Supernova highlights

Over three days of wall-to-wall music, this year’s Supernova International Ska Festival felt like a curated tour through the full arc of ska’s history. There were original Jamaican legends, like the 86-year old Stranger Cole, whom we had had the pleasure of seeing in Costa Rica a few months ago. Two-tone heavy weights Bad Manners headlined the final night of the festival. Third-wave pioneers that fueled D’s personal love of ska featured prominently on the bill. Bands signed to Bad Time Records — the laboratory of emerging talent in the U.S. ska scene today — enjoyed a consolidated block of playing time right in the middle of the festival line-up. And there were also several great international bands, ranging from El Salvador and Mexico to Japan.

scenes from Supernova

This past weekend, which D spent at the Supernova Ska Festival in Virginia, was pure magic — a 72-hour dream of musical delirium and loving community from which D was rudely wakened late Sunday night by American Airlines alerting him to an eleventh-hour delay that completely derailed his return to Costa Rica. It took two hours of post-midnight phone calls and a scramble to purchase last-minute tickets on another carrier to sort out the mess before D could return to his post-festival reverie. Words and photos don’t do the Supernova experience justice, and videos only barely hint at its transcendent joy.

the handoff

Like all good things that seem to end too quickly, the kids’ time in Connecticut passed in a flash. A few days after D’s sister and her kids had arrived from DC to help celebrate Junebug’s birthday, D packed the bags again for a track further north. Having spent a week and a half with their babushka and dedushka, the kids were heading to Maine to visit nana and zadie, with a stop at the Mystic aquarium along the way.

cousin time

D was today years old when he learned the difference between second and third cousins and what Munchkin calls “my removed cousins.” In Russian, everyone is simply a cousin — or an aunt/uncle if they are a generation older — no matter how many branches away one’s distant relations may fall on the family tree. And the truth is that our kids do not spend enough time with their cousins — first, second, or third, removed or not — this is part of the price we pay for serving overseas and leading the lives we lead.

new places, familiar faces

The Connecticut woods are pretty, but tamer and less tangled than the wild boreal forests of northern Maine, where we roamed last summer after returning home from the Philippines. For part of that summer, we had rented a house in Rangeley, about an hour from the Canadian border, where the kids went to camp and we took work breaks by immersing ourselves in the wilds around the Appalachian trail. The two of us won’t make it to Maine this year, but the kids will return to Rangeley with S’s parents this summer.

five for fighting

Like other kids with summer birthdays, Junebug naturally gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop, feting her classmates’ birthdays throughout the school year only to miss out on a celebration of her own when school lets out for the summer. Our frequent moves, which tend to fall during the summer months, add an additional element of disruption, forcing us to get creative at times in rustling up friends for Junebug to play with at her birthday parties.

New York, New York

Well, the kids are now NYC-official, as D made multiple trips to New York last weekend and shared a bit of his home city’s magic with Munchkin and Junebug. Technically, they’ve set foot within New York’s city limits before — S’s aunt lives in the far reaches of Brooklyn, and we paid her a visit a few years back. That hardly counts as a trip to the city in D’s book, however. This past weekend, on the other hand, checked the box in a big way.

dark red stain

The ruling was no less shocking for being widely anticipated. The path — from the smug lies told during Senate confirmation hearings, to the oral arguments in Dobbs, to the leaked draft opinion previewing the Court’s decision to turn the clock back on fifty years of constitutionally protected privacy and reproductive rights — was straight and entirely predictable. 

threading the needle

The event cancellations piled up quickly following our positive diagnoses, the kids’ social calendars — which are a lot fuller than ours — taking a particularly heavy hit. We were planning to return to Uvita, where Munchkin’s soccer team was to play their last away game of the season, but had to scrap our travel plans even before he got sick. Munchkin was the last in the family to come down with COVID, but once both of us tested positive, there was no one to take him. Even as we canceled playdates, lessons, after-school activities, and — most painful for the kids — their end-of-academic-year celebrations, we couldn’t help but thank our lucky stars that we got sick when we did. 

scenes from Halloween

Ferdinand. Coco. The Lego Movie. Frozen (at the outset). The list of movies that Junebug, age 4, has found fear-inducing is long and, at times, surprising. Even more surprising is the one movie we thought would terrify her but which she instead found delightful: The Nightmare Before Christmas. We watched it on the big screen at an outdoor movie night with some friends a week ago as a precursor to Halloween, and Junebug found the entire experience utterly delightful. We joined the same friends last weekend to celebrate the holiday in earnest.