Lisa n Tom (n James n Joseph)

Lisa writes: I had to go into the office for a couple of hours on Friday at a time when I'm normally home with Joseph. So I took him along. It went about as well as expected. The chair lying sideways in the foreground is supposed to be a barricade to keep him in my cubicle. It worked for a few minutes. The box of tissues was supposed to keep him distracted. It worked for a few minutes. When the barricades fell and the tissues ran out, I handed him my cell phone to keep him distracted. Amateur mistake. No idea where my phone is now.

Lisa writes: Adios, Passat. Tom's car was one of those VWs caught in the emissions cheating scandal. He finally got word that no fix was coming for this particular model and so today we sold it back to the dealer. His disappointment was softened by the fact that the master cylinder started leaking a couple of weeks ago. As Tennyson wrote, Tis better to have loved and lost than to have been stuck with a very expensive clutch repair. There's a little bit more to this story, if anybody's interested. The clutch started making alarming grinding noises two weeks ago. Like, I-am-not-getting-into-that-car-again kind of noises. Tom has avoided driving the car, taking Uber to work and suggesting we drive my car to NJ last weekend instead of his. As part of the buy-back, the car had to be able to drive into the lot under its own power: no towing. The dealership where he had his scheduled appointment was a good 35 minutes away from home. He was really, really not confident th...

Lisa writes: Cute coworker gave Joseph this Little Farm toy that her daughter has outgrown. (The daughter has requested Barbies. Sigh.) Joseph loves it.

Lisa writes: It rained nearly the whole time in Hoboken (pathetic fallacy, right)? Hannah cleverly found a indoor playground called The Urban Jungle and James ran around hard for two hours. Forgive the sideways videography, but isn't this thing cool?

Lisa writes: Joseph, held by cousin Hannah Kiera, giving cousin Jean a high-five. We drove up to New Jersey two weeks ago to visit Jean in hospice. She is Tom's father's first cousin and the last of that generation. That second picture is a little deceiving. Jean looks a lot more conversational in this picture than she really is. She's suffering from dementia. Hannah's mom gave us a heads-up before we came and explained Jean's situation like this: Jean remains at the lowest possible plateau short of being in a coma. When she is awake, she has lucid conversations and laughs, but remembering requires energy, of which she has little. I have told her you are coming, and have shown her pictures of you, and she may or may not click into a memory when she sees you. She will surely enjoy seeing James and Joseph. Her comfort phrase is "Help me help me. I don't know what to do," When she is not focused, she repeats that, even in her sleep. She...

Lisa writes: Joseph has been teasing us with walking for a couple of weeks now. He'll take one step, two. Maybe four. Then sit down and refuse to repeat the feat. Here's how many he go up to today.

Lisa writes: The nice thing about this concept is that you can really pack a lot of babies very efficiently into a very small space.

Lisa writes: The joke here is that James keeps calling Tom "mama" to be funny, so Tom was calling him "Pedro" to play along. The secondary joke is that Pedro sounds sort of like piedra which means rock. It's probably funnier if you're three.