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Who would’ve ever thought that I would be making the drive from Utah to Michigan  again ?  With Hannah needing to return home after her pediatrics and family medicine rotations, it didn’t feel right to have her make the journey alone, so I flew out once again.   This time, it felt a bit less triggering to fly into the Salt Lake airport.     None of my children lives in Utah anymore, so I am not barraged with stories of the toxic culture which makes me want to strange most anyone who lives in the Beehive State.     Nevertheless, there was still a bit of a dark cloud over my visit.     Hannah had been dating a really nice guy, and I had bought a ticket to come in a day early so that I could meet him….but she didn’t want me to.     This troubled me for a couple of weeks, but eventually I changed my ticket back to the original date and respected Hannah’s wishes.   So I flew in on a Friday morning while Hannah was taking her ab...

For Baby’s ninth birthday, we were just hoping that Ethan and Rebecca could find a day in their busy schedules to come up and see us….and they did!   Thankfully (and I mean that with a candy bowl full of sincerity) Glo is living at home at the moment, and she was more than happy to take over the decorating duties.  Decorating the Kennedy home for Halloween is no easy task, but she took it on.  Just getting the tubs out of the basement requires Herculean strength, and then sorting through the decorations to find the good ones is also daunting.   We had gone to dinner with John’s brother, Jacob, and his girlfriend and few weeks earlier, and the girlfriend friended me on Facebook.  She had posted a photo of hanging hats and candles in her front hall (which looked darling) so I got on Amazon and ordered more candles than we could use for a while.  Hanging taper candles and column candles.  Like, 150 of them at least.  Wit...

Despite this post being marked in April, I'm writing it in November.  I was sitting across from Glo tonight at dinner, and she was recounting how she has such bad feelings about her college graduation.  Maybe disappointed  feelings would be a better description, and it made me realize that I hadn't written about it. Glo might suffer a bit from the disease I gave her: tending to focus on the one negative experience versus several good experiences.  No joke, I can easily recount fights John and I have had while on vacation, but I frequently forget the surrounding good moments.  And this, friends, is why it's beneficial to record our lives.  Our memories will not be perfect, but writing things down when they happen produces a far more accurate account of how things were.  So let me do the best I can in recounting how I remember the four days. Several of us were arriving at different times.  Gordon was already there from Arizona, Hannah and I traveled...

Allow me a pity party for a paragraph.  As much as John is earning buckets of money for us and for our retirement, his weekend calls have been infringing on our time together.  Like I said, it's a complete pity party, because my logical mind reminds me that I should be happy he's making so much money, but my heart feels rather lonely at times as I reminisce about trips we have taken that we don't have time to take again. I love John.  I don't need him around all the time, but I find that the best quality time with him is when he doesn't have other distractions like work, and call, and hospital credentialing. Anyway, I guess that was two paragraphs, and I don't need to take it any further than that, because I don't want the body of this blog post to be about me and my loneliness. I've been wanting to go to Mackinac Island for two years now (I can hardly even believe that it's been that long since I was there).  With Lake Michigan getting colder and th...

Once again this year, we bought season tickets to Tigers baseball.  I’ve always wondered why people attend games of losing teams, but I guess I find myself in that park seat now ;-)  We had a lot of hope at the beginning of the season, we lost that hope pretty darn quick, and then in the final month of the summer, the Tigers came back. In fact, they not only came back, but they made it into the playoffs.     From what I read, this hasn’t happened in a very long time as was evidenced by all the pesky fans showing up at the games near the end of the season.   I mean, I don’t want to wait in line for my chicken tendies!   The first two games were played in Cleveland with the Guardians winning one game, and the Tigers winning one.  The third game was to be played at Comerica Park.   Not a bad view! Ethan called me the day of, asking if I was going.  I told him that I was not.  His words, “Mama, you should go. ...

Normally, we don't follow the advice of showing up at the airport three hours before an international flight, but having flown out of Dublin before, I remembered that it isn't a stream-lined process.  For some bizarre reason, there is "US Preclearance" at the Dublin airport which means we clear customs at the airport.  Yes, there are immigration booths and agents there before we head to our gate.  I don't know why this happens only in Dublin, but it does.  So, despite John's resistance to leaving for the airport at 10 a.m. (when our flight left at 1:15), we did. And good thing. I don't even think I can possibly recount the nightmare that the next 48 hours would be, nor do I really want to remember the nightmare that the next 48 hours was, but I'll give a quick outline here. After we dropped off our rental car and got on the shuttle bus, I wondered what we were going to do with all of our extra time at the airport...until we got to the terminal and saw ...

We got up EARLY, because we had several things to get done before our tour at Kilmainham Gaol began at 12:30. Our final breakfast.  Ugh, talk about heart-breaking.  We finished up our last bits of bread and eggs and fruit, but we still had an unopened block of delicious Irish cheese.  Yeah, I packed it in my checked luggage ;-) We were off.  When we had left Newgrange six days earlier, the gift shop had already closed, and we all wanted to have a look, so the Newgrange gift shop was our first stop.  Thankfully they let us in without a ticket.  I hadn't bought much of anything except food all week, so when I found a beautiful leather purse embossed with the three concentric circles that are endemic to Newgrange, I took it to the cash register almost immediately (I did do the thing where I imagined walking away from it, and I knew that I would regret it).  Glo wanted to buy some local jewelry, but Gordon wasn't enthusiastic about her doing so.  We h...

Our final day in Northern Ireland.  To be honest, I was ready to settle down and never leave, and I wish we had the cash to buy a smaller home that was for sale in the same rental community.  I love the isolation of the Causeway Coast--it reminds me of some of my happiest places: Preist, Interlochen, even our home in State College.  A place of refuge and peace. This was our Bushmills day.  For the Kennedys, no trip to Northern Ireland is complete without visiting the Bushmills Distillery, and I wondered if Gordon would like it.  Something we didn't know is that September is the month when the distillery has a mandated closing of much of its machinery for maintenance and cleaning.  So the usual noise and aromas and heat weren't present without the mash fermenting all around us.  We didn't miss the nausea that sometimes accompanies the tour, but it didn't feel quite real either.  At least not to us.  Everyone was given a small bottle of whiskey...