february 2016

In early February we planned a playdate with a family that was in the ward for just a few months doing an internship. Megan was in DC from January to May with her husband, their 2-year-old daughter, and two of Megan's teenage sisters, who had come along for the experience. The playdate ended up being the same day as playgroup, which was at the Natural History Museum, so we combined the two and met the girls on the metro to travel down together. On Tuesdays the butterfly pavilion is free, so after watching a tarantula feeding and holding a grasshopper, we went in to look at the butterflies.

Jed loves to come to work with me and help, and he particularly loves wearing the headsets. This particular project was the Choreographers' Showcase, and I needed to start setting up a little before Scott got home from work, so Jed came with me to help. I feel very blessed to work in a place where I feel comfortable doing that, and as long as I'm still able to get the work done that I need to, my production managers are okay with it too.

We were lucky enough to have Don and Carol come to visit in the middle of February, which is always a treat for all of us. We did lots of fun things with them, including eating at Jed's favourite restaurant (Silver Diner), our favourite restaurant (Chevy's) and going to the zoo.

While Don and Carol were here, I had an all-day gig at the Kennedy Center, the second Mason Bates concert. He's the new composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center, and is all about taking classical music and doing new things with it so the audience is engaged in a more comprehensive way. His first concert was "progressive" in the sense that the audience moved (progressed) through different rooms to experience different decades of ambient music, with a heavy dose of projections and mood lighting. This project took place in a traditional theatre with a thrust stage.

At the end of February Scott, Jed, and I took a Saturday (right before I went into insane tech week) and spent some time together at the Air & Space II Museum - it is a Smithsonian, but out near Dulles airport instead of downtown. There isn't enough space in the downtown museum for all of the planes and shuttles that they own, so this extension center is kind of an overflow area. They also have the Discovery Shuttle, which is simply too big to be housed in the building downtown. There is a lot of neat stuff at that one, and we tend to go there more than the original. Jed's favourite part is the plane that the kids can actually get in and pretend to fly, of course!

Jed discovered Super Mario Bros at a friend's house, and immediately became enamored with it. This fascination soon turned into an obsession, and he now plays it every single day. The structure of his day revolves around being able to play half of his screen time in the morning with me, and half of it in the evening when Scott gets home from work. He can earn extra levels by using the potty, and loses playing time if he's particularly uncooperative. It is his motivation to get his morning routine done and literally the first thing he wants to do when Scott gets home from work. At first he was really terrible, and too scared to do anything but be in a bubble the whole time - but slowly he became comfortable playing and is now quite good. It has been a good tool for him to work on his anxiety with - he is no longer terrified of the bad guys and is able to face them confidently. He still often loses his special abilities and/or dies, and while he used to totally freak out when those things happened, he now takes it in stride (usually). It has been good for him in multiple ways!