everyday life

A trip to American Girl Place with Grace makes me think about money and what kinds of values I want to instill in my children about it.

I read The Embers by Hyatt Bass, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and Olive Kittredge by Elizabeth Strout.

A post by Mrs. Chicken makes me think hard about my personal mythology, and about the moments that make me who I am.

Thanksgiving in Florida. A first for me. I learn that Grace is now super easy on a plane, because she can sit and watch TV for hours. I learn also that this is not true for Whit.

I launch my Present Tense interview series, and am heartened by the response by those I ask to participate. My preoccupation with the notion of presence leads me to think about why I am always the one taking pictures. It also leads me to reflect on Gwen Bell’s essay about her mother’s death and the resultant melancholy that shapes her life.

We have parent-teacher conferences for both children and learn, in short, that Grace is a high-strung perfectionist who likes to read and enjoys computers and that Whit is a natural comedian who hates being alone and prefers outdoor physical play. In the simplest terms, we have one of me and one of Matt.

Grace shares with me her feelings of not entirely fitting in in her classroom, and of the resultant loneliness. I find myself lost in a quagmire of identification and wonder how best to help her with this.

A poem my father wrote in college is featured as the preface to a book called Finding Pete. I am once again wowed by my own father.

Blog conversation about boys, girls, the families we imagined and the families we have makes me think about my own children. About the differences and joys of each gender and of the various permutations we each wind up with.

I took the children to see Where the Wild Things Are and found myself massively moved. It’s gorgeous.

Weekend in Vermont with Matt’s whole family. There is skeet shooting and marshmallow roasting, and the stunning foliage makes up for the incredibly long and trafficky drive up.

Godmom Gloria comes for a visit and the children swoon.

Grace turned seven and I wrote her my annual letter. Her birthday party is a doll tea with her best friend at a local restaurant. 24 girls and 23 American Girl dolls (and 1 stuffed animal, bless that child).

Halloween: a witch and a clone trooper. This is the first year the children have not matched. I stopped influencing their choices and lo and behold they did not choose to match. Oh well.

Spent the last week of the summer, also the first week of September, in Marion. I took Grace and Whit to Water Wizz, which has become an annual tradition. The weather had fall in it, which made the week bittersweet. I reflected on the summer.

My sister’s marvelous friend Launa began keeping a blog of her year in the South of France with her family. It’s beautiful. She wrote a post about friendship’s changing tides, ebbs and flows, which really made me think.

Whit begins “beginners” at the same school as Grace, who starts 1st grade. It is wonderful to have them at the same school, though the passage from a world with a child at nursery school, unsurprisingly, makes me melancholy.

Steve Jobs returns to Apple. And speaks out about the power and importance of organ donation.

I attended my first “curriculum night” at the kids’ school (for those of you keeping track, yes, this was the first time in three years – I know, A+ to me) and in between the running back and forth between classrooms (Matt was away) I find myself blown away by Grace’s writing and drawing in her journal in particular.

I also sent my kids to school on picture day with unwashed, unbrushed hair and old tee-shirts. I forgot about picture day, but wow was I reminded the minute we walked into the lobby. Another gold star.

I remembered a special friend that I’ve fallen out of touch with, and with whom I continue to hope to reconnect.

My knee finally recovers, and then I come down with swine flu.

I attend a Firestarter session with Danielle Laporte in New York, and meet Aidan from Ivy League Insecurities. Incidentally, both women exceed my (already sky-high) expectations!

I find Meg Casey’s words tremendously reassuring as I wonder why what feels like such massive internal shifts seem to be hidden between a status quo exterior.

I take the kids to see Madagascar II and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (the latter is much better, I think)

Both kids’ camps end. Grace is devastated by the prospect of no cafeteria trips for ten months. Whit seems unfazed.

Ethel Kennedy Shriver and Ted Kennedy both die; for some reason I am surprisingly affected by both of their passing.

I turn 35 and am none too psyched about it.

Bloggy friends start a provocative conversation about what we really want. This makes me think about how little I know what the answer to that is for me. Eek.

I have dinner with one of my college roommates who is in town from London. Such a treat to have an uninterrupted evening with her, and we both laugh and fight tears more than once in the course of a dinner.

I start really thinking hard about the challenges and joys of being fully present in our lives.

We spend a week in Vermont, a few days with Grandma and Grandpa and a few days on Lake Champlain. Then we have a few days in Marion for an end-of-summer vacation. Labor Day was so late this year that the last week of the summer was really the first week of September, and I felt keenly aware of it being fall already.

Kathryn and Eloise come down to Marion the day before my birthday for a swim, really great to see them both.

The annual Marion Book Sale is a huge hit, as usual. Where else can you buy 50 books for $15? And what better way to round out the Berenstain Bears and Magic Treehouse collections?

The most stunning sunset I can remember was the backdrop for a last-day-of-August dusk swim with friends in Wareham. It makes me shiver to remember the colors as the sun went down on the summer.

I read Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan, After You by Julie Buxbaum, How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely, World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler, Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, and Time of my Life by Allison Winn Scotch.

The annual Fourth of July parade and celebration of my mother’s birthday. The WW2 veterans, in their dwindling numbers, make me cry as usual. Whit sits on a tractor at Home Depot wearing camouflage fleece, lobster-embroidered khaki shorts, red Old Navy girls’ flip-flops, and Mardi Gras beads. I take them both to see Up in the pouring rain.

I start to realize the pain in my knee is something real. Big bummer. I have a cortisone shot which hurts like hell but doesn’t much help.

We hike on Mount Washington and camp overnight. With five adults and six children. Getting six kids to bed in a room with four triple-decker bunk beds is a challenge. Crazy thunder and lightning all night long another challenge. Pouring rain and snow in the morning for the hike down a route that is very difficult even in good weather is a third challenge.

Judith Warner’s column about the resentment and pressure to be silent that educated and privileged women face touched off an interesting blogosphere conversation. For me the real questions were around judgments we make about others based on superficial indicators. I then wondered about how this is a short leap from interviewing, which is a big part of what I do for work.

I read Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks, Perfect Life by Jessica Shattuck, and Home Game by Michael Lewis.

Whit starts to swim on his own, wearing his lucky hot pink swim shirt (hand me down from his sister. and ultra manly). Oddly, but in a way that echoes his contrarian approach to life, he is only able to swim underwater.

We have a birthday dinner to celebrate my 35th birthday with three of my very dearest friends and their husbands. It is a wonderful evening filled with love and laughter.

Grace acts (as a pirate) in her first play, the camp production of Peter Pan.