August and September 2021

It's fall already? How is that possible? Eighth, fourth, and kindergarten for the kids, and a new school year for me as well. Helen has Ms. Garcelon, who taught Samantha before her, and Mr. Lewis as a para, while Samantha has ms. Lau. Both are in in-person orchestra (Newbold and Sibelius) and take the subway in with Robert and the schoolbus home together at the end of the day.

At work I moved offices, in the same building/floor, but to the other side, and traded in a view of the Green Monster for the green roof.

Last weekend, we had an end-of-the-season get-together with the church softball team. First we played wiffle-kick-ball, where people had three pitches and then got a chance to kick a kickball if they hadn't already gotten on base, and then we had supper at our house. It was nice to hang out with people off the baseball field.

Samantha keeps producing art...

...and so does Helen.

Samantha and I spent a morning at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Sunday School started back up. I'm co-teaching the kindergarten class, which is a very sweet group of kids.

We celebrated Marcus's birthday with a sleepover and Magic draft and then a Red Sox game two days later (it was supposed to be the next day, but the hurricane postponed it, and then the game itself was super exciting and turned out to go into extra innings before the Red Sox won).

There was that day Helen played with all the neighborhood boys and then I found myself serving dinner to them all in the side yard.

I got Robert a Hawaiian-style shave ice machine. It's not as good (obviously) as the ones in the big-name places in Hawaii, but it's pretty darn decent for an at-home treat. I ordered syrups from Hawaii, so we have lilikoi and li hing gummy bear and mango for now, too.

There have been lots of playdates with Evie, Shanti, Glorina, Bruno, Desmond, and assorted permutations of them.

We hit JP Open Studios, with an interactive social justice art activity on the Eliot School lawn, and then some cider pressing at the Loring-Greenough Oktoberfest across the street.

For the Autumn Moon Festival, we met up with friends who drove down from New Hampshire and enjoyed dim sum and all the festivities of Chinatown.

We hit Mayor Janey's movie night in Roslindale--that's Janey at the back left, in the grey suit with her back to us. Emil talked to her when she walked by our blanket, though we didn't get a better pic with her. We had a fantastic spread of food and of course there was also some playground fun.

Mona and Carlos came to town, first staying at our place Airbnb-style while we were camping, and then coming back for the next weekend when we were home so we could all hang out. And our garden has produced lots of tomatoes, and some unintended fungi.

Samantha started at the Boston Children's Chorus, which is currently rehearsing in tents on a lawn in Dorchester.

While she has chorus on Saturdays, Helen has soccer and then swimming lessons, and then we all meet up for lunch or whatever the rest of the day brings.

In August the girls did a week at the MFA daycamp, coming home with (of course) even more art from that.

We still bike everywhere as much as possible.

We celebrated my birthday in August with pints of Jeni's ice cream that Cori sent, and a special visit from Christine all the way from DC!

I took Marcus to two days of the Mayor's Cup tennis tournament, both the 12U and the 14U since it was four days before his thirteenth birthday. He had a great time, and the Tenacity folks running it were amazing. I never thought I'd enjoy two days spent sitting by the side of tennis courts so much, but it was one of my favorite experiences of the summer--the coaches were models of how to cheer for every kid, and it was great to see kids who'd gone to school with Marcus or karate with him and who now were in different schools all coming together and playing.