We celebrated Westley’s 6-month birthday with strawberry shortcake from Nugget and lots of photos at home. Though he’s still too young to have any cake himself, he has begun putting everything he finds into his mouth, which makes it easier for us as we began introducing him to solids like rice cereal and baby food. Luckily, this year’s ASRS meeting took place in nearby San Francisco, so I was able to just drive in for the sessions I wanted to attend. On Wednesday, I tried out the new In Situ at the SF MOMA, where Corey Lee’s menu of signature dishes replicated from some of the finest restaurants in the world (including Noma’s Wood Sorrel & Sheep’s Milk Yogurt) made for a delicious lunch with my Duke co-fellows. I was invited for a reception and tour at Genentech’s headquarters in the evening, where I got to see how thousands of liters of Lucentis are produced, and rub elbows with their researchers and medical liasons. I returned to lab on Thursday to take my summer lab students out for lunch to thank them for their hard work. I also took my research med students, including my year-long T32 mentee, for dinner at Takumi Izakaya at their soft opening. On Friday, I returned to the City by the Bay to play reporter for Retina Times and present on a discussion panel for Zeiss’ surgical microscope. I joined a colleague for a prix fixe lunch at Volta, but skipped dinner to beat rush hour traffic on my way back. With a lot of upcoming travel, I skipped the rest of the meeting to spend more time at home.

With Westley’s rash under better control and us becoming more used to our routine, we decided to bring the baby out to explore some Sac restaurants – chowing down comfort food at South, satisfying our Korean crave at Hankook Tofu House, and filling on Indian buffet at Pooja and Mehfil. Our outings were interrupted, however, by a GI bug that led to nausea and vomiting for the whole family. The baby’s symptoms outlasted us by almost a week, culminating in yet another ER visit for IV fluids that kept us up all night. We were feeling better by the time we drove down to Stockton for Melody’s 20th high school reunion with her 20 valedictorian friends, but not before infecting grandma and grandpa also. This week, we were back to full speed, just in time for the Olympic Summer Games in Rio. We watched Brazil show off their national treasures (like Gisele) at the opening ceremony, and prepared for 2 weeks of watching sports that Americans would hardly watch otherwise like rugby, volleyball, and swimming. We joined in the Olympic spirit, and ordered us an Amazon Dash button for Westley for speedy Aquaphor ordering, and a Dash wallet for me for speedy credit card spending. With a third person in our household to care for, we need the speed!