Thursday

We were at the dinner table last weekend and Jordan proposed a new "thing". She wanted to go around the table and each of us share a joy and a concern. Interesting thing for an 8-year-old to suggest, but we did it and continue to every night. It's become a favorite part of my day because it's a really good way to connect with the girls and it forces me to focus on things that are important to me all across the spectrum. And hearing the joys of everyone else often makes me notice and appreciate things I hadn't before.

Autumn has been a weirdly emotional experience. The trees turned unspeakably beautiful for several weeks and then one very cold morning as I was standing alone in the parking lot at work, surrounded by trees and almost perfect silence, I could see and hear hundreds, maybe thousands, of leaves hitting the ground like rain. Now, several days later, the wet leaves on the ground smell spicy, like the things people traditionally bake at this time of year and I never knew why before now. Autumn happens at home, too, but it's not as in-your-face as it is here. I like the in-your-face. Aside from being really aesthetically satisfying, autumn is one of the few visceral reminders of the passage of time, like watching our children grow or the calendar change.

Autumn is orienting me to the fact that the days where we have these girls with us are going to be gone in a seeming instant. We only have six more autumns before Claudia goes away to college. In the last several days I've stepped back and made myself quiet and watched. I'm coming to realize no day is going to be all good or all bad and that's encapsulated in small moments at our house. After work, Jamie is greeted at the door by three ecstatic girls and a small beagle who greets him with a hale and hearty asthma attack. Claudia has taken to very enthusiastically playing the recorder, a shrill Mary Had a Little Lamb (or is it Hot Cross Buns?) played with gusto over and over and over and it's both heartbreakingly charming and, you know, shrill recorder music. Along with our blueberry pie and ice cream desert shared around our dinner table, Sammy says "buh" and Jordan says "arf" Buh. Arf. Buh. Arf. Buh. Arf. “Claudia say something gross!” Claudia complies. Buh. Arf. The ceiling leaks, there are all "a's" on the report cards, the dog's sick, we laugh a lot, there are candy wrappers and coats and shoes *everywhere* and they don’t seem to belong to *anyone*, milestones of bonding are reached, feelings are hurt. It's like the grandmother character in the major motion picture, "Parenthood" starring Steve Martin and Mary Steenburgen noted-- life's a roller coaster. And I'm wanting to relish every moment of it, every twist and turn, because unlike the roller coasters at King's Island, this one's track isn't on a finite loop, allowing us to ride it over and over again.