@theterrace

It’s pitch black in the closet and there are five people—myself and four strangers—squeezed into a tiny closet that’s from the outside. It’s my nightmare as a later-in-life sufferer of claustrophobia. It’s made worse by the fact that if someone coughs, the dogs and king’s guards searching aggressively in the other side will find us immediately and we’ll be hanged. Poor Anne on the other side of the door in the dark, damp room alternately seems angry and frightened as she denies to the men that anyone else is in the room with her. There are 12 of us stuffed in various hiding spots. The Catholic priest coughs on purpose—gives himself up—and the search is called off as he is hauled away…to the gallows. Now we are 11.

The year is 1605 and the Roman Catholics are done with the decades of oppression under a series of conveniently Protestant kings of England. Guy Fawkes masterminds the plot to load barrels of gunpowder under London’s parliament building and do away with it in one massive blow—along with the king’s men and hundreds of innocent people in the surrounding market. What do we do: support Guy Fawkes, Anne whose brother was hanged for no reason other than faith, and the other Catholics at wit’s end, or stand staunchly with King James and the other Protestants who have bought up all the land, power and dignity of the people?

Victors wrote the history books and set the holiday schedule, and so Brits around the world celebrate the stopping of the gunpowder plot every November 5 on Guy Fawkes day. My dad remembers celebrating this as a child living in a British colony. I’m so glad innocent people didn’t die that day when the plot was foiled, but it was amazing to learn about both sides during an immersive experience next to the Tower of London last week.

Using virtual reality, live and interactive actors, and a staged underground set, we could smell the smoke and feel the damp and (with the help of technology) glide high above the Thames on a rope to help the priest try to escape and feel our row boat almost tip into the river later, as old London burned in the distance. Clara pointed out that the actor in the (virtual reality) boat talking directly to us and appeared to be only feet away was the actor who played Draco Malfoy.

In the end, the king’s men detected and averted the plan in the nick of time, and we celebrated the victory with a modern day feast of fish and chips. The night prior, we dined on popcorn and mochi watching the live performance of Wicked on West End, and one day we ate the national food of the UK, tikka masala.

Our favorite meal, however, was on Christmas Day. Throughout the service at Westminster Abbey, Kevin was sliding through restaurant options that might have any remaining 11th-hour openings. My only request a month earlier was, “Let’s have a proper traditional English dinner on Christmas—you know, like beef Wellington, Yorkshire pudding, lamb, sticky toffee pudding for dessert, that kind of thing.”

So while the priest is reading the gospel, having stopped right in front of us and waving the immense wand until Brooks about passed out, Kevin leans over and whispers to me, “Italian or Peruvian?” We went with Italian.

Walking to the restaurant through throngs of people started to hurt Tatum’s feet in heels. I swapped shoes with her but it was still a miserable walk under the cold sky and we were going to be late. So Tatum, Brooks and I hailed a cab and Finn, Kevin and Clara walk-ran to the restaurant. We didn’t want to cancel as we risked losing a large deposit. Those of us in the cab arrived first and we stopped before entering.

We had arrived in front of a door in a dead commercial area near the Tate Modern that seemed to lead to a deli. We deduced this from the shelves lined with goods for sale, and the fact that there were only two tables in the tiny place. And the writing on the door that read “Italian Deli,” which was a strong clue. To get away from the cold, we entered but weren’t sure what to do. This was not the place for a very pricey dinner and heels. Kevin by phone assured me that this was the correct address at least.

They arrived and we sat down wondering if we would be eating very expensive salami and mozzarella paninis. But no, not the case. Our set menu included the following offerings: ox tongue, fois gras, pork cheek, anchovy paste on fried cheese and, my favorite option, pigeon wellington. Brooks was perplexed by the options but happy to see a beef filet on the list of starters—until Tatum advised him against it as would arrive tartare. Brooks wasn’t up for raw meat on Christmas.

The meal was delicious and very passionately presented by our young Italian fellow, but the whole experience was cultural in a way we hadn’t expected. Dessert included two mini birthday cakes presented to the official 16-year-olds. They even let us sing to them (one of them).

We went home to our quirky arbnb flat by the Chelsea football stadium and watched a lot of Harry Potter movies. That was a great antidote to all the walking, learning and dining, especially since we were able to visit the infirmary where Harry had his bones regrown, also serving as a chapel at Oxford University.

I loved our long walks to and through Hyde Park, where we saw tiny elves in trees and shops full of English roses. It’s hard to know what’s real sometimes, between claustrophobic closets centuries ago and magical dimensions that muggles can only imagine. That’s the great thing about travel; you don’t have to choose just one answer.

It’s amazing to see a 9-year-old who’s taller than you by a mile, as Lloyd now is. Okay, he might actually be 17 now, but in my mind’s eye, he’s still a fourth grader who makes fantastic structures given a box of magna-tiles. The highlights of our Kraków visit were many but chief among them was reconnecting with the Allens (Emma, Elton, Lloyd and Cerys) and the Roys (Rachel, Neel, Ashima, Avi and Inika). Finn and Avi acted like long-lost soulmates—the crack-up-at-every-crack kind.

Experiencing it all in the old world style Christmas market in the historic Kraków old town was charming and filled our eyes and hearts with the cheer of the season—that and the Polish sausages and mulled wine. We gathered along an immense table in a cave our first evening. While waiting for lasagna and steak frites, Emma tried to teach us Welsh, the craziest language ever invented.

Our favorite meal, however, was possibly the one where we crammed along a couple of sofas at the airbnb flat and dined on take-out shawarmas and champagne imported by the Roys from Paris. We watched an awful-wonderful, very American Christmas movie (Daddy’s Home 2), thanks to Clara’s good taste.

We also saw art and learned about Poland’s hardships and history at the beautifully restored Wawel Royal Castle. On our last day, we braved Schindler’s factory-cum-museum, which was moving, shocking, cautionary. The Jewish quarter on our visit reflected the contemporary weight of the Jewish world: a banner asking to bring home the hostages.

Kraków was cheerful, quaint, super walkable over those cobblestone streets and full of delicious food. Tatum again gave escargot in garlic butter sauce her full support, Clara favored the ribeyes, I reconnected with my love of the flat white coffee and croissants, Kevin tried multiple pints, and Finn just likes food. He’s nonpartisan. The warmed outdoor cafés lit up by fairy lights, heat lamps and hanging lanterns were irresistible. We were charmed.

Mrs. Tomlinson. Mrs. Hathway.

That’s how we usually started our conversations. It’s funny for best friends to be so formal, but that’s what amused us. That was Josie and me, always looking for a way to keep it fun. We’re going to ride around the neighborhood on our bikes after dinner, smoking cigarettes and laughing, we promised each other. Our kids will be doing the dishes because our evening starts when we sit down for the fine dinner we have made for everyone. And from then on, it’s crossword puzzles, good books, a show, and bike riding.

We didn’t get to do that, but we always meant to. In fact, we could barely finish a movie together, interrupted either by our kids or ourselves, talking about something that couldn’t wait. We did sit in their glorious Bethesda backyard by the trampoline David put up, in the green grass and under the blue sky, sipping something out of the elegant acrylic glasses painted in happy colors with bikes. We talked and talked and talked.

Whatever else was going on–trauma, delight, holidays, boring days, dinners, coffees, doing chores–we talked. Tatum and Sophia were so aggravated with us on our college trip down to the Carolinas because regardless of which of us was driving, we were talking. We talked nonstop for 5 hours straight, there and back. The girls, teenage girls who never run out of talking, ran out of talking and begged us to stop but we couldn’t. They put in their ear buds and they slept. We just kept talking away, so pleased with our situation and ourselves.

That was almost as much fun as the night we dined on the pergola with all the families, the kids straggling in from poolside still in their suits, and for some reason we talked all night in Southern accents. Maybe that was Clara’s request. But once we started we couldn’t stop. Even when normal people like Uncle David showed up, we couldn’t stop with the drawls. It was so much fun sitting under the stars under the pergola under the summer night air. Who knows what we talked about–don’t remember. Nothing and everything. Serious and silly. Anything. With a straight face. Josie could do it wearing candy corn bucked teeth too.

She took me for serious prayers when Tatum was missing. She lived at my house for a month when I had to be away. She and the girls were our Covid-bubble family. You and Sophia and Georgie belted out the happy birthday song to Tatum on April 21, 2020…from the lawn at 8 am, standing in front of a huge yard sign. We drove each other’s kids to crazy faraway places just because it needed to be done and we semi-single moms couldn’t do it. We knew the inside-outs of each other’s marriages and parenting preferences, deepest hurts, fears and plans. We never missed an Edgemoor thrift sale. We went to each other’s churches, baptized our children together, and celebrated every single Mother’s Day together, usually over a homemade-by-kids brunch and mom-made coffees with cream. At your birthday last year, we had coffees and pastries at Boulangerie Christophe’s and later we dined around your table with your 99-year-old neighbor and vowed to be like her at 99. At my birthday in June, we picnicked at Wolf Trap with our families and listened to John Legend under the stars.

Remember our Bruno Mars dance party in the kitchen? “Feeling good! It’s my birthday…you look good! Whoooo. Put some perm on your attitude, you gotta relax.” Finn and Josie dancing was a sight to behold; legendary. Clara wanted to play her new Christmas tunes on the piano so you could sing along. You would have loved that.

We talked through all the details of all these moments before and afterwards, and no detail was unimportant or dismissed by Josie when it came to someone she loved. We talked so much we got in trouble–with our kids (“Mom, isn’t it time to go upstairs now?”) and our neighbors: “It’s too late for you to be playing in the yard. You need to go home now,” Andy said to your kids as we guiltily got out of the car. We had been sitting in the car talking for an hour one Monday night while our kids grabbed an unexpected gift of tire swing time, too late for a school night.

We aggravated our kids with long nature walks along the canal and Great Falls, even in, especially in, the dead of winter. “Isn’t this great?” One of us would say. “It’s heaven,” the other would reply. We aggravated our kids with museum visits and insistence on doing chores before hanging out. They aggravated us with regular requests to come home from school for no apparent reason.

We talked about the cows and the fences. Did you know that cows will walk the entire length of a field looking for holes in the fence before they will start eating the lush green grass waiting for them? They need to make sure they’re safe and the boundaries are secure. This is what we reminded ourselves and each other when enforcing boundaries with our kids, keeping them on track, at home, in school and with joy felt harder than we had imagined it could.

The last time I made her laugh was when I reminded her that God, whom she loved with her whole heart, cared about all of the details of her life, all of them. He would take care of things and she need not worry. I reminded her that he knows the number of hairs on her head and in her eyebrows…and we laughed.

When I walked out of Suburban Hospital Monday night, December 2, I couldn’t believe I was now living in a world without Josie. I had held her hand as she took her last breath, as her pulse slowed and stopped. When I shopped for shoes for Finn to wear to her funeral on Friday, I thought, “I can’t wait to tell Josie about this Nordstrom Rack, it has everything.” When I stood at her graveside at All Souls Cemetery on Saturday, December 7, I thought, “I thought we were going to Boulangerie Christophe for your birthday today.” I took Georgie and my kids instead and cried silently to myself instead, over pastries and coffee.

Last year at this time, we stole away to wrap all the Christmas presents together at my church, away from spying eyes. The only present I can give you now, Mrs. Hathway, is to love your children like my own, and I already do. Forever. I will never be able to fill your cool, colorful Hoka running shoes, but I’ll keep giving them the nature walks, pastries, and stars under the pergola every chance they’ll let me. And I’ll make sure they know how to talk and talk and talk. I love you forever, Josie.

We’re back already and it’s only Saturday morning. Teenagers have places to go and people to meet and privacy to protect, so we didn’t stay in Deep Creek very long but it was a full two days. Mostly full of mashed potatoes and pie: pumpkin, coconut, lemon meringue, apple, peanut butter, Oreo, and pecan chocolate. I brought my traditional pumpkin pecan pie, but we ate it for breakfast at the cabin because there was no room on the table for another pie.

Make that tables, plural, need to seat all 31 people. There were at least two in high chairs and someone asked if they should be counted as people. Um, I’d say yes? Clara was a magnet for the kiddos, who were literally climbing on top of her.

There was also turkey, gravy, stuffing, corn pudding, cranberries, vegetable medley, green beans, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes (baked), sweet potatoes (mashed), and sweet potatoes (souffléd). Thanks and so full.

The girls went to go down to see the moonlight and snow on the lake after dinner. Dad, Finn and I got our steps in during the day. Finn gets his flips in day and night—and at the gas station stop, as seen here with the flags—and the highlight of the trip for him probably has nothing to do with family or food: He mastered the roundoff backflip with the rope. Huge!

Fun and games, sarcasm and irritability not withstanding, included the crossword puzzle, jigsaw puzzles, Colorku, Spit, Rumikub, Boggle, Cranium, Memory, and Paddle Ping Pong (Finn and I got to 101). Does dog management (four at the cabin) count as fun or a game? Marley tried to balance it with schoolwork that kept her up late into the night, stressed about a project due Wednesday.

So all in all, a pretty classic Deep Creek Thanksgiving, a first for our kids. We tried the new American tradition of Black Friday shopping at the outlet mall on the way back home but it was so jammed packed, it was stressful and made us less thankful and less good human beings. No more of that for me.

In the meantime Kevin and Hugh both worked through the week. Hugh taught a unit on the family tree to his university students in Jordan, and Kevin spoke at a high-level meeting on transport in Ukraine. He’s increasingly thankful for electricity, since his is out on a daily basis.

Despite the cliché of it, I am thankful for the basics: food, a warm house, lights, health, clean air, and family around us. Not even our closest family and friends have all that this year. And I’m very grateful to have all the kids at home and doing great—by which I mean okay, which is great.

I found out that Kamala Harris lost and Trump would be our next president at about 1 o’clock in the morning, when Tatum woke me up, crying. She fell asleep with me, inconsolable. I knew how she felt.

While more than half the country clearly appreciates Trump’s vision for our future, I find it destructive. I see dismantling of basic checks and balances in our trifold system, stripping away of women’s rights not only to make decisions about our health and bodies but also about our very lives—since having a child only gets started at delivery (see last post); destabilizing our economy since I don’t believe that this administration cares very much about the working or middle class, in spite of their sales pitch; ignoring the planet’s health; and decreasing our sense of safety with each other and in the world.

It makes me sad, more than anything because I love the country we have built up over the last few hundred years. It takes so long to build and it’s so easy to kick structures down. To reflect on this, I took the children to see the Constitution and Bills of Rights the week of the election. It was moving.

My hope is the incoming administration will bring honor to those men who constructed our cool system of democracy. I hope they will restore more dignity and respect to people who feel left out or disrespected. I hope they will bring better budgets at the household level and the country level, and feelings of hope, trust and pride in all that the United States represent. Will they do the good works that my conservative grandfather would be proud to be associated with?

Will they honor the vision of George Washington, who represented the best in bestowed and elected power by modeling how to carry power lightly and peacefully, handing it over graciously when one’s turn is up?

My hope is that sadness is transformed into pride. Sometimes we lose our lives to find them when the broken pieces reassemble into something even better. Let’s see what each of us can do individually, collectively to reassemble into the better.

Hugh’s friends in Poland were baffled when he explained that the rest of his family lived in California, DC, Nashville and Copenhagen…simultaneously. “Do you not like each other?” they asked. We do, very much. And this is why having my mother live across the country from me, or vice versa, still kind of stinks. In the season of thankfulness, I’m thankful for planes. They brought Mom and Doug to us once again, for a fall visit.

Whereas the hills of Montclair, California, offer unbeatable views of city lights over the Bay, our little neck of the woods offers unbeatable…woods. I am so proud of our Cabin John Creek trails. Doug walked them with me and probably appreciated my company just fine, but would have better liked the company of his fishing rod.

One fun part of the visit was attending one of Finn’s competitions, where they got to see Finn’s freestyle, currently in development for international competition trials. Look at those screenagers.

One of the things I admire most about Mom is her gift for and investment in friendships, and this visit was no exception. Anna Borg, Jimmy and Rose, our neighbors Lisa and Norman, and Dad and Auntie Blitz came over to watch the elections, and it was indeed good to have company. Tatum, Aiden, Finn and Clara were gleefully startled by the irreverence of the so-called grown ups lounging around drinking, smoking, cussing and pontificating.

Marley pried herself away from hardcore senior year studies to come for Mom’s birthday, and we went out for Middle Eastern foods at Ala in Bethesda. Mom, naturally, ordered a lavender martini.

My kids have only celebrated Mom’s birthday in person with her a handful of times, so we made the most of it. Clara made dinner with me and Tatum made mini lemon custard and meringue cakes for dessert. Finn was on the low key end of participation, as Tatum, unimpressed, points out in his “card.”

Our celebration circle extended beyond the usual activities to include some handyman love. There’s nothing like rotting wood and funky electrical wires to bond men. It was great having Doug and Dad conspire to get my house back in shape. They brought out the ladder, the electric drill, hammer and nails, light bulbs, the whole toolbox, and repaired our steps, put up porch lights, replaced flickering lights with calm ones and generally made our house more respectable again.

This was nice because it gave Mom and me the chance to shop for my gala jump suit—more on that in a moment. Activities aside, it’s just the best having my mother by my side to talk and talk and cook and read and talk. It’s funny that the older I get, the more I need my parents.

It snowed yesterday, which was a cue that fall is about to slip into winter, and I haven’t shared fall updates in awhile. Highlights include Halloween and a visit from Grandoug Einstein and Mama Zombie; college applications dropped in the metaphorical mail box; I became a professional photographer; Kyiven signing the largest Bank loan ever; Clara and a dozen red roses; Finnittowinit and the Spot for Space; and reaching the extraordinary milestone of ten years of Roshan. Lowlights included the closing the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and the election of Donald Trump as our next president.

Halloween was a spectacular orange and green spectacle, and I that’s all the Charleston Chew I can bite off for this first update. I love our block. We are chock a…block full of young families, which makes it fun for children of all ages, especially my parents. Check out Grandoug’s new Einstein look. Poppy showed up predictably unpredictable: He wore a green beret, spoke in something between an Irish and Indian accent, and sported a tight, bright yellow polo with a Redskins logo. When Clara pointed out that was perhaps not kosher, Poppy replied, “Yes, isn’t it wonderful?” In some kind of bad accent.

Finn declined to dress up but didn’t fully decline to knock on at least one door, the Donnellan’s, with his buddies—two of whom made a full-on effort to embrace the costume, Eli as an alien and Carter as a turkey. They scared the dog but I think the little kids mostly laughed at them.

Clara didn’t dress up, and Tatum went with Aiden as part of a video game couple but I couldn’t tell they were in costume. I know it was a priority, however, because college applications briefly took a backseat to the front seat drives (multiple) to the thrift store. Clara didn’t embrace a character but Mary was impressive as the lead druggie/chemist in Breaking Bad.

Even Kevin got into the spirit, as it were, with his colleagues in Kyiv. He said they decided to celebrate this uniquely American holiday because any distraction helps.

They were enthralled by Georgetown in all its glory afterwards, thanks to Sheila driving while I kept the candy machine going at home. Clara was a bit shocked by Palestine protestors seeming to drip blood, but loved seeing the world get wacky.

How they’ve grown.

And they’re off! Like circus cats in a clown car, the tiny green Mini rolled down the street with Tatum behind the wheel, Clara beside her, likely fiddling with the radio, and Finn, now the tallest among them, stuffed in the back like a folding chair holding a fat backpack. It’s a miracle they can all get in the car—but I’m not worried, Tatum takes full advantage of the convertible aspect of the car to provide mental and physical space. There’s nothing like a happy teenager with hair flying to remember the real reason for a car, which is obviously joie de vivre.

There is going to much to unpack about my joie de vivre shimmering with all three pigs in one schoolhouse for one blessed year. However, there is still so much to unpack about the summer that I didn’t get to share yet. We can start with the fantastic karma that accompanies hard work and unparalleled motivation. Let’s call it “carma,” because look at the smiles on these two new drivers, who are absolutely glowing in the light of their new licenses. Go Tatum and Bridget! Tatum celebrated with brunch at Tastee Diner.

Tatum had a highly accomplished summer, because in addition to getting her license, she completed a year’s worth of French III online, got a certification, job and employee of the week award as a lifeguard at Palisades, and completed about 80 percent of her college application and list of schools of interest. Moreover, she has her first publication coming out in the fall, a chapter in a book about the desert, edited by none other than Joanna Biggar. Tatum’s time in wilderness, metaphorical and literal, has produced jewels.

Yet Kevin and I consider this Clara’s Epic Summer. At 15, Clara travelled solo to South Africa to participate for more than three weeks in a wildlife conservation program. Given Tatum’s immense growth during her time in the great outdoors, we thought Clara might love it as well. Outward Bound and similar programs didn’t align with our schedule, but Hugh told us about Global Leadership Adventures, “peace corps for teens,” and that captured our imaginations. Clara said yes before we even finished the invitational question.

She unfortunately didn’t write us letters or take her own photos, but I got some intel from a program blog and she told us more about it once home. It sounded, well, epic. I would say an experience of a lifetime, but I hope she’ll have many more. She learned how to track poachers, saw every imaginable animal on game drives, and made new friends.

Two weeks into the trip, Clara got Kevin and me on the phone at the same time—not an easy feat spanning three continents—and asked if she could go to a new school this year (hence the clown car, see above). Then she had the chance to talk it all over with Kevin when she hit the streets and plastic sheets of Costa Rica for a child care service project, followed by surfing and ATV driving on our vacation. See? An epic summer for Clara.

Of course, her favorite week may still have been the traditional summer trip to Deep Creek Lake in August. Tatum said the Fourth of July week at DCL was her summer highlight as well. Poppy and Grams have given us a magical gift with the family gathering at the dock each year.

Stones on the path of the week have to include fireworks and possibly swimming under the stars on the Fourth itself; cousin time; Blitz’s and Sean’s trivia night preceded by Patrick’s homemade pesto and followed by birthday cake for Blitz; a visit or six to The Creamery; an actual cinema showing of the latest good movie; dinners on the porch at the cottage and the big house; boggle and cam jam, books and tanning time at the dock; tubing and boat rides; coffee in bed with the aunties; and many games of telephone tag (“What? I can’t hear you. What judge is pickled in potatoes?” “No, I said don’t judge my salad, it should have triple the amount of tomatoes”).

There are so many moments over the summer that I want to etch into to my mind, but I can’t say I wasn’t counting the days til school started. There is a certain amount of crankiness that sets in when schedules are too fluid for too long. So school arrived just in time, and for once, I only have to keep track of one of them. But I’m guessing it will still keep me on my toes, and it will definitely have my heart as I watch the clown car roll slowly down Tomlinson Terrace.

“It’s really surreal. One minute I’m meeting with my team in the shelter and then I’m eating a $7 ribeye at this little European bistro on the sidewalk with some colleagues, and it’s beautiful,” Kevin said over the phone on his first night in Kyiv.

What’s also surreal was hearing the missile alerts speak to us decisively on his phone when he first returned to DC and forgot to silence them. They commanded us to go to shelter, repeatedly and, dare I say, alarmingly. However, when the alert was over, an hour later, they kindly blessed us to return to our lives with a cheerful, “May the force by with you.”

Kevin’s reports include the following. The 11-hour overnight train ride from or to the border of Poland allows for privacy but only a bench and not a bed per se. It was kind of cool being introduced at a meeting by the Prime Minister of Ukraine. Cyrillic is hard to get his mind around. And he loves the people in Ukraine, whom he says are unwaveringly committed to victory, open to nothing less. His team is close and they like to be at the office, now located in a big hotel with a safe bunker and back-up generator, because it feels like a reprieve from the intense pressure of everything else in some ways.

It doesn’t fully protect mentally, however. Kevin’s hardest day in his brief three weeks on the job came the day of a terrible missile attack that landed on a children’s hospital (only 10 minutes from his apartment, I might add). Being a day-time attack, the team was at the hotel-office at the time. Kevin had to refuse to let his colleagues leave work to collect their children, which he said was very hard, but one can’t be out during a raid. The mothers were beside themselves, as I could completely imagine. (Most of his Ukrainian colleagues are women because men are less available.) They came together for lunch and wine in the office the next day, just to decompress and collect themselves as a community.

In addition to the extremely disruptive power outages, which are frequent and make communication and working difficult at best, a big concern is disrupted sleep. Missile alerts happen almost nightly it sounds like, and there are limited sleeping spaces in the shelters. First come, first serve is the system. People shelter in subway stations and basements, as anyplace underground is best.

Unless you’re Kevin and have decided that sleeping in your bathroom is just fine. “Yeah, it’s fine. It’s pretty safe. I’m inside double walls. I don’t worry about my safety,” he told me. What does “pretty safe” mean—shouldn’t that be a yes or no situation? He has not yet gone to find his designated actual shelter in the building next door. (That shelter is under a kindergarten, which I can hardly think about.)

But other than those issues, Kyiv is a garden of roses. Literally. There are gardens everywhere, and summering in Europe is delightful. Kevin raves about the architecture, the cobblestone streets, the sidewalk restaurants, murals and street musicians. It sounds amazing, once you get over those pesky missile alerts.

Now that his two-week summer vacation is over, he’s off again, currently in the Frankfurt airport en route to Krakow en route to the border en route to the overnight train en route to Kyiv. (That sounds like the beginning of a bad children’s story.) He would love for me to come visit and see his stylish apartment with its balcony in the trees on one side and overlooking a charming market on the other. As much as I would love to eat pastries under fairy lights at some artful bistro, that doesn’t seem quite wise at the moment. In fact, that might be a little surreal.

It’s hard to capture Clara smiling in a family photo this year—and her school photos could wither a spider (no offense)—but this girl in the middle of some little kids and she’s lit up like a hot tamale. They banded around this beautiful child of mine like fans to a rock star, which she is. The photos are the proof of what she’s too modest to say, which is that people feel her care, her sense of fun and kindness and her spark.

International Volunteers Headquarters (IVHQ) assigned Clara to work in a child care program in gritty San José, Costa Rica. IVHQ is a program my friend recommended, and Clara initially asked to work on a 2-week turtle conservation project on the coast, in line with her love of beaches and the environment and Bali. That plan got upended by Kevin’s move to Kyiv because Clara wanted him to join the trip and he could no longer take 3 weeks of vacation.

Instead, they slept on plastic sheets in a narrow room in a home stay in San José for one week, and then Tatum, Finn and I joined them for a week of vacation in Montezuma for a week. While Clara’s slightly older peers in the program, those not joined by a parent, were possibly checking out dance clubs and local pubs, Clara and Kyiven were drinking tea, chatting with Vera in a flowery house dress and watching cat videos before falling asleep at 8.30 pm.

But look how worth it that was: Clara was amazing with the kiddos and loved the experience. They loved her, it’s plain from the adoring hugs, and she is super organized and responsible, which teachers need in a classroom. Whitman High School prepared her well, with a Child Development class and hands-on practica experience developing curricula and leading activities with pre schoolers—although in this case, Clara and Kev worked with slightly older kids.

Poppy prepared her well too, and she was ready to go with the hand games, no language skills needed.