We’ve reached the end of July. We would ordinarily be in the US right now on holiday. I would be in Idaho doing some manual labor on a house we bought late last year. The kids would be in Indiana playing with their cousins. My wife would be hanging out with her mother. We would reunite in Idaho to hang out with my family, go camping, etc. Alas, none of that is to be. Having passed the halfway point, it appears that 2020 is sort of becoming the year that wasn’t.
Having said that, it’s not like we’re doing nothing. May usually begins a season of special days for us. We had Mothers’ Day and my birthday. In June we had Fathers’ Day. July will be the birthdays for both girls. Priya’s is in August. It’s different celebrating these things during a pandemic obviously and calls for a bit of creativity.
For my birthday, in addition to receiving a few books, a shirt, a cake and handmade cards, I was presented with a Vidhug. I’d never heard of it before but it’s basically an app that allows people to submit video clips of their birthday wishes. It’s pretty cool and quite wonderful to see all these faces from different chapters of my life. A couple years ago a friend of ours pulled something together for my father-in-law’s birthday but he had to do it the “old fashioned” way. He received mpegs from people and used some video editing software to pull them altogether. It was massively time consuming but a really cool thing in the end. Having this app makes it all pretty easy. It was a half hour of people from my past and present: 15 different countries and 8 US states. Newborns to 90 years of age. Greetings came in English, French, Dutch and Kirundi. There were house pets. A horse. A mounted elk. Fresh cookies. Singing. Some champagne. A birthday cake. It’s going to serve as a really nice archive. Quite the treasure, I have to say.
* * *
A few weeks ago our soon-to-be 7-year-old lost her second incisor. She now has no front teeth. I distinctly remember those days with slightly affected speech and the frequent rubbing of the tongue over the gap. I was against the idea of a tooth fairy but somehow it happened for our kids. This is an interesting fairy in that it tends to use the currency of the country where the tooth was lost. When the previous tooth was lost, our inquisitive little daughter left a list of questions for the fairy under her pillow along with the tooth. Among other things she asked for a description of what she looked like and some other things about her job. And she asked her to leave the tooth since she wanted to keep it. The tooth fairy complied with the demands.
I wasn’t nearly as demanding back in the day. In any case, this time things got a bit more complicated because we lost the tooth sometime between the extracting and the going to bed. It was likely my fault. I pulled the tooth in the late afternoon and what I didn’t realize was that she set it on the coffee table. In the meantime Priya had made some meringues that we snacked on while watching a Star Wars movie. Unfortunately the meringues were the exact same color as the tooth. Given that I am notoriously tidy, after the movie I proceeded to clean up the coffee table, likely scooping up bits of meringue with the tooth. I’m not really sure but I think that’s what happened.
Tears ensued as it became apparent that the tooth fairy might not have the tiny calcified structure to retrieve from beneath her pillow. Ugh. When I realized that I may have been the culprit, I proceeded a gag-inducing search of the two rubbish bins where the tooth might have ended up. Unfortunately it was the proverbial needle in the haystack. Later, when I went to kiss her goodnight, the tears streamed again and her cute, sad eyes guilted me into a second failed, albeit brief, attempt at finding the tooth. I finally gave up and we convinced her that she’d still get her compensation due even without the tooth.
* * *
In July the Kenyan government decided to open up a bit. We spent a nice Covid-friendly evening at some friends’ house celebrating the 4th of July. It was good to get out and see some new faces, albeit without the hugs and handshakes. It was a hint of freedoms to come - though were not there yet by any stretch of the imagination.
Part of the opening is to allow internal travel within Kenya. That’s a pretty big step and we’re going to take advantage of it, just in case they reverse the decision next month. We’re planning to go to a national park with some friends, driving rather than flying to make sure that we are in contact with as few people as possible. It will be interesting to see how this will work with pandemic restrictions. It’s not the same as going to the US but we’ll take what we can get at this point.
