The Fullness Of September

September has been mighty full, folks. In many ways I feel busier now as a parent than ever, and in no way is that a complaint. In fact, it's a deep joy that I feel, as I am fortunate enough to have such amazing, interesting people, who seek and do interesting things, in my life. However, I feel I'm still working to balance the doing with the blogging, the photographing, the cataloging, the supporting, the responding, the organizing, the talking, the reading, and the reading, the cooking, cleaning and gardening, the care-taking, the loving and the being. Perhaps if my family and friends were less interesting, less thoughtful and less active, I wouldn't have such difficulty keeping up. I know Alex shares this same dilemma. It's a wonderful problem to have and I'm not crying in my ice cream, believe me.

For instance, last week Alex spent the day with Adam up at the homestead (addressing that little problem with the well) and they had a blast being together, just the two of them. The hiked the land and found interesting mushrooms (including this giant puff ball) frogs and toads, saw some scat and scary uprooted trees in the woods.











Just a few days after that, Olivia and Adam went to their homeschool biology lab and spent the day doing, what else? Foraging for mushrooms. They had a great time and they certainly learned lots, which was perfect, as two days after that, they attended the Maine Mycological Foray with Alex, hosted by some homeschooling friends. Alex took lots of great photos for another blog post. It was a rather oddly mushroomy week!





Sunday, Alex and I caught up with our own garden, doing some of the first fall clean-up, weeding and cutting back. So that's one thing we can check off our list for this week. Oh, and we're still getting great tomatoes.



Monday I was up early to bake a chocolate cake and two loaves of French bread for the annual Not Back To School potluck at Fort Williams. It was an absolutely gorgeous day and lots of good people showed up and I always wish I had taken more photos, but with the plate-juggling and wonderful conversations happening, I simply didn't whip the camera out as much. It was fabulous, nonetheless.






After the potluck, we high-tailed it over to downtown Portland to see if we could catch Lady Gaga's speech, as we happen to like her music and we very much support her politics. We arrived just in time, parked without a problem, hoofed it over to the park and ended up very close to her arriving tour bus and walk onto the stage. Normally we're not the celebrity gawker types, but what the heck, it was a fun and interesting way to spend an afternoon, and all for a cause we support.












All of these things zoomed to where we are today, which is cleaning and packing and baking and planning to be at the Common Ground Country Fair all weekend; we love the fair so.



The kids have a bio lab before we go. The biology course is the AP biology, so each class is a lab. Tomorrow they are covering photosynthesis and they need to bring goggles--sounds interesting. Sunday we have to zip home so the kids can get to their first PSO rehearsal, as their choir has been asked to sing in the Magic of Christmas again this year. (Olivia has performed once before with the Magic of Christmas and two years ago, Adam and Olivia performed in a John Williams tribute.)

Whew! This doesn't even cover all the in between moments, the quiet milestones, the growing, the teeth lost, the autumn equinox and tomato soup, the car and dinner conversations about the physics of time and space travel, synesthesia, ethics, molecular biology and music. Not to mention the past-everyone's-bedtime* snuggle in our bed, because we all must see at least the very first episode in season 3 of The Big Bang Theory. Oh and the laughing, we do so much laughing. Or Alex racking the four and a half gallons of blackberry wine before leaving for work. *we do not enforce bedtimes in this home.

September is a full month for us, no question. A twelve few more hours in my day would be wonderful, but those hours would be filled with interesting people and things to talk about and explore, I'm certain. Not that I'm complaining.