september means...

September always feels like it should bring change.  Even though I'm not a student anymore, it's something sort of ingrained after years and years of starting up the school year again every September.  Yesterday, the schools in our town had their first day, so the streets were full of yellow buses and shouting kids and backpacks.  So it felt like change was in the air all day.

I've learned that September isn't actually fall, no matter how much we might want it to be.  I mean, isn't fall just everyone's favorite season?  But can you blame them?  It's the perfect weather, with bright leaves and sweaters and you can look forward to the best parts of winter, like Christmas or the first snowfall.  Today it is hot and humid, with that late summer air that makes everything feel damp and gross, even as outside everything turns brittle and brown and seems ready to die away for winter.  We played outside in the grass, today, experimenting with leaves and dirt.  We saw a toad and decided not to pick him up, but we watched him hop away.

This September, Sam is doing one last college class, that will hopefully finally allow him to get his OT license (which has been a bit of a nightmarish, complicated process that will have taken over a year to complete if he can do it when the class ends in December).  This is annoying, but it's exciting to finally be taking steps to do it.  Oliver will be turning one in a couple of weeks, so I could write all kinds of things about how is he so big already? and it went so fast! But also, one isn't that big, is it?

That's what I thought.

So here we are this September, playing in the browning grass and hoping for this to be out last one as sort-of students and looking forward to all the changes that are coming as Oliver (finally, suddenly) turns one.