I flew down from Manhattan to celebrate Chet's actual 7th birthday with him down in Social Circle, GA, where he and Ava spend the month of August with their grandparents, my ex's mom and step dad and their cousins. My ex has also been living down there for the past two years, ever since I moved the kids to New York. I come for two days at Christmas and this year three days in the summer. These few days are the only time that the kids have their entire family all in one place. Two of the three cousins, pictured above, Athan and Jovan, are wonderful kids and probably Chet's best friends in the world. Chet, especially, adores it down there and said many times that his dream is for us all to move down there and live all together in this huge log cabin in the middle of the woods.
Though that is hardly my dream I have to say I love it down there too. It's so quiet, I routinely sleep ten hours a night. The lake is lovely. I saw a snowy egret patrolling the shore just the other day.
His birthday, Ava's and their grandma's all come in the summer so the grandma throws a huge summer celebration. Ava was her sous chef and made the caprese salad with cherry tomatoes fresh from the garden. There was also eggplant parmigiana with fresh garden eggplant, and melon right from the garden as well, plus hamburgers, chicken wings, rice, and for dessert an ice cream cake.
This is Chet's second birthday party. The first was at Dave & Buster's right after school let out with his school friends. Whenever the kids complain about how weird it is having a mom and dad in different states, I remind them that they are also lucky to have several birthday parties throughout the summer. Ava tried to complain about the celebration that it was too heavily weighted toward Chet until I reminded her that she already had two parties. The first one was a sleepover on Long Island, the second was in France.
For none of us is this the life we had expected, but it's usually pretty wonderful nonetheless.
