photographs

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.

Grace graduates from kindergarten. I spend the graduation ceremony wiping away tears, and feel my heart crack a little at how grown up she all of a sudden appears.

Whit leaves the nursery school that I’ve been a parent at for five straight years. That’s bittersweet too: the first school experience that either of my children had, and that I had as a mother.

We have a happy weekend visit in Marion with Hilary and her family. The four cousins have a ball together.

Grace takes a Boston Coach from Laguardia to visit her godmother, an hour away, and then flies home two days later on the Delta Shuttle alone. Her independence makes me feel mostly proud and slightly sad

We enjoy a weekend in Marion with my godsister and her three children, celebrating Margot’s third birthday and the third generation of the Godfamily. Pirate hats and Mardi Gras beads abound.

On a weekend in New Hampshire, Grace and I ride Segways. And then we have a very rough night together.

The children start at their respective camps. Grace’s favorite thing about camp for sure is the lunch room. Very old-school high school cafeteria. Plastic trays and rotating meal of spaghetti, hamburgers, chicken nuggets, etc.

My goddaughter is christened on a glorious May Sunday. My children were hilarious when they took their first communion (which I learned in godmother class was the right thing to do). Whit asked the priest in a whisper whether the wafers had nuts in them, and Grace asked me if the next time I could ask them to use white wine because I told her it was better than red.

Elizabeth and I have a sunny pizza lunch in the park with our five children (!).

Start the summer with a weekend in Manchester with Hadley & family, celebrating my godson’s birthday.

The kids have a blast at our school spring fair and that of their friends Clem and Campbell. Grace and Clem dress up as witches, complete with black hair paint. Removing said hair paint in the bath is an epic job.

Lisa Belkin spurs me to think yet more about the tension between pushing our children ahead and holding them back.

I read Free Range Kids (loved it), Bad Mother (liked it), It Happens Every Day (adored it).

Grace starts writing poetry and blows me away with her insistence, both pedantic and inspirational, that she is going to “look at things a new way.”