First February/February Firsts

It feels unbelievable to be typing this, but we have come to the first anniversary of Carol's death. In mid-February, Jeremy went back to Texas to spend time with his dad and siblings. I can't believe that we've already passed a year's worth of holidays and memories without her, though obviously she has been a part of every family gathering we have had.

This month also marks Nutmeg's first birthday. (We told her it was her birthday; she didn't seem particularly excited about it.) Now that she's a year old, it's safe to let her start galloping around a little more without worrying about her joints, so she has been fully enjoying running around the back yard as Turtle chases tennis balls. She has her own, extra-large tennis ball that she carries around during the proceedings.

Other February happenings:

We went to see Jurassic Park at the symphony, something that Jeremy in particular has been looking forward to for a year. It's one of his favorite movies, and he was so excited for Oscar to get to see it for the first time. It really is fun to sneak peeks at your kid grinning at a movie that you've loved since you weren't much older than they are now.

Oscar, Romie, and I also had a great day at the zoo over Oscar's February break. The weather was perfect, which meant there were more animals out to see than when we went in December. Of course, it was also a holiday, so we weren't the only ones who thought it would be a nice day to go to the zoo– it was probably the busiest I've ever seen it. And there's a lot of construction going on as they work on the new giraffe building, which means you have to take some funny routes to get some places. But we got to see Sully, the baby gorilla!

Rehearsal and taekwondo kept us busy this month. The play opened the last weekend in February, following my first tech week in over a decade. I'm only in one scene (which is a great way to dip my toe back into being a theater kid; I think I'm going to try to find other shows to audition for in the future), so I've been killing time behind the scenes doing a simple stitch with variegated thread. And the boys are working toward their next belt test, which involves them choreographing a weapons routine.

We watched a lot of Winter Olympics. Since Oscar was about two, he has understood that the Olympics happening means that the TV will be on a lot more than usual for two full weeks, but this is the first time he has really paid much attention to what is happening in the games. Of course, the skiing events are his favorite.

Jeremy and I finished our Winter Adult Reading Program and got our annual mugs. This is our fourth year and fourth mug.

In dog news, we had another first with Nutmeg when she went into heat. (We have to let her go through at least one cycle– probably two, since her first was a little earlier than expected– before we can have her spayed. It's especially important for giant breeds not to spay or neuter too early because it can mess with their growth.) So we are now experts at diapering an enormous puppy, who luckily got used to the whole procedure pretty quickly and was very good, as is her way.

Books:

• Please Look After Mom, by Shin Kyung-sook: A haunting, narratively distinctive story about a missing woman and the family that has no idea how to find her. The core of this book is memory– the family members' memories of Mom, but also her own memory loss. It's beautiful and heartbreaking.
• Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman: I'd never read anything by Backman, but his name keeps coming up in book club, so I decided to give him a chance. I wasn't expecting this book to be so funny, though it does give in to sappiness at times. Tonally, it reminded me a lot of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, which came as a pleasant surprise.
• Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann: The source material for The Sheep Detectives, a movie that sounded so stupid I didn't think it could be real until I saw the preview, which made me laugh out loud several times. Like Backman, Swann is Swedish, and this book is also driven by humor despite the dead body in the middle of it.
• Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney: I can never really decide if I like Sally Rooney's writing style, but I do find it fascinating, the way her rhythms and unusual sentence structures sort of pull the reader along. Chess is the main metaphor here, but she's also playing with the musical meaning of the title term, placing us in a very specific moment in two brothers' lives as they seem to be moving from what their identities and relationships were before their father's recent deaths to what they eventually will be.

TV Shows:

• The Traitors, seasons 3 and 4: I don't know how I managed to miss an entire season of this show, but I am caught up now. Season 3 introduced me to still more semi-famous folks I'd never heard of before, my favorite being Tom Sandoval, who is the least self-aware person on TV. Season 4 actually features several people I had heard of before, which worried me, because these folks were demonstrably smarter than contestants on previous seasons– but not to fear, voting is still based mostly on vibes. This was the first finale that I watched the night it aired, and I was both impressed and bummed by the results.
• Bridgerton, season 4: I am not obsessed with this show and have never really liked Benedict as a character (in previous seasons, he has felt like the brother the writers threw all of the least-developed plotlines at: Benedict wants to be an artist! Benedict hangs out with bohemians and sexual deviants! Benedict gets involved in a throuple with a married woman and her other boyfriend!). Anyway. This season he is pressured to finally settle down and get married already, and then conveniently falls into a Cinderella plot with Sophie, a maid who loves him but weirdly enough isn't super interested in being a wealthy man's mistress. I know it sounds like I must have hated season 4, but it has actually been my favorite? Somehow? All of the background plots are interesting and amusing, there is some real exploration of questions of obligation and independence from expectation, and relationships develop and evolve in ways that mostly make sense for once.

Movies:

• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die: My first movie-theater movie of 2026 was this Sam Rockwell sci-fi. It's part time travel, part Black Mirror, part manic humor, and it's a lot of fun. Haley Lu Richards has the perfect energy to match Rockwell, but the rest of the cast is also very good.
• Moana 2: Oof. Deeply unimpressed by this one– especially the music.
• Jurassic World: Rebirth: We weren't expecting this to be a good movie, but it also wasn't as much fun as we were expecting. They shoehorn in an entire subplot just to ensure that there's a child to endanger. Also, it seems somehow disrespectful to play the score of the original movie over much less interesting characters in much dumber situations.

In stitching news, I've caught up to mid-October on the temperature stitch, and it's interesting in retrospect to see how consistent the temps were for several months in a row last year. I'm almost done with my "Act I" variegated backstage stitch, which involved a fair amount of frogging despite being quite straightforward because it's very easy to get distracted in a green room. And I tried my hand at this Colorado flag stitch, which turned out a bit wonky but was fun enough that I'm going to do a second attempt in which the C and the sun look closer to normal.