Yes, it rains in Florida. This week the common late afternoon rains returned with regularity. I knew it was time to close my computer and head for home when I heard the distant rumbling of the arriving storm cells. Another week, another class prepared. One more to go, and then school starts for me. (!) Marcela has been busy putting together a class on book binding to teach this January, if it is accepted. The kids have been busy being kids. Maxim has organized each of her different collections of dolls and accessories in their various places around her room. She will sit sometimes for more than an hour taking off and putting on doll clothes, building houses out of the modular doll house, and fixing hair. Noah is still on his Spiderman kick. He had his mother take out a spiderman comic novel when they got their library cards on Tuesday night. I have been trying to read parts of it to them, but it is really for adults. Lots of violence. On Thursday morning we drove in to Tampa and picked up los Abuelos at Tampa Internation airport. They will be here through September 20. They are sleeping in our room and we are on the air mattress in the kids' room. It is much roomier than when the family visited us in Hull, but an air mattress is an air mattress. We keep asking ourselves when our adventure is going to end. On Friday night we all went to the Tavern, the gathering place for Eckerd faculty and their kids. Faculty have a beer or soda, the kids ride their scooters around the huge adjacent parking lot. From there, we set out on what proved to be a futile adventure trying to find some place to eat in downtown St. Petersburg, a town seemingly designed to be navigated from a Hummer. One of my colleagues, who admitted that she was bad at directions, gave me directions to get to a kid-friendly place. After an hour and fifteen minutes of parking and walking and parking again and walking, we headed for home, defeated. Not only was the named restaurant nowhere to be found, but there were simply no other adequate venues. We met with much more success on Saturday. In the morning, Paco and Natcha went with the kids to their gymnastics class. We ate a pasta lunch and then everyone napped for almost three hours. We dressed and headed out to St. pete Beach, the ocean, to have dinner and take in the sunset. We returned to a place we have been to twice, but will not go to again. Nevertheless, the food was fine. Better still, the ocean was serenity. The sunset, divine. I am posting pictures at Flickr. As you can see from his posture, Bones is happy that there are two more cat lovers in the house and is especially glad that he no longer has to move around in a cat cage every few days. He decided to shed almost an entire second cat's worth of hair since arriving in Florida, but he is generally content and eating well and even enjoying the outside a little bit. The rain this morning kept people from the weekly jaunt to Passe-a-Grille beach, but we are already prepared. We got our own beach umbrella and goggles for the kids. The first hurricane of the season, Ernesto, has gathered south of the Dominican Republic. They say its headed this way, generally speaking at this point. We hope it either misses us completely or passes us by peacefully. For now, we'll enojy the cooling effects of the late summer rains.

Well, the first full week of school for Maxim went without a hitch. Marcela drives her in in the morning and either she or I pick her up. She is doing a lot of activities and says she is enjoying herself. The worry I felt last week about her having a tough transition have faded. She will do fine. We have her on the waiting list for two other schools that offer Spanish langue instruction, but it is likely that nothing will change until next year. The first grade has more seats to fill and one often has a better chance in the school choice lottery - the last noun is really the only important one to understanding how school choice works in Florida at the moment. We also decided to keep Noah out of pre-school for the time being. We were not thrilled with the set-up or the teacher at the place where we had reserved him a spot. He is next on the waiting list at a closer school, but they also have an intermittent drop-off program which may work better for us this semester. For the time being, he's quite happy being home with Marcela most days. Marcela had an interview with the fine arts program director at Eckerd early in the week. He would like her to design a bookbinding course for Winter Term this coming January. There are still some budget questions - he has no bookbinding equipment so things will need to be purchased - but she is enjoying thinking through a course and putting together the proposal. We are still trying to work out how to get to all of the places we need to be in a day with only one car. I took the bus one day, but the buses are not wed to the schedules they print, so you never know if you just missed a bus or if one is about to come. I missed the bus one day and waited a half hour for one another day and then yesterday I put air in my bicycle tires and will try riding to school as another option. Yesterday the kids started gymnastics with coach John at Gold Medal Gymnmastics, a one-person gym facility for children. Half of my colleague's were there with their kids too. Which is the reflection of the sort of group we have fallen into, professionals with children our children's age. People with like concerns and similar interests and the same dedication to their children. It is, of course, too early to tell, but we are pleased so far. This morning we will go to the beach for the Sunday morning swim.

Has it been two weeks since we arrived? The time has passed in a strange way, seeming to go by fast, but being so full it feels as if we have been here much longer than two weeks. Maxim has already made two friends at school - Jada and Amanda. And she says she loves it, although she does have stories about eating too slow in the cafeteria and having half her lunch thrown away. We are having her practice eating fast at lunch time at home to help her get up to speed; they aren't as relaxed about timing in elementary school as they are in pre-school. We took Noah to an open house at his new school and decided we were glad we put Maxim in public kindergarten. It will be fine for Noah for pre-school (although Marcela has put him on waiting lists at other schools). Marcela has been hard at work finishing up unpacking the house and setting things up. We are literally down to a very few boxes and some storage decisions. The living room needs a new piece; I am going to make a shelf similar to the others I made for our Maynard living room, but bulkier for the televisions, VCR, and DVD players. (Marcela also wants me to make a puppet theatre for the kids, which I think is a fine idea.) Speaking of the kids, they also have a great set up here and everything is unpacked. They can even put up the small yard tent in their inside play area. The down side of having this large a space behind the beds in the room is that one or the other of them wakes up in the night and is frightened by the dark. We don't mind nightly visitors, but they are getting so big it does start to crowd out the bed. We spend a lot of our time in the kitchen, sitting at the table, standing around the island (peninsula?), preparing food. Marcela set up this room first and it has been our comfort zone ever since. We do like the living room and use it more than we did the living room in Maynard, but the kitchen/dining room is the center of the house. It all gradually begins to feel like home.

It has been a comedy of errors and a few missteps, but we seem to have achieved success in getting our next tier of arrival matters in place. We got high speed for the house - but not cable. Our [semi] expensive stereo, which had stopped working when we lived at Sudbury Street, has begun working again (?), so we have radio. Last week while admiring the new 2006 Prius driving in front of me on 34th Street North, one of the main secondary arterials in St. Petersburg, I ran into it. First accident ever. Tuesday, when we drove halfway to the next county to get our car registered in Florida and to exchange our Massachusetts licenses for Florida licenses, Marcela failed the vision test at the counter. Yesterday, as Marcela was having her eyes checked by the optomitrist making small talk about how we were trying to decide whether to put Maxim in pubic school or to stick with the private kindergarten, we learned that school began Tuesday...two days ago. (Oh, and it turned out that Marcela's eyes were fine. (!) ) By the time we got home, the schools had closed for the day, so we decided to enjoy the evening. We harvested the last pineapple of the season, boiled some pasta, and tossed up a delicious lima bean and cottage cheese salad. (By 'we' I of course mean Marcela, except for the pineapple; I harvested that.) After dinner, we scrambled to do our research on the Pinellas County School web site (it's a 'school choice' community; about which, more later.) and this morning it happened. Maxim began kindergarten at Lakewood Elementary School. We'll post some pictures on Flickr later on today. We were heartened by the fact that her kindergarten teacher, Miss Wester, is a native of Leominster, Massachusetts and a die-hard Red Sox fan. Noah doesn't begin school until Monday and my classes will not begin until Labor day, so Maxim is our pioneer into the wider St. Petersburg life. We are very proud of her.

Well, we're here. This is the backyard. A raised deck surrounded by tropical fruit trees and native bushes. The kids are happy we are next to the park, because this is not a yard designed for children's play. We took everything from our storage in north St. Petersburg to our house. It took two trips and about five gallons of sweat. Keith Castleman, an environmental studies senior who will long be in my debt, helpd haul the roughly 7,000 pounds of random household goods. The boxes have been moved inside and mostly emptied. The kids are unpacked in their room. We went to our first ball game as a family yesterday only to watch the Red Sox blow a four run lead and then lose in the 10th. The home crowd was ecstatic. The kids enjoyed the circus atmosphere and sat through all 10 innings. They went to see the tank of sting rays held in the centerfield bleachers, but the exhibit was closed for the afternoon. They decided to dance on the stage instead. Any chance to ham it up seems to thrill them these days. We have to tell them often to keep their voices down. This is not because they do not have adequate play space at home, mind you. We gave them the master bedroom, put the bunkbeds near the door and have encouraged them to contain their toys to the back part of that room. There seems to be enough space for them to play separately and together and it has diminished (although it will never halt) the incessant flow of toys into the rest of the house. They like to pretend they are going on vacation, pack up suitcases, take things elsewhere and unpack them, which requires other rooms and will more than likely run against the grain of our wishes. But that's the trial of parenthood. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat again. When it cools down in the evening, which, contrary to popular myth, it has done now and again since we have arrived, we wander out to the park, Seminole Park, where Noah can pretend the jungle gym is a train and Maxim can jump from her swing high into the air. We kick around the soccer ball and talk about what to eat for dinner. The kids love to use the water fountain, although the water is not New England water in that it tastes every inch of the limestone calcine it has come from. The night before last the sun went down and kissed the top of a storm cell, cumulus maximus, out on the distant horizon. What this landscape lacks in topography it makes up for in sky, as far as I can tell. Beauty. A fine welcome home.