Our 1-Year Anniversary

I've been dying to watch A Handmaid's Tale whenever Kevin and I got around to finishing watching Orphan Black. But we got sidetracked at the end of last month and just sort of stopped watching Orphan, and so Friday evening I asked if we could start A Handmaid's Tale.

But Kevin reminded me that he had asked if I would watch Shoresy with him first since the first season is only six episodes.

So that's what we did. And I have to admit it was pretty funny.

Then Saturday was of course our 1-year anniversary!

Unfortunately I had an early morning appointment to take my car to Mr. Tire to have new spark plugs put in, get an oil change, and have my tires rotated.

I was in and out way faster than I expected to be though, so I decided to meal prep my lunches for the coming week. And that took longer than I expected it to.

Kevin and I had plans to have dinner at Las Margaritas. But first, I guess neither of us was content with just giving each other the new laser printer we bought together sometime back around New Year's after Kevin's old one got fried by a power surge.

He presented me with a card and a gift bag:

A cinnamon roll and a glass of orange juice, because we often have cinnamon rolls for breakfast on the weekend, and I love orange juice.

And also two frog figurines because I love frogs, I love butterflies, and we have a bee theme throughout a lot of our home decor:

And I got him a poster depicting the positions of the constellations on the day we got married. But we took it to his parents' house for safe keeping and forgot to take a picture of it first :(

Kevin had suggested that we include the kids for dinner, which meant I had to go pick Taylor up and bring her back to the apartment so she could shower and do her makeup.

Riley has become really good at time management over the past year and being ready to go at the time we said we want to leave.

Taylor, not so much. She tends to lose track of time putting on makeup and we usually run a bit late to things that she is coming along to. So even though I told the kids we wanted to head over to the restaurant between 4:00 and 5:00 since it's a half hour drive for us, we ended up walking out the door at 5:30.

That meant by the time we got there the club music from the bar had been cranked up for the night, which we had been hoping to avoid by getting there earlier.

Kevin ordered a pina colada, which surprised me since he's not a big drinker. So I got one too :)

And for dinner, we each stuck with our usual nachos with everything.

Riley got the chicken enchiladas that she loves there, and Taylor wasn't sure what she wanted, so she texted me a list of ingredients and asked me if I could order her something that had them in it.

I thought I had found something suitable but didn't see that it was part of the catering menu, so the waitress kindly suggested an alternative instead, which Taylor agreed to.

But when it came out she didn't like it. So she asked the waitress if she could just have a side of rice and a side of refried beans instead. And also the kids insisted on getting French fries and then ate maybe all of 10 fries between the two of them.

I could tell that Kevin was getting progressively more annoyed, both at the fact that I had let Taylor get away with not having to be an adult and order her own meal (which is something he feels she needs to learn how to do), and the fact that she unintentionally but effectively ordered twice as much food as the rest of us in terms of price as a result.

But three of us thoroughly enjoyed our meals, even if the music was too loud as always.

We had told Catherine that we would likely stop by to visit her and Ron after dinner since we would be just around the corner.

And we did.

Catherine asked if there was any update on my mom. I'm not up to date on everything as it happens, since I don't talk to anyone in my family. But the last I heard was that my mom was in the Statesman nursing home in Levittown but then called 911 twice to say she was having trouble breathing. So then she had gone back to St. Mary hospital for a time. And now she was at Oxford Crossings in Langhorne.

Apparently her dementia has really started to accelerate too. She told my sister that she can no longer remember her car, her storage unit, or the inside or outside of her trailer. And then she confused my sister for Taylor a few days after that.

I told Catherine and Ron just like I've told Kevin, it breaks my heart but I can't involve myself or I know I will get sucked back in 100%. I have to be either all in or all out.

I ended up telling Kevin's parents in detail about the things that happened to me growing up that my mom just refused to deal with or to even try to let me talk to her about. And how those events ultimately led to her trying to dump me on a therapist who just wanted to prescribe me pills I had no interest in taking, which in turn led to my mom deciding to temporarily kick me out of the house at 16, and then take me back until kicking me out again at 18, two weeks after I graduated high school.

Catherine and Ron had already known far more than most about why I've decided to cut ties with my mom again. But now they know the full story. And I'm grateful to them as always for not judging me or guilt tripping me or telling me I'm a horrible person for refusing to continue enduring abuse from my mom, my sister, and my uncles for the sake of taking care of my mom when nobody else wants to or knows how to either.

Then when we finally got home later Kevin and I watched the first two episodes of A Handmaid's Tale.

Sunday I went out to BJ's and to do the laundry, and the girls wanted to go swimsuit shopping.

Those things took the majority of the morning, afternoon, and evening. So Kevin and I took it easy the rest of the evening and watched a couple episodes of A Handmaid's Tale before we headed to bed.

Monday he sent me a video of our neighbor Ruth trying to park.

We've documented her antics here numerous times before:

She's noisy, and oblivious, and tends to park outside of the lines more often than not. Our good neighbors Jeff and Lillian can't stand her either, and obviously Kevin is especially not a fan.

So he said he happened to be passing through the living room when she came home, and he figured he'd get her on camera and call her out on her inconsiderate park job if need be (since one person's bad park job usually tends to screw up the entire line, and it's not like she doesn't do it all the time).

She ended up fixing it on her own. But it's a funny video anyway.

That evening I picked up Taylor on my way home from work and we went food shopping together. Real food shopping, as in I suggested that she use her food stamps to buy actual groceries instead of just candy and junk food.

And she did a pretty good job!

The four of us had fried chicken for dinner, and then we cleared the table so Taylor and Kevin could jump into her math homework.

So Taylor pulled up the video of the teacher's lecture from that afternoon. And Kevin watched about 12 seconds of it and then said he was good to go.

They worked on math together for almost three hours before we decided to call it a night and take Taylor home.

We had already planned for her to come again tomorrow night. But just before we headed out she made a push to come over a third night later in the week as well, which had not been part of the plan.

I told her we would discuss it and I would get back to her. So then Kevin and I argued about it on the way home from dropping her off and he accused me of letting Taylor overstep the boundaries once again. But I was already leaning towards putting my foot down anyway because Taylor had mentioned she only had two assignments left to do (and not even for math), so I didn't see why she needed two more nights of help just to complete her last two assignments.

But then we got into what prom and graduation might end up looking like since they're both out around Millersville and back to back on Friday night and Saturday morning. Which means lots of driving and the fact that Taylor is under the impression that her school will be paying for people's hotel rooms, which neither I nor Kevin can imagine is actually going to be the case.

Then I told Kevin about the talk Taylor and I had in the car on our way over earlier. Part of which was a comment she made that she doesn't think Kevin really knows what he's talking about parenting wise because he doesn't have trauma like she does.

He took offense at this and asked why losing his father as a child and having to move away and leave all his friends didn't qualify as trauma. Then he suggested maybe it was because he has never hidden behind that or used it as a crutch to try to never have to take responsibility for anything he ever does. But of course this was all before I had a chance to explain that I had already enlightened Taylor on his past right when she made that comment, and she acknowledged that she didn't know about any of that.

He just gets so angry that she isn't where he was when he was her age.

Tuesday evening Riley got invited to the movies with Kassie and her older sister Kaylee.

Riley told us that Kassie said it would just be the three of them. But Kevin rolled his eyes.

Yeah right. How old's her sister now? Pushing 20 like Taylor is, right? What are the chances she's allowed to go to the movies by herself in THAT household?

And sure enough, it ended up being Riley, Kassie, Kaylee, and Noelle. Because there's nothing like going to the movies with your mom at 14 and almost 20!

Meanwhile I made pesto chicken for myself and Kevin and Taylor for dinner and then I helped her with homework for a few hours before we took her home.

Taylor leaves all the lights on at my mom's trailer but I guess my sister had stopped by at some point, because all the lights were off. So Taylor asked if I would walk her inside to make sure she got in safely.

Then Kevin and I drove home and my phone rang right as I was parking the car. It was Taylor calling to say she forgot her vape in the backseat of my car and asking if we could drive back for her to grab it.

Kevin nearly exploded with disbelief and insisted that if it wasn't important enough for her to remember it, I should hold onto it until the next time we were planning to see her. Then we had a big argument about our failure to see eye to eye on Taylor vaping marijuana in the first place even though I've told him countless times before that it was only supposed to help her with her appetite a couple years ago when I spent months paying for her visit a therapist at $130 an hour to no avail because she was too concerned with protecting her girlfriend at the time (who was being abused by her parents), and she never wanted to open up and discuss her own issues.

Wednesday the 22^nd I had promised Kevin that we would have a free evening after dinner and we could work on the mock deck he's been asking me for more than a year to help him make to test out a card game he is developing.

But I noticed on the drive home from work that one of my headlights was out. And so he insisted that I should take care of that first to make sure I wouldn't get pulled over and soaked for $300 on my way into work one morning for missing a headlight.

So we put the card game on hold Wednesday night, and then again on Thursday night when he said he would rather that I watch a homesteading video he had sent me a week before that I just hadn't had time to get to yet.

But he made tacos for dinner Thursday night and then on Friday night he and Riley got Burger King and I ordered Chinese food that had a better chance of not giving me a gallbladder attack.

Then we watched a few episodes of A Handmaid's Tale together.