Fall has come and the white ash next door has dropped its leaves, many of them making their way to our back yard. This photo is actually a week old. After I took it it continued to rain and the children had to find things to do inside. This wasn't a problem because Marcela had picked up tickets to the Children's Museum in Boston and we all rode into the city together. I taught my class and the kids played around the museum. There was sand to be molded and trucks to be driven around and groceries to be purchased and giant bubbles to be blown and so on and so forth for almost three hours. We all met back at the Alewife station of the Red Line and drove home together along route 2 and 62. The rains continued. On Friday I went to Maxim's pre-school class at the Community School and taught the pre-schoolers some science concepts through story and song. One of the stories I told began, "Once upon a time in the great kingdom of Maynardia there was a very spoiled little princess..." "Hey!" Maxim shouted. I usually tell the story I told with Maxim as the main character, "Not you, honey," I assured her. It kept raining, water gathered in small but growing puddles in our basement. Bones couldn't get to his litter box. On Saturday I drove to Sandwich for a workshop. It poured. Marcela took the kids under umbrella through the rain downtown to Diana's Dance Zone. Maxim is learning dance steps for the Christmas show they will do at the Middle School auditorium. She likes to practice. Noah is fascinated with trains. He likes us to wait in South Acton for Marcela's train to leave on the mornings that we drop her off. He holds his hand out the window and waves. "Bye train!" He shouts, "Bye train!" He usually gets a wave from one of the conductors. He always asks if we are going to the train when we get in the car. He has a small plastic train set that he plays with in the living room and a conductor's hat that he got from his Grammy. Saturday afternoon, it poured some more. At the end of the day, just as the sun was going down, the clouds broke at the western horizon. Sun light is like a breath of pure oxygen after ten days of cloud-diffused light. And then, just as quickly, the sun set and the winds came. 45-50 MPH winds all day Sunday. The leaves that had turned by then were all blown from their trees. Sunday night Marcela and I dropped Maxim and Noah at Griffin's house with his parents John and Lisa (bless their hearts) and went out for a Mother's Day (Argentina) dinner. Marcela is a wonderful mother to our children, and we celebrated that fact and talked about the kids and laughed at the joy they bring us every day. We have the mother to thank. Gracias a la mama mas mejor, gracias Marcela, por todo. Te amamos mucho mucho!

More rain. It does wonders for the remaining plant life and sends earthworms tumbling into our basement, but it hasn't been ideal outside weather at all. Yesterday morning, Maxim's friend from Community School, Joey, invited her over for a play date. Having only one child for the middle of the day kept it quiet in the house. I tried to balance the checkbook and moved things around in the basement. I found puddles of water under the plastic from painting and around a pile of odd-sized wood. I put the fan on it to hurry evaporation. Noah enjoyed having his parents to himself and Maxim had great fun at Joey's house. I made artichoke heart marinara over penne and whipped up a batch of butterscotch brownies, which I haven't made since I was 13 years old and which Marcela had never eaten before. We started downloading tape from the summer and fall to send along with Marcela's mom Nacha's birthday package. She has a birthday on October 31st. This morning was as gray and rainy as every other day this week. I went on a long walk through the school woods and then took Maxim to her gymnastics class. The kids played very well today, almost without fighting at all. While we were at gymnastics, Marcela and Noah harvested our small carrot crop from the front raised-bed garden. There were nine or ten in all, not too big, and we managed to finish them by mid-afternoon. After dinner - Marcela had made a delicious barley and corn soup and fried spinach - we put the kids in their pajamas and drove over to the library for Tuesday night storytime. We have a wonderful children's librarian in Maynard; he remembers every child's name and offers these weekly evening story readings. Tonight, Noah's best friend Aron, who used to go to his daycare, was there. Noah shared his blankie with Aron, but not another little girl who also wanted to sit there. "Mommy, the baby is on my blanket," he cried out. Maxim showed Mark (the librarian) the pictures of princesses on her new pajamas. They didn't want to go to bed when we got home, as usual, but they fell asleep quickly. We can't wait to see the sun again. I think we are all tired of these dreary rainy days.

Rain. Now in the third day. The kids find ways to play and scuttle up and down from room to room, picking things up, making up games, putting them down somewhere else and moving on. But they miss being able to run. Noah runs anway, around the loop through the hall, kitchen, and living room. Maxim makes up more complicated play and moves more things. Last night Maxim and Noah made a dancing train around the loop. Noah dances by bouncing his squat little body and moving his arms alternately and separately up and down. Maxim made sure the train would have to stop in the kitchen so she could show her new dance. "When I go like this," she says to Marcela and I while showing her best bow, "You clap, ok?" She opens the kitchen door halfway into the room and goes 'back stage' behind it. Noah continues into the living room, moving well to the music. We are listening to Vic Lali, our local children's musician. During the summer Maxim and Noah went almost every Thursday to Vic's morning music sing-a-long at the Knights of Columbus Hall downtown. Vic is giving us a piano, if we can get it here to our house. Marcela had several booklets with circles and squares of sample book materials. She and the kids pulled the pieces off and built another train collage to add to the wall in the kid's room. They have just begun their work in this photograph. They will finish today by adding glitter to all the things they painted and glued yesterday. You can also see the mural Marcela painted on the wall behind the sink in this photograph. Maxim found a deck of my playing cards yesterday and asked me what games you played with them. "Lots of grown up games, sweetie." I answered.
"Can you play kids' games, too?"
"Well..." I tried to think if I knew the rules to any kids' games. "You could play go fish."
“Go fish?" She asked. "How does that play? I never played with these before, that’s why. Do you have to take all the cards? I want to play beat the fish.”
“No, not beat the fish, go fish.”
“Can we play go fish? Is it easy? So you take all the cards? Well, what about these ones because these don’t have any fans on them. Daddy can you help me play beat the fish?” We played and she won.
They also watched movies. Once Upon a Potty is Noah's favorite one right now, even though he still won't sit. We had ravioli with an asparagus cream sauce for dinner last night and each of us had another of the spice cookies that Marcela and Maxim made yesterday morning. We talked about going to Hull this weekend, weeks ago. The rain has disuaded us. If it is not too wet, we will carefully rearrange the basement to accomodate the yard things we moved into it on Friday. They have forecast rain through next Saturday. We will have to rent some more movies.

When you are backcountry camping, you put your sleeping bag into what is called a "stuff sack" before you put it on your pack. The stuff sack is the smallest possible nylon bag into which your sleeping bag can compress. Your goal is to make the sleeping bag as small as you can so that it fits into your backpack. As summer suddenly becomes autumn, and the daylight loses out to nighttime, our daily activities begin to feel like that sleeping bag. Where we once had ambling days full of morning light and daylight and evening light when we could play outside and still have time to do the dishes and make dinner, we now rush home from work and hope we can get a snack into Maxim and Noah before sending them outside for a twilight ride up and down Front Street. It doesn't take longer to finish things, but the shorter days makes it feel that way. We have finally put away everything that was brought out for the barbeque. Today we will finish putting away summer yard items - the grill, the round table, the plastic chairs, and many of the kids' toys. We may have to mow the lawn one more time or twice more, but that should do it before winter. These shorter days and compressed activities have had an effect on the children this week. They don't seem ready to sleep when bed time comes, they wake up irritable and grumpy. Transitions are challenging for anyone, harder still when you are too young to understand. Over the fence to the north toward Summer Hill, you can see the colors just begining to emerge. This change was as sudden as the shorter days, and part of the same cycle of fall. The kids have sudden changes as well. Yesterday we asked Noah for the third day in a row to try sitting on the potty. He has been celebrating the fact that he is "a big boy" for a couple of weeks now. "No," he said matter-of-factly, "Because I not big enough." Maxim was in our bed this morning when we woke up. "I had a bad dream," she told me. "I dreamed a dragon took you away," she said. "But then I was here when you woke up," I said. "I wanted to make sure," she laughed, a little nervously. They play until it is dark, Noah running his car as fast as his little legs will take him and Maxim speeding back and forth on her bicycle and learning to stop with precision. "It's too dark kids," I holler from the doorway where I am correcting papers. "Ooohh," Maxim whines from the bend in the road, "We want to play more. Just one more daddy," Maxim pleads. "One more daddy," Noah parrots. "Ok, one more." Then we gather together at the table, the four of us, for dinner. Noah yells and makes monster noises and Maxim talks non-stop about princesses and fairies and where we hid her Halloween costume, and together we eat until our plates are empty.

It was a beautiful October 1st. This Saturday may have been the nicest Saturday weather-wise since winter broke last year. The sun was shining, the air was warm, but not hot, there was a light breeze. In the morning, Marcela took Maxim to her dance class and then met up with Marie and Gordon and Gwen to walk around downtown Maynard for the annual Maynard Fest. All of the stores put out sidewalk displays, there were sing-a-long's for kids and face painting and lawn-mower-pulled trains, and music. The Maynard Fest is trying to become a unique regional outdoor festival - a one-of-its-kind, end-of-the-year celebration - that advertises the town. Marcela returned with Noah close to noon and said Maxim had stayed with Gwen. We ate some lunch and I went back to what I had been doing in the morning: cleaning up the yard and the house, shopping for food and drink, and generally getting things ready for an afternoon and evening of children, food, and fireworks. I moved everything to one side of the yard and mowed. Then I moved everything back to the other side of the yard and mowed. Then I brought out my work table from the basement and a couple of table cloths and I set up a food area in back. I pulled out the bicycle, tricycle, and plastic car from the basement. I cooked potatoes and bacon for potato salad and chopped carrots and mixed dip and swept floors and moved things in the kicthen and moved the car and bartered with neighbors for parking places. All of this while periodically checking in on the Red Sox getting beat up by Randy Johnson. The barbeque and party were my idea, so a lot of the preparation was up to me. The rest of the family prepared in their own special way. They needed their rest because it was going to be a long night of excited conversation and play. (Bones would actually spend most of the party hiding in the hall closet, but he needs his rest too.) We invited people over because we discovered last year that our house sits almost directly underneath the annual fireworks show put on by the management of the Clock Tower Place office building that occupies the old factory buildings here in town. People started showing up at our house at 4:30 and we lit three barbeques at 5:45. After I managed to fight off several other alpha males for barbeque cooking priviledges, we proceeded to keep three grills filled with cooking food for an hour, sausages and hamburgers and vegetables and chicken and mushrooms. At its peak we crowded 35 parents and children into the backyard. Everyone kept asking where we needed to go to see the display. Stay where you are, we'd say. The kids were so excited. Fireworks! At 7:45, we started gathering people into the backyard. Any minute now. And then, without warning, the sky above us opened up. At the very same time that the parents all went ooh and aah, the children tried to jump under our skin and hide. We did not anticipate the shear terror it would evoke in almost every child, and they quickly retreated to the safety of Maxim's bedroom to watch through the window. Marie estimated the display must have cost about $500,000, given its length and complexity, and she quipped about how now she knew where her organization's steep rent costs at Clock Tower Place were going. Esperanza, Micaela, and Aron all stayed outside for the whole show. Brave children. We cleaned up a little bit and sent extra food along with whomever we could convince to take it. It was a festive Maynard Fest this year. This morning, only vague traces on the lawn and warm memories.