Fall

I wish it were fall here.

It's not.

The humidity and heat have been killer the last couple of days.  The conditions are perfect for mosquitoes.  The mosquitoes here in this part of the Bronx* have been thriving all summer anyway but the last few weeks have really set the population alight.

All week this cartoon has been running through my head.

True story Calvin.  True story.



*When you ask Noah were he lives he says, "the Bronx." And it's really just the most adorable thing you've ever heard.  I'll work on getting it on video.

Our First Day

We had our back to school dinner.  We (I say we but all of us know that the Hubbs sort of washed his hands of the project) had our back to school dinner.  We decided to go with something a little less sentimental than a family theme and fancy dinner.  We went with letting the kids pick dinner (mac and cheese from a box for the second day in a row), measuring them against the door frame in our bedroom, prayers said for good school years, a little pep-talk about finding the kids who don't have friends and being their friend and googly eye balls glued on rocks and delivered around the neighborhood.

Yep, that's right.  We glued googly eye balls to rocks and delivered them around the neighborhood so that kids on their way to school would find them and hopefully feel happy--a first step into helping other people. My first instinct was to subtly put them in half hidden places but Claire's technique was just to put them right in the open.  We've walked around the block to check on them since and Claire's technique was, by far, the most effective--every one of hers was taken but mine are still sitting in the grass.  The kids did insist that we leave one outside our favorite bakery.  I sincerely hope that whoever had to open the store saw it and smiled.

The first day of preschool was great.  Claire is in afternoon PreK so we started the day sitting at the front door, eating breakfast and waving at the big kids walking to the local elementary that's just at the end of the block.

Claire picked her own outfit for school and even decided she needed to do a test-run of it the day before.  It meant a little late-night laundry but it's hard to say no to someone on their first day of PreK.

I'm not excited about the 20 minute commute each way to PreK (there's no public PreK in our neighborhood) but overall I think we are going to love it.

These Days are Just Packed

Last week was one of those fleeting, end-of-summer weeks where it feels like the whole world slows down to give you enough time to pack everything in.

We took advantage.

As a last mommy/daughter date before school starts and before the baby comes Claire and I went to see Matilda.  We had so much fun (I would say that every single thing about it was fun except that no one in their right mind would call driving through Times Square fun.  I'd also list walking through Times-Square crowds when you are roughly the size of a small car as "not fun."  I'm not saying "small car" in a derogatory type of way either; more literal.  I've reached that phase of pregnancy where instead of seeing a cute pregnant person people have started staring at me in the horror of having to witness my water break right in front of the them.)

We picniced in the front yard 

We welcomed some of our favorite San Diego Friends to the East Coast.  They spent the night here and we went to the Giants game.  We hired one poor baby sitter to watch all 5 kids but we didn't feel guilty because we paid her nearly twice her normal rate.  I'm quite sure that Claire didn't spend a single instant in her regular clothes and since the Moyles left she has asked me to play dress-up with her every day.

We also had our cousins visit for the long weekend and we finally made it to the Roosevelt Island tram (which is fun and which is, luckily, located very close to Dylan's Candy Bar).

And then, of course, there was this.

School starts this afternoon and I feel like this is the moment to say goodby to summer but as it was 80 degrees with 80% humidity yesterday at 9 am I think we can hold off wishing summer farewell for a few days at least.