The summer of 2016 certainly hasn’t been boring. After a nice long informative meeting with the Sickkids genetics department we have formal confirmation that there really isn’t anything to do/not do for the time being. The cavernoma situation has slowly become a fact of our life. Happily, the kiddo hasn’t had any vertigo issues since May so we are now chugging along with all systems normal.
July was a blur of day camps for the kiddo and work for the adults. August included some real summer holiday plans with a week at my parents house in New Brunswick and another week in Temagami at summer camp. Wanapitei offered a week long ‘Family Camp’ that allowed all three of us to almost completely escape work and electronics. It was the first backcountry trip that I’ve taken since having Portia and meeting Simon so it was exciting to rediscover camping with these people I love. There were just as many bugs, stinky out houses, and smelly body parts as expected, plus even more stunning moons, loon called still morning lakes, daily canoe trips, heart racing cliff jumps, and new friends than I could have hoped for.
We’ve been back from summer camp for less than a week and already Portia has lost her first tooth, I got to train with a few Cirque du Soleil performers, and Simon and I received invitations to move to the next stage of the Canadian Space Agency’s Astronaut Corp recruitment. we have officially met the minimum requirements to apply for the job, which is a pretty big achievement in my books. With 3772 people applying for 2 positions the chances of actually becoming an astronaut remains incredibly remote, but it has been fun just throwing my hat in the ring and spending my summer imagining the possibility.
Work has finally slowed down. Like myself, most of my clients take vacation in August. The rest of the year, however, is looking bananas work-wise. Detroit in early September and a full week in New Brunswick are already confirmed along with a looming project in Mexico plus potential training sessions for a big corporation in Montreal, Atlanta, Ohio, Chicago, New Jersey, Oregon, Illinois and two more in Mexico that all need to happen by end of 2016. Another lifetime ago the prospect of so much travel would have been exciting. I still love that my work provides opportunities to explore non-vacation places that one would rarely travel to by choice, but the thought of scheduling all that, missing the kid and leaving Simon with all the home-front responsibilities along with his own demanding work schedule takes some of the fun out of it. Sounds like I need to find someone in my neighbourhood that we can hire to help with dog walking, school drop offs and maybe a few of those myriad other little things.
