Wow, what?

Has it honestly been less than a year since I've posted here? That blows me away. I thought it had been years and years and years. I suppose I should read the last entry I wrote. I'm interested to know what I had to say, what compelled me to pick up this blog. ...a few minutes later... Okay, I see. Wow, nobody wanted to comment on that? I can't imagine why.

Huh. So, here we are. I'm still an assistant professor, still have the big-ass grant. The boys are still at the hippie school although god help me I don't know for how much longer. (Oh, I'm not really into god -- I was just using an expression.) At a school so small when you run into trouble it can be hard to find a way out. When there are only seven or eight kids per grade and a kid has an enemy or two, that doesn't leave many left over to be a friend. I don't want to get into the details, but numero uno has transitioned into a new classroom with new teachers and it's been rough. In fact, the whole summer was rough and I wonder now if it was in anticipation of this switch. He's in "middle school," which I put in quotes because it's a classroom about twenty feet from his old classroom. The room may be just across the hall, but there's a distinct shift in culture, which we're learning the hard way each time we have to meet with his teachers. Okay, enough about the kid. I know nobody reads this, but still, I'd hate to put too much out there about this little guy who is getting bigger each day.

It is fall, my favorite season. I went back outside tonight to get the kids' backpacks out of the car (a task I generally avoid and resent because why can't they just get them themselves?) just to feel the air. It was unusually warm for mid-October today, in the low 80s. Tonight had the smell of fall but the temperature of late summer. Lovely. Of course it was almost dark at 6:30ish and that's only going to get worse with time.

What the?

I forgot that I had this blog. Let me tell you a bit about me now. We moved. To a way-too-big house with too much grass to mow. It's nice living out in the country, but the commute is long. The boys go to a hippie school near the university where they are in the same class (grades 2-4 are combined). They continue to challenge us every day but they are the most intelligent children I've ever interacted with and I love that. They are disrespectful and messy as hell. They have wicked senses of humor and big hearts. I am an assistant professor now and co-PI on a huge NSF grant. Like, seriously huge. My students like me because I give them time. I like them I guess because they like me. I still love physics and math. I love to read and I love to write. I am teaching myself to play the piano, which makes me feel right. What more to say? I'm in a writing slump and I hope spewing forth here will help.

Hi!

Fall

I love early fall, but this year September was a blur. It was a nice blur, for sure, but Matt and I had unusually busy work schedules, plus we visited a bunch of friends, plus we had a couple of rounds of company, and on top of all that the school year started, which was somehow surprisingly overwhelming. Now that it is October I've started to feel like we're approaching a reasonable routine. But...back to September.

For starters, Will successfully turned four. Here he is at his birthday party, which we had the weekend after his birthday. It was a gorgeous day, so we were able to have it totally outside. We decorated the back deck with apples, mums, and a pumpkin, which was nice and festive.



Next, Will got to bring a book home from school to read to us, which was a big, exciting deal for him (and us, of course). My understanding is that when a student gets to a certain point in his "learning to read" workbook, he gets to bring a book home for a couple of nights. This particular book was about a cat named Tab and a rat named Mac. Tab has a cap and Mac has a ham. (You can guess what vowel sounds he'd been working on.) Here he is reading to Ryan and Matt the very second we got home.



Then last weekend we met up with Megan, Paul, John, and Megan's mom at the Strasburg Railroad. Since this was not a day out with Thomas, the place was pleasantly uncrowded and we checked out the train museum. The museum was fine, but the best part was hanging out with friends. Here is a picture of Will riding a hand-cranked train. (I don't have a picture, but man, you should have seen John motor around on this thing. It was amazing--the kid's not even two.)



And this weekend we went apple picking. I admit, we did not have as much fun this year as we did last year. We went to a different orchard and did not like it nearly as much. We did get to have lunch with my sister Emily, though, who moved to the Philadelphia area this past summer for law school.

Adiós, pingüinos.

I can't believe it's been over two years since we converted the downstairs office into a bedroom for Will, complete with emperor penguin border (you may remember that he was unusually obsessed with penguins as a one-year-old). Well, those penguins are no longer. Now that Will and Ryan are sharing a room upstairs we are turning his old bedroom into a playroom. We tried just moving the toys into that room and hoping for the best, but I could not take the dark blue walls, which made the room feel small and stuffy. So over the last week Matt and I repainted the walls a cream color and the built-in bookcase red, which is the color that Will wanted for all the walls. I'm glad we reached this compromise, because I think it looks great. We have yet to move in the 1.76 million toys that the boys possess so the room might start to feel crowded and stuffy anyway, but for now I love it. We won't move the toys until we get back from the beach in a week, which will give the bookcase a good long time to dry.

New bedtime routine

It's been a while since I've posted here, partially because my job got really busy and partially because our non-work lives got really busy and Facebook was a far easier way to communicate with people. However, I found out this past week that people that I didn't have any idea read my blog missed it! What can I say--I'm flattered, so it's back, at least a little bit.

As you might surmise from the above photos, as of last night Will and Ryan are roommates. We just returned home from a monster ten-day trip during which we were in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. During this trip the four of us spent a lot of time together in hotel rooms, and the boys enjoyed each other's company as they fell asleep. They also shared a room (just the two of them) for four nights at my parents' house, which went much more smoothly than I expected. So stuck in traffic on I-95 in NYC on Monday, I casually proposed moving Will's bed up to Ryan's room so that they could share a room at home. Will declared he wanted to do it that very day and Ryan just smiled his famous RyGuy smile at the very thought. Thus it was decided and (many) hours later implemented. We haven't entirely smoothed out the new bedtime routine, but it will take time. For one thing, we're all exhausted from our trip. And the boys obviously get pretty worked up about their new room situation, so bedtime is chaotic. Matt has had to stay with them in the room until they fall asleep in order to make it work, but we're pros now at phasing these things out. We want to give them a chance to genuinely adjust to the change before we switch things up too much, but we anticipate that relatively soon we'll be able to bribe them into a bedtime routine acceptable to everyone.

Next project: turning Will's old room into a playroom and the current play space into a small sitting space. Oh, and upgrading the decor in the boys' room to something more manly, like, for example, tractors. Or diggers.