretty good. Julie went Wednesday and they had a fancy dinner event at which they ate:

That's lamb and shrimp, potatoes, carrots and an orchid, which I think was strictly decorative. Entertainment was provided by an opera singer from the Florentine.

The picture doesn't show it, but the room was packed.

I went Friday, and today, Saturday, took her to a student string recital. So she's had a week full of culture. She can't watch TV, she can't read, she can't listen to the radio, but live music keeps her awake.

We found, in our endless packing, a diary she'd kept 20 years ago, when we'd left the kids with them for a week while we went away and had fun. Ahna was 7, Ezra 4, and she and Dad took them to the zoo, to parks, swimming in the pool, and twice to deliver Meals on Wheels to the shut-ins. She wrote that she read them the story of David and Goliath, and Ezra put rocks in his pockets, just to be prepared.

So I sat and read the diary to her -- she was amazed that she had written it -- but she kept stopping me, saying we had to be ready, we didn't want to miss the people, the people who were coming.  She couldn't say who this was, and I could only guess that in her family- and friend-crowded life, there was always someone coming, someone she didn't want to miss.

But it was also an expression of her anxiety. She can't sit still. There are only so many things you can do with her, and it will be sad if this overtakes her entirely and we lose the reading.