ERIN COOKS

February 19, 2009

A necessarily short post this evening. I meant a longer one with photos and wit, but somewhere around the tenth hour of my day trip to Houston, I decided all you were going to get was a mini-entry.

Erin had a clinic appointment in Houston this morning, and we scheduled it early, so she could spend the rest of the morning and into the afternoon doing a photo shoot in the Ronald McDonald Room at the hospital. This was the first session to provide the artwork for a new cookbook that Erin is writing. It will have recipes that kids can cook even if they are stuck in the hospital (no stove or oven). Some of the recipes are fairly simple and a pre-schooler with some assistance could have a go at making and eating them. Others have, let's say, more complexity. The proceeds from the sales will go to support more research for pediatric cancer. That's her plan, and I'm sticking with it.

Anyway, Erin made frozen fruit salad cups, key lime pie, and guacamole for the camera today, and ran out of time to make twice-baked potato cuties. Kim Christensen did the photography, and I will be excited to see how they look. She did a fantastic job under primitive and interrupted circumstances.

Erin had looked forward to the day for a while, because, well doing a photo shoot sound exciting and possibly even glamorous. I think she imagined it more like sports photography, where she would be in the kitchen doing her thing, and the photographer would walk around trying to catch the right shot. Instead, it was more like "let's pretend to cook" so the photographer can get the angle and light right. Both my kids are all about expectations and things going according to (their) plan. Needless to say, it wasn't exactly what she expected. When she had to cut things short (not getting to the potato dish she had planned) because she had been recalled to the clinic for a hemoglobin transfusion, I knew better than to try and jolly her up. At that point it was merely a matter of surviving the day. This does not even count that the transfusion pushed our departure back so that she missed fencing (the first night with real foils).

She's asleep now. Tomorrow will be a better day. I think she plans on boarding the bus at school and driving back to Houston (within three blocks of Texas Children's, actually), to go on a field trip to the Natural Science Museum. Since we were just there in December, I might try to talk her into taking a personal day tomorrow, to get over her twelve-hour extravaganza today.